Welcome!

I am a PhD candidate 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 under which conditions women turn out to vote at equal rates to men even in the absence of individual-level resources such as income, education and political knowledge. I show that household support for female participation can bridge the resource gap between men and women to close the gender turnout gap; and that household support is mobilized by clientelist parties.

I employ a variety of methodological approaches in my research, including surveys, experiments, statistical analysis of large datasets, and qualitative interviews and observations. My dissertation combines several months of qualitative fieldwork with an original household-level 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 participation.

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