How do social networks enable and constrain women's political participation? While studies in developed democracies have demonstrated the importance of social connections in mobilizing participation through information dissemination and social pressure, studies in developing and clientelist democracies have emphasized how household gatekeepers and social norms limit the participation of women. We evaluate how material and social incentives shapes women's public participation and the conditions under which women's networks mobilize their participation through a spillover experiment embedded within previously-mapped networks. We first conduct a census of all adult residents in 14 villages in rural Bihar, collecting detailed network data, and then randomly invite surveyed citizens to a public meeting. Randomly varying the gender of the invitee, a material incentive to participate, and a recruitment incentive to mobilize others, we estimate the diffusion of invitations through men’s and women’s intra- and extra-household networks. Additionally, randomly varying at the village-level the availability of a women-only meeting, we evaluate the role of social costs in shaping women’s participation. We find that women were highly responsive to material, recruitment, and social incentives. Our results also show that intra- and extra-household mobilization effects are larger for women. Our findings demonstrate the importance of social relations, particularly by defining the incentives to support women, to public participation.
