Abstract

This thesis examines the role of political parties as avenues for the political mobilisation, participation, and representation of women. It conducts an in-depth case study of the state of West Bengal in India to examine the gendered institutional cultures of political parties and the obstacles and opportunities that these shifting cultures present for women’s political participation. Among the several political parties operating in the state, the thesis focuses on three significant political parties- the All-India Trinamool Congress (AITC), the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)), and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Under the approach of Feminist Institutionalism, the thesis primarily adopts a qualitative interpretive research method, involving Discourse Analysis of party documents and other political texts and semi-structured interviews of women party leaders and ground-level workers. With this, the thesis seeks to uncover the representation of women in the gendered institutional cultures of each political party as well as to delineate how the women party members articulate their sense of institutional belonging and constitute their political subjectivities. The thesis contributes to the corpus of academic literature on women’s political representation as well as on the phenomenon of continuity and change in political institutions in South Asia through its specific focus on the gender regimes governing the institutional cultures of the political parties in West.