When do women and men participate equally in the electoral process? I argue that besides the traditional, resource-based explanations of women’s participation, there is an alternative path to women’s equal electoral participation that depends on clientelist mobilization of household support for female turnout. Where households are supportive of women’s participation, they can bridge the resource gap to enable female turnout even in the most unlikely of contexts, namely where women face a lack of resources and high costs to participation in public life. But households will only be supportive were returns to
a vote are high. I develop a typology of clientelist regimes that posits that both the sequencing of the clientelist exchange as well as the source of the clientelist resources determines the value of a vote. Returns to a vote should be highest when clientelist parties rely on post-election resource sharing arrangements that provide selective post-election access to state resources; and lowest when clientelist parties instead bank on privately funded electoral handouts. I test this theory in India, a particularly puzzling case of gender turnout parity, using a novel panel data set on the number of ethnic groups targeted by clientelist parties from 1977 through 2007. I show that a) the number of ethnic groups incorporated went up over time, and that b) a rise in the number of politically incorporated ethnic groups before an election leads to a drop in the gender turnout gap during the election at the constituency level.