Over the last two decades, women’s ‘political participation’ has emerged as a major marker of democracy around the world. This is frequently operationalized through the policy of ‘gender quotas’ that seek to enhance women’s presence within national and subnational institutions of governance. Since 1993, India has implemented a large programme of decentralization (panchayati raj) and gender quotas, which enabled more than a million elected women representatives (EWRs) to become part of the political process. This article engages feminist theorizations of gender quotas using the Indian context. While affirming the need for gender quotas for increasing presence of women in politics, it argues that the presence of EWRs in local governance does not easily assure their effective political participation or political representation. This is because of the ‘social embeddedness of policy’ in local contexts. Effective participation and representation depend upon the ‘relative agency’ of EWRs who continually negotiate and construct their political subjectivities within everyday life situations, specifically three processes—patriarchal family relations, caste relations at the workplace and discursively produced marked identities.

中文翻译：

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参与和代表的存在

在过去的二十年里，女性的“政治参与”已成为世界各地民主的主要标志。这通常通过“性别配额”政策来实施，旨在提高妇女在国家和国家以下治理机构中的参与度。Since 1993, India has implemented a large programme of decentralization (panchayati raj) and gender quotas, which enabled more than a million elected women representatives (EWRs) to become part of the political process. 本文使用印度语境探讨性别配额的女权主义理论。虽然肯定需要性别配额以增加女性在政治中的存在，但它认为 EWR 在地方治理中的存在并不能轻易确保其有效的政治参与或政治代表。这是因为当地环境中的“政策的社会嵌入性”。有效的参与和代表取决于 EWR 的“相对机构”，他们在日常生活情境中不断协商和构建他们的政治主体，特别是三个过程——父权家庭关系、工作场所的种姓关系和话语产生的标记身份。