Welcome!

I am a visiting fellow at Emory University. Previously, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I earned my PhD in political science at New York University.

My research sits at the intersection of gender, political behavior, and the political economy of development, with a regional focus on India. I study when and how women in developing countries participate in politics – and how institutions like the household, social norms, the developmental state, and ethnic parties shape that participation. My work brings gender to bear on questions in ethnic politics, distributive politics, and state capacity.

I employ a variety of methodological approaches in my research, including surveys, experiments, statistical analyses of large datasets, and qualitative interviews and observations. My book project combines several months of qualitative fieldwork with an original survey, hand-coded information on ethnic parties based on historical newspaper archives, and a newly assembled administrative dataset on turnout by gender to understand the factors driving women’s political participation in India.

You can contact me at franziska ‘at’ gatech ‘dot’ edu. My CV is available here: CV