Kamya Yadav

I am the Charles R. Kaye Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. My research sits at the intersection of gender and representation, party politics, and the political economy of development, with a regional focus on India.

My work examines how political institutions — such as quotas and party organizations — shape women's political participation, ambition, and representation, as well as citizen engagement with politics. This research spans India, Zambia, Malawi, and the United States, and draws on surveys, experiments, observational causal inference, and qualitative interviews and shadowing. My research has been supported by the American Political Science Association, the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond, Global, International and Area Studies, the Institute for South Asia Studies, the Graduate Division at UC Berkeley, and SurveyCTO.

My book project, The Political Glass Wall: How Women's Wings Prevent Women's Political Advancement, introduces the concept of the political glass wall to explain why women's wings — present in nearly 40 percent of political parties — fail to advance women's political careers. Combining over 100 elite interviews, electoral data, an original survey of 1,054 party elites in two of India's largest parties, and newly collected data on India's national and state party leaders, I show that ostensibly gender-egalitarian institutions can institutionalize discrimination by creating parallel, unequal career tracks.

Previously, I worked and published on the information environment and misinformation as a research analyst at Graphika and a researcher for the Information Environment Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I was also a Senior Data Science Fellow at the D-Lab at UC Berkeley. I hold a B.A. in Politics from Princeton University and an M.A. in Political Science from UC Berkeley.

Publications

Peer-Reviewed Articles

Siwakoti, Samikshya, Kamya Yadav, Nicola Bariletto, Luca Zanotti, Ulaş Erdoğdu, and Jacob N. Shapiro. 2021. "How COVID Drove the Evolution of Fact-Checking." Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review. Access.

Book Chapters

Yadav, Kamya, Alicia Wanless, and Samantha Lai. 2025. "Multilateral Efforts on Information Integrity: Why a Clearer Definition Is Needed." In Springer Handbook on Disinformation: A Multidisciplinary Analysis. Access.

Working Papers

Kinship and Women's Collective Action: Evidence from Patrilineal and Matrilineal Malawi Under review, with Amanda Robinson, Amanda Clayton, Boniface Dulani, and Asiyati Cheweza
Abstract
·PaperGlobally, women participate in local politics less than men. We focus on one underexplored obstacle: the psychological conditions that enable collective action. As part of a coordinated set of field experiments and drawing on social-psychological theory, we develop a months-long intervention in Malawi designed to foster women's collective identification, perceived injustice within gender-based hierarchies, and ultimately their collective efficacy. Our intervention increased women's participation in local politics, with effects varying strikingly by kinship. Counter to our expectations, effects were largest among women practicing patrilineal kinship — a system of descent, residence, and inheritance that structurally disadvantages women — than among women in matrilineal communities. Our findings suggest that interventions targeting the psychological foundations of collective action are especially effective where women face the greatest structural constraints, have fewer preexisting resources, and have less access to gender-based support systems. Our findings underscore how women's displacement from their natal kin ruptures their collective power.
Are Women's Wings Barriers to Women's Political Advancement? Job market paper.
Abstract
·PaperWomen's wings are present in nearly 40 percent of parties worldwide. They provide women with pathways into politics and yet, there is no correlation between the presence of a women's wing and women's electoral candidacy across party types and electoral systems. Why does a seemingly inclusionary institution fail to advance women's political careers in practice? I argue that women's wings enable women's political entry but stymie their advancement in parties because women's wings occupy a second-tier status within the party organization. An organizational division of labor leaves women's wing members unable to develop the vital networks and sociopolitical capital that party elites prioritize during promotion and candidacy decisions. As a result, women's wing members experience lower organizational mobility and electoral candidacy, relative to women in the main party organization and male members of party wings. I draw on 106 elite interviews and an original survey of 1,054 party elites from two of India's largest political parties to substantiate these claims. This study suggests that ostensibly gender-egalitarian institutions can institutionalize discrimination by creating parallel, unequal career tracks that exclude women from centers of power.
The Limits of Intra-Party Competition for Women's Political Representation With Priyadarshi Amar, Anirvan Chowdhury, and Varun Karekurve-Ramachandra
Abstract
·PaperParty candidate selection is a black box. Though we observe final candidate lists, winners, and losers during elections, we rarely see the pool of eligible candidates parties draw from. We leverage a unique phenomenon from Rajasthan's urban local body elections — "informal intra-party primaries" in which multiple aspirants file nominations for the same party ticket — as a rare window into this process. We ask where these primaries occur, why, and what they imply for the selection of women. Using candidate affidavit and administrative data from 2014 and 2019 urban local body elections, we show that informal primaries arise in competitive wards and less often in wards reserved for women. We find that they are likely driven by both party-led screening and candidate-led rent-seeking through hedging and rebel candidacies. Informal primaries have gendered consequences for candidate selection. We find that in wards reserved for women, parties screen on household rather than individual wealth. On the candidate side, we show that women who hedge candidacies and run as rebel independents do so out of necessity to get any ticket rather than rent-extracting leverage. Our findings suggest that upstream interventions in recruitment are necessary to improve both the quality and quantity of women's representation.
Voluntary Party Gender Quotas as Reputation Building Strategies
Abstract
·PaperWhy and when do political parties voluntarily adopt policies that are electorally costly in the short run? Existing explanations of party policy choice generally assume that adoption delivers immediate electoral benefit, yet parties routinely commit to publicly unfavorable policies whose payoff materializes only if voter preferences shift in their favor years later. Using voluntary gender quota adoption, I develop a theory of unpopular policy adoption as a long-run reputation-building strategy. I argue that opposition parties facing electoral threat from a better-resourced incumbent can use costly, semi-permanent commitments to signal credibility to voters, accruing a reputational premium when voter preferences shift. I combine a two-period signaling model with descriptive evidence from cross-national analyses of 73 voluntary party gender quota adoptions. The evidence shows that adopters are disproportionately opposition and left-leaning parties, that they incur short-run vote-share losses, and that the losses can reverse over subsequent election cycles. Qualitative case studies of two Indian regional parties, the Biju Janata Dal and the All India Trinamool Congress, complement the model and descriptive analyses by tracing their 2019 quota adoption and electoral outcomes over two cycles. The framework offers a unifying account of party behavior that integrates strategic electoral incentives with ideological commitments, and can generalize to other contexts of costly policy adoption.
"It's My Duty": How Social Norms Influence Peer-to-Peer Correction of False Claims Online With Rachel Xu · Pre-analysis plan

Works in Progress

Unlocking Urban Democracy: Voter Engagement in Local-Level Zambian Politics With Leonardo Arriola, Nicholas Dorward, and Melanie Phillips · Pre-analysis plan · Poster
Gatekeepers of Representation: The Role of Candidate Training Programs on Minority Candidate Supply With Diana Da In Lee