Entry vs authority: Two bottlenecks will shape reality of women’s reservations

India is entering a consequential political-administrative cycle. After six years of delay, the government is set to begin the house-listing phase of the next census in 2026. This process bears significance well beyond the vital data about India’s population that it will generate.

It also has a direct bearing on women’s representation in Indian politics since it is the first step toward implementing the constitutional amendment, passed in September 2023, reserving one-third of seats for women in national and state legislatures. That key piece of legislation was designed to take effect only after a delimitation exercise, referring to the redrawing of legislative constituencies based on official Census data. This makes the coming Census cycle the hinge moment when the reform becomes electorally actionable.

It is a good moment to revisit the considerable literature on the gap between descriptive representation (more women in seats, which is what the quota sets out to achieve) and substantive representation (women exercising real influence). Research shows that quotas can change the formal rules of entry, but they do not automatically transform the terms of authority under which women govern.

As the reservation pipeline moves from constitutional promise toward implementation, the key bottlenecks will lie in who enters and under what conditions – often shaped by kinship networks (the bibi-beti-bahu pipeline of wives, daughters, and daughters-in-law) and the gatekeeping instincts of political parties.

Family pipelines, proxy candidates

One persistent pattern in Indian politics is that women who reach elected office often come from established political families. In the current Lok Sabha (the lower house of Parliament), over half of the women MPs reportedly have political family links, and many are dynasts whose close relative – usually a father, husband, or father-in-law – has preceded them in politics.

Research suggests this isn’t a marginal difference; in the parliaments elected in 2004, 2009, and 2014, about two-thirds of women MPs were dynastic, compared to about one-fourth of male MPs. This points to a “family pipeline” that has, for decades, partially compensated for the absence of formal gender quotas at higher levels of government.

But this pipeline cuts both ways. While family networks can facilitate entry, they can also constrain autonomy and narrow the social diversity of women’s representation. At the same time, dynastic entry does not automatically mean dynastic control. Some women who entered through political families have gone on to build independent mass bases, consolidate authority within parties, and become major political actors in their own right.

The bibi-beti-bahu model can reinforce the perception of women as political stand-ins for male kin rather than independent leaders. This is especially visible in by-elections, where women candidates have sometimes stepped in for deceased male relatives, inheriting their electoral base even as the real locus of control remains embedded in family networks.

The pattern is even more pronounced at the panchayat level, where women’s quotas have been in place for decades. Despite the scale of formal inclusion, many elected women remain informally sidelined by male relatives who manage everyday governance, a phenomenon that gave rise to the term sarpanch pati (the sarpanch’s husband). However, proxyism is not a settled story. Substantial literature debates how pervasive it is, how it varies across contexts, and whether the more decisive constraints come from household substitution or from the wider political-bureaucratic ecosystem that can sideline women even without a visible sarpanch pati.

At the same time, recent scholarship also cautions against treating sarpanch pati as a uniform or exhaustive diagnosis. Evidence suggests the phenomenon is not systematic everywhere, and that women’s authority can be constrained not only inside the household but also by institutional practices and local elite ecosystems (bureaucrats and influential panchayat actors) that can sideline women even when husbands are absent from formal meetings. In such cases, the promise of the quota risks shrinking into symbolism – women occupy positions but do not always command the authority those offices are meant to confer.

Recognising this gap, the government launched the Asli Pradhan Kaun? (“Who is the real chief?”) campaign in 2025 to publicly challenge the culture of proxy leadership and encourage women to assert their authority. Some states and local administrations have also reportedly taken smaller corrective steps, including discouraging or restricting husbands’ participation in official meetings so that women office-holders gain confidence by speaking and governing for themselves. The broader lesson is straightforward: genuine empowerment requires not only entry into office, but the institutional and social space to lead.

Party gatekeeping, elite control

Family pipelines loom large partly because party gatekeeping remains the decisive filter for women’s entry into competitive politics. In India’s electoral system, parties control tickets and have historically nominated relatively few women for winnable seats.

The numbers from recent national elections illustrate the scale of this bottleneck. In 2024, women accounted for about 9.5% of total Lok Sabha candidates, and the two largest national parties fielded only a small fraction of women contestants relative to the total number of candidates. This pattern helps explain why women’s representation in higher legislatures has struggled to rise organically.

While “winnable” is rarely tracked as a single official metric, election research does test it using proxies like past victory margins and incumbency. For instance, a constituency-level study of the 2009 election finds that the Indian National Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party not only place women in unwinnable seats, but their nomination patterns still reflected strong risk aversion and reliance on “known” candidates.

Parties often justify this imbalance in terms of “winnability”. This is usually invoked as an internal ticket-allocation heuristic, often relayed through off-the-record briefings and interviews by party figures, but it also surfaces explicitly in public-facing party discourse and elite commentary.

