2026-27 AY PT Research Fellowship: Women's Representation and Authority in Indian Politics
The Stanford King Center on Global Development’s Academic Year Part-Time Research Fellowship Program connects King Center faculty affiliates and affiliated researchers with undergraduate students committed to providing research support during autumn, winter, and spring quarters.
Students have the opportunity to engage in world-class research that has real-world impact. Undergraduate student research fellows are paid $19/hour*. Students must be enrolled full-time to participate and must be able to commit to research 8-10 hours per week.
*Students must attend orientation and submit an I-9 form to verify employment and receive payment. Students who cannot accept pay may be allowed to receive academic credit for this research.
Research Project Description:
Electoral quotas for women are the most common institutional solution to the problem of political gender inequality today, but widespread qualitative evidence from India – home to the largest such quota policy – suggests that men can co-opt these institutions. This project leverages big data and large-scale surveys to measure actual and perceived political authority. Our data reveal that local Indian politics, across the board, is a family affair. Unlike typical conceptions of representative democracy, we document how local governance tasks are collectively shared between elected representatives and their family members in both male and female-led localities. However, female representatives have significantly less political authority than male representatives. The project also examines the roots of these authority gaps and their consequences for policy-making. This work has implications for our understanding of democratic accountability and representation.
We are seeking an undergraduate research fellow with intermediate to advanced data handling skills in R, Python, or Stata. The research fellow should be able to write code to clean data that has been scraped from government websites and to merge cleaned datasets. The research fellow will additionally be responsible for producing figures and tables that will ultimately be included in the final paper. Due to the comprehensive nature of this project, the research fellow should additionally have advanced organizational and time management skills and should be able to work independently. Prior experience with using data handling software outside of the classroom is a desired qualification.
Primary Research Mentor: Soledad Prillaman
Co-Research Mentor: Somer Bryant
Stanford undergraduate students in good academic standing and enrolled full-time are eligible to apply. Co-term students must have undergraduate student status; if co-terms are in graduate billing status (after 12 quarters) they are ineligible to participate.
All majors are welcome!
Students Responsibilities:
- Scrape data from Indian government websites
- Clean and merge multiple datasets in Stata
- Conduct complex statistical analyses in Stata
- Produce graphics and tables for inclusion in papers
Students qualifications:
- Intermediate to advanced knowledge of Stata (or other statistical programs)
- Exposure to statistical methods or econometrics
Time Commitment:
The time commitment is 8-10 hours per week (equivalent to a 3-unit course) each academic quarter. The expectation is that students will work the full academic year with their mentor (Autumn, Winter, and Spring quarters). Students planning on studying abroad may not be eligible.
To Apply:
Along with the application, applicants are asked to submit:
- a cover letter
- resume or CV
- unofficial Stanford transcript (first quarter frosh do not need to submit transcripts for autumn quarter applications)
Research Mentor Questions for Applicants:
- What is your level of experience in Stata?
- Have you used Stata outside of coursework?
- What is your level of experience in other statistical programs?
