Welcome!

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I earned my PhD in political science at New York University.

My research interests center on gender and political participation, with a regional focus on India. My dissertation investigates when women in developing countries turn out at equal rates to men, even in the absence of resources such as education or income. I show that certain types of clientelist mobilization – the type that provides citizens access to the most valuable state resources and brings them into the political mainstream – will set incentives for households to support women’s political participation. Related work investigates the extent of women’s agency under household-supported turnout; and the consequences of women’s increased electoral participation in clientelist systems.

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

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