For instance, Congress leaders have long described women’s nominations being filtered through winnability, and party documents have even framed candidate selection as balancing loyalty and winnability. Yet in practice, winnability tends to privilege established networks, name recognition, and access to resources – forms of political capital that remain disproportionately male and deeply embedded in patronage structures. This is where the logic of the women’s reservation amendment intersects with the family pipeline.

Once one-third of seats are reserved, parties will have to nominate more women, but the easiest pathway may be to select women who already carry an inherited political brand. Hence, quotas may expand the supply of women candidates, while gatekeeping may still shape which women are considered “safe” bets.

This concern also relates to the “creamy layer” problem: when politically privileged families and social elites disproportionately capture the benefits of institutional reform. If party leadership remains centralised and male-dominated, quota implementation could be absorbed into existing hierarchies rather than disrupting them.

The broader finding from scholarship is that women’s entry is frequently routed through existing social pipelines such as family ties, party patronage, and caste/class networks, so a woman office-holder is often read as representing not only gender but also the social bloc that enabled her rise. This structure can dilute the political meaning of expanded representation even as numbers improve. The implication is not that quotas will fail, but that the political sociology of nomination will determine how far they can travel beyond symbolism.

Beyond tokenism

While the earlier sections show how kinship and party control shape women’s entry, the next question is what happens after entry. Quotas can rebalance the headcount, but the conversion of descriptive representation into substantive influence depends on whether women can exercise authority independent of family and party patrons. This is why the twin bottlenecks of family pipelines and party gatekeeping remain central to interpreting the reservation moment.

A large body of work by scholars, including Raghabendra Chattopadhyay and Esther Duflo, Rohini Pande, Rikhil R. Bhavnani, and Irma Clots-Figueras, among others, has used India’s local reservations to test when descriptive representation translates into substantive influence, and when it does not.

Evidence from local government offers cautious grounds for optimism. India’s panchayat reservations show that women heads can shift policy toward public goods more closely aligned with women’s stated priorities (for example, drinking water and roads), and that repeated exposure to women leaders can weaken gender stereotypes and improve girls’ aspirations and educational outcomes over time. But this disruption is neither automatic nor evenly spread.

Where women’s authority is contested, informal obstruction can blunt the promise of formal inclusion, sometimes through household “proxy” dynamics, but also through discrimination and interference by the wider male-dominated local ecosystem (council members and bureaucrats) that can sideline elected women’s voices and centrality in decision-making even after they enter office.

Rachel Brulé’s (2021) broader work on gender-equalising reforms similarly highlights that institutional openings can provoke backlash when they threaten entrenched hierarchies without parallel shifts in bargaining power, reinforcing the core lesson: the same quota design can produce empowerment in one context and proxy capture (or backlash) in another.

At the party-strategy level, there are already signals of variation. Some regional parties field markedly higher shares of women candidates, suggesting that candidate supply is not the only constraint; organisational incentives and leadership choices matter too.

The 2023 passage of the Bill itself also reveals growing political pressure: after decades of stasis, a mix of reputational costs (no party wanting to be seen as opposing women’s representation) and sustained mobilisation, including litigation pressing for action, helped create a moment where near-unanimous support became the path of least resistance.

At the same time, the way it was enacted, by tying commencement to a future Census and delimitation, postpones the immediate disruption of incumbent ticket structures, which may shape how seriously parties prepare to diversify their nomination pipelines before the reform actually bites. The real test, therefore, is whether parties use the runway to cultivate non-dynastic women leaders or simply default to “pre-authorised” names once reservation becomes operational.

Finally, the women’s reservation amendment is best seen as a structural opening rather than a guaranteed redistribution of power. It will change the arithmetic of entry, but party gatekeeping, kinship networks, and political ecosystems will still shape the sociology of authority – and “proxy power” will not look identical across tiers.

At the panchayat level, proxy leadership can be overt and administrative, with male relatives informally substituting for elected women in day-to-day governance; at the MP/MLA level, outright substitution is rarer, but dependence can be reproduced through control over ticketing, campaign finance, staff/advisers, and patronage networks that narrow autonomy.

The coming election cycles will therefore test not only how many women enter legislatures, but which women enter – and whether reservation broadens leadership beyond inherited authority and delegable legitimacy, or simply re-labels the bibi-beti-bahu pipeline under a constitutional umbrella.

Soumya Bhowmick is an economist whose work engages with questions of development and institutional design in India’s governance landscape. He holds a PhD and double master’s degrees in economics from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and the University of Antwerp, with specialisation in globalisation economics and European integration. He has published in peer-reviewed journals and contributes regularly to platforms including Economic & Political Weekly, The Hindu Business Line, The Diplomat, CFR, The Telegraph, Firstpost, Dhaka Tribune, East Asia Forum, Fortune India, The Quint, and India Today.

The article was first published in India in Transition, a publication of the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania.