Age of Marriage and Women's Political Engagement: Evidence from India

Fenella Carpena and Francesca R. Jensenius
Additional contact information
Francesca R. Jensenius: NUPI - Norwegian Institute for InternationalAffairs; University of Oslo

Working Papers from Oslo Metropolitan University, Oslo Business School

Abstract: Although decades have passed since most women in the democratic world gained the right to vote and run for elections, a large gender gap in political participation persists today, particularly in developing democracies. This short paper considers an important --- and heretofore overlooked --- factor limiting the political engagement of many women in the developing world: her age of marriage. Drawing on nationally representative data from India and instrumenting marriage age with menarche age, we find substantial positive effects of delaying marriage on women's participation in everyday politics. A standard deviation increase in marriage age makes a woman 36.2 percent more likely to attend a village meeting, and 6.2 percent more likely discusses politics with her husband. Exploring mechanisms, we show that education and time --- rather than employment and mobility --- are the main channels of impact. These findings underscore the importance of early marriage as a critical barrier to women's participation in the political sphere.

Keywords: Gender; Politics; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 F63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-05-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3383080 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oml:wpaper:201902

DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3383080

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Oslo Metropolitan University, Oslo Business School Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Eirik Hanssen ().