BHUMI PUROHIT

I am an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Georgetown’s McCourt School. I focus on gender politics, the political economy of governance, and political behavior in India. 

The primary objective of my research is to understand the behavioral and institutional barriers to women's political representation. I am motivated by questions such as: why do women's interests remain under-represented in politics, even with parity of electoral representation? How do gender biases about women politicians affect public service delivery outcomes in women’s constituencies? Additionally, a secondary research agenda focuses on answering the question: how do institutional norms influence the behavior of bureaucrats and politicians? I situate my research in South Asia and employ multi-method research techniques, including primary surveys, experimental work, and in-depth qualitative fieldwork.

My first book project titled Gendered Bureaucratic Resistance: How Women Politicians Navigate the Bureaucracy, based on my dissertation, examines how bureaucrats' explicit and implicit gender biases, combined with their career incentives, drive bureaucratic resistance—bureaucrats' refusal to aid in policy implementation. Bureaucratic resistance particularly impacts female politicians, and subsequently leads to worse public service delivery outcomes in their constituencies. While existing research has studied the impact of political parties and voters in limiting women politicians’ electoral advancement, my project provides the first theoretical and empirical account elucidating why and how bureaucracies create barriers for women once they are elected to office. This research is generously supported by the Institute of International Studies (UC Berkeley), the Weiss Family Fund, and the Center for Politics of Development, and the Center on Contemporary India (UC Berkeley). In 2020, this project received an Honorable Mention from the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics and in 2022, the Empirical Study of Gender Research Network Prize. It further received American Political Science Association (APSA)’s William Anderson Award for the best dissertation in the general field of federalism or intergovernmental relations, state, and local politics, and APSA’s Women, Gender, and Politics Section’s Best Dissertation Award in 2023.

My second research agenda focuses on the behavioral and institutional challenges to public service delivery. In a co-authored book project, Public Financial Management, State Capacity, and Public Services in India, Santhosh Mathew, Devesh Sharma, and I examine how a poorly designed public expenditure system in India guides the behavior of politicians and bureaucrats in a way that harms public service delivery.

Prior to Georgetown, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, with a joint appointment in the Department of Psychology.  I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to coming to Berkeley, I worked as a J-PAL Policy Consultant for the Ministry of Rural Development in India to create policy implementation plans for finance management reforms and rural poverty reduction. I have additional experience with managing experiments and research with One Acre Fund in Kenya and running social enterprises in India and Sierra Leone. I hold a Master’s degree in Area Studies with distinction from the University of Oxford, with a concentration on Modern South Asia. Prior to that, I graduated from Duke University with a Bachelor’s degree in Public Policy and a certificate in Documentary Film Making.