Keywords
Child marriage, political factors, political ideology, political party, India, politics
Abstract
Although India has made significant advances in reducing girl-child marriage compared to other countries in South Asia, one in three of the world’s child brides still lives in the country. The literature on girl child marriage focuses mainly on the effects of socioeconomic factors and examines the implications of child marriage. I argue that, in addition to socioeconomic factors, the practice of girl-child marriage may be explained by political factors. My study focuses on the case of India and examines the impact of political factors at the legislative assembly constituency (AC) level in two states with varying political traditions and social traits, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh. In particular, I explore how the governing parties’ political-ideological orientations affect the prevalence of girl-child marriage across state assembly constituencies in these states. For this study, I use four datasets: the Demographic Health Survey & GPS coordinates (DHS), spatial data to distribute the clusters of the DHS survey data using the corresponding GPS coordinates (Susewind, 2014), election data to code the political ideology of elected parties in each assembly constituency (National Election Watch) and Socio Economic and Caste Census 2011 data to control for contextual socioeconomic factors at the constituency level. I analyze the data using logit multivariate regression models that incorporate control factors. To assess the impact of governing parties’ political ideology, I control for alternative explanations of child marriage using individual level (education, wealth, access to media, religion, caste, and residence type) and socioeconomic factors at the constituency level. I expect that in state assembly constituencies governed by parties of left ideological orientation, there will be less prevalence of girl child marriage compared to those governed by parties of right ideological orientation.
Completion Date
2024
Semester
Summer
Committee Chair
Dr. Kinsey, Barbara
Degree
Master of Arts (M.A.)
College
College of Sciences
Department
School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs
Degree Program
M.A. Political Science
Format
application/pdf
Identifier
DP0028886
URL
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1477&context=etd2023
Language
English
Rights
In copyright
Release Date
2-15-2025
Length of Campus-only Access
None
Access Status
Masters Thesis (Open Access)
Campus Location
Orlando (Main) Campus
STARS Citation
Kapoor, Divya, "Girl Child Marriage and Governing Party Ideology: Evidence From India" (2024). Graduate Thesis and Dissertation 2023-2024. 476.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd2023/476
Accessibility Status
Meets minimum standards for ETDs/HUTs
