The Inclusion of Excluded Majorities in South Asian Parliaments: Women, Youth, and the Working Class

This article provides a new perspective on parliamentary representation in South Asia, focusing on the collective under-representation of population majorities based on the macro-demographic categories of age, class, and gender. Situating this analysis within debates on descriptive representation, i...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: JOSHI, Devin K.
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2015
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/1930
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Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
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Summary:This article provides a new perspective on parliamentary representation in South Asia, focusing on the collective under-representation of population majorities based on the macro-demographic categories of age, class, and gender. Situating this analysis within debates on descriptive representation, it presents the first comparative analysis of the contemporary demographic characteristics of members of parliament (MPs) in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Highlighting three major gaps in parliamentary representation, it finds quotas, proportional representation electoral systems, and leftist parties to have positively impacted the descriptive representation of South Asian women, the working class, and young adults.