Much has been made of the gender gap in political participation in India. Underlying this gender gap in political participation, however, is a striking and unanswered puzzle: across rural India, women show up to vote on election days at high rates, almost equal to those of men, but in between elections women remain markedly less present in political spaces, both relative to men and relative to their rates of votingWhy do women vote but not participate in politics otherwise? I argue that the explanation for this puzzling fact lies in the structure of political networks and women’s agency. Drawing on network data from a complete census of adults in two villages in Madhya Pradesh and in-depth interviews with 40 men and women, I show that women’s political networks are rooted in the household, and women’s political behavior is jointly determined by their household. Women vote not only because they
want to but because it provides a benefit to those with power in their households. I then link the structure of men’s and women’s political networks to their political participation and show that the size of women’s political networks, specifically the size of their networks outside of their household, correlates with their non-electoral political participation. Women’s political participation can only be understood by understanding the nature of influence and coercion in their political networks.