Georgetown Professor Bhumi Purohit Receives American Political Science Association’s Best Dissertation Award
- The annual William Anderson Award is given to the best dissertation in the general field of federalism or intergovernmental relations, state, and local politics.
Indian American researcher Bhumi Purohit has received this year’s William Anderson Award, presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best dissertation in the general field of federalism or intergovernmental relations, state, and local politics. Currently an assistant professor of Public Policy at Georgetown’s McCourt School, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs with a joint appointment in the Department of Psychology.
Her research examines the behavioral and institutional barriers to women’s political representation, as well as institutional barriers to public service delivery. “The primary objective of my research is to understand the behavioral and institutional barriers to women’s political representation,” she says in her Georgetown profile.
Her first book project titled “Laments of Getting Things Done: Bureaucratic Resistance Against Female Politicians in India,” is based on her dissertation, examines how bureaucrats’ explicit and implicit gender biases, combined with their career incentives, drive bureaucratic resistance—bureaucrats’ refusal to aid in policy implementation.
She holds a Master’s degree in Area Studies with distinction from the University of Oxford, with a concentration on Modern South Asia.
APSA praised the book for presenting “a path-breaking examination of bureaucratic resistance to locally elected women politicians in India.” Noting that it is “the first study to systematically examine the gendered nature of bureaucratic resistance at the local level,” APSA calls it a “fine contribution to our understanding of local politics and power in India provides a convincing explanation for how they make such decisions.”
Her 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.
Purohit received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Before that, she 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. She has additional experience with managing experiments and research with One Acre Fund in Kenya and running social enterprises in India and Sierra Leone.
She holds a Master’s degree in Area Studies with distinction from the University of Oxford, with a concentration on Modern South Asia. Prior to that, she graduated from Duke University with a Bachelor’s degree in Public Policy and a certificate in Documentary Film Making.