Abstract
The government of Bangladesh introduced direct election in the quota seats for women through the Local Government (Second Amendment) Act 1997. The empirical studies on the performances of the elected women representatives, however, show mix evidences of women representatives’ success and empowerment. Intuitively, the literature commonly scrutinised the role performances of the elected women representatives in the LGIs, but there is no study so far to investigate whether there were situations that beget self-selection in contesting (and more importantly, in self-exclusion from contesting) election. This paper discusses the issues women representatives faced in contesting election in the local government institutions in Bangladesh. Empirical evidence shows women members were to struggle in exercising agency and mobilising resources while making a decision to contest election, during election campaign as well as functioning in the LGIs once elected.
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Notes
- 1.
Eve-teasing is used in Bangladesh to refer to the repeated verbal harassment of girls that takes place often on the way to the girl’s school/college or office.
- 2.
In the 1997 Local Governance Act, three units are created in each Union Parishad/Pouroshova for the women, a unit comprising three wards. A Union Parishad/Pouroshova thus has nine general wards from which nine members are elected. Besides, there is now provision of three women members to be directly elected. The Union Parishad/Pouroshova is thus reconstituted as 9Â +Â 3Â =Â 12 members, headed by the chairman/mayor as before. The innovation of this Act was to introduce direct adult franchise in the quota seats for women. This opened the door for women to actively take part in politics for the first time in the history of Bangladesh.
- 3.
Panchayat is the lowest tier of the rural local government in India.
- 4.
The current parliament has nominated 50 women members in the reserved seats. The number of reserved seats each political party gets is determined by the percentage of votes parties received in the general election.
- 5.
The local government institutions in Bangladesh are in charge of, on behalf of the national government, to list, allocate and distribute relief items (e.g. rice, wheat, flour, sugar, pulse, cooking oil, cloths, tube-wells, etc.) to distress households. Note that like many developing countries, Bangladesh doesn’t have pension system for its citizens. Instead, the poor and extreme poor households are provided regular assistance (mainly food items) through local government institutions. Due to low supply and high demand of such relief operation bribery, corruption and nepotism are heard very often.
- 6.
Salam is the Islamic way of wishing and greeting. In full meaning it means may Allah bless you with peace and tranquillity. Saying Salam is considered as reflection of one’s humbleness to the elderly, modesty and religiosity.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful for helpful comments on the previous draft of this paper to Dr. Elizabeth Morrell, Mona Lena Krook, participants of the Midwest Political Science Conference (Chicago, USA) 2012; New Zealand Political Studies Association Conference (Canterbury University, Christchurch) 2013 and the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Science Seminar (Flinders University) 2013. The remaining errors are responsibility of the authors. Opinion, explanation and suggestions do not correspond to any organisations mentioned in the paper.
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Aktar, S., McIntyre-Mills, J. (2019). Reserved Seats for Women in Rural Local Government: Achieving a Level Playing Field. In: McIntyre-Mills, J., Romm, N.R.A. (eds) Mixed Methods and Cross Disciplinary Research. Contemporary Systems Thinking. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04993-5_17
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