The household is a difficult setting to study because its operations are, by design, not observable via public behavior. Violence within the household is often concealed; coordination over whom to vote for is not recorded; the bargains struck within marriage are rarely stated in terms that researchers can capture. Soledad Artiz Prillaman and Naila Kabeer take up this problem in India and Bangladesh, respectively. Both authors directly demonstrate the links between household ties and women’s political behavior.

There is a large disparity in the rates at which Indian women and men attend political meetings and make claims on the state despite nearly equal levels of voter turnout. Prillaman’s book, The Patriarchal Political Order, argues that this is because political participation is a function of household-level rather than individual-level costs and benefits. Specifically, households coordinate over when and how members should engage in politics. In such arrangements, the interests of dominant household members (generally, men) are represented over the interests of subordinate members (generally, women). This is because dominant household members have influence and coercive power over other members. After proposing a relational theory of women’s political participation, the author uses experimental results, survey data, original census data with network analysis, and interviews to demonstrate how ties within a household-centric system can constrain women’s political agency.

The book also describes how women can dismantle the patriarchal political order: by building ties outside the household and engaging in collective action. To support this part of the theory, Prillaman provides causal evidence from two interventions. The first is women’s self-help groups (SHGs), which are microcredit groups that facilitate financial savings. The second intervention is a gender consciousness-raising training provided to some of these SHGs. Both interventions enhance women’s political knowledge, efficacy, and confidence, as well as their solidarity with one another. These mechanisms, in turn, increase their agentic political participation. While many studies are skeptical of microcredit’s capacity to shift women’s position within the household (e.g., Banerjee, Karlan, and Zinman Reference Banerjee, Karlan and Zinman2015), the book provides convincing evidence with its focus on the associational (rather than financial) nature of the group, as well as on political outcomes.

Kabeer’s Renegotiating Patriarchy explains a different outcome: pro-poor and gender-equitable social progress in Bangladesh amid political and economic turmoil. In doing so, the author describes how women’s decision-making shifts in the face of patriarchal risk. Events such as war, famine, and male migration eroded the norms of obligation that men provided for women in their households. In such conditions, security from marriage became unreliable, and women revised their expectations of husbands and sons and acted accordingly. Kabeer uses participant observation, focus group discussions, longitudinal interviews, anecdotes, and survey data to show how household-level choices accumulated into national-level change. Kabeer’s approach integrates Bangladeshi citizens’ agency into an account that has otherwise focused on institutional quality and internationally set development targets (e.g., Asadullah and Savoia Reference Asadullah and Savoia2018).

Kabeer also uses these data to show how women renegotiate norms in patriarchal settings by tracing paid work, particularly women’s entry into the export garment industry, as a domain of change. On politics, specifically, Renegotiating Patriarchy describes the electoral failures of Jamaat-e-Islami, a political party that women voters refused to support. Crucially, the book does not simply assume that these votes were women’s own. When asked why they voted as they did, women cited obedience to husbands’ instructions as one reason among others, but not the dominant one. Rather, Bangladeshi women exercised their agency to make sure that a party that would further constrain them did not come to power.

This brings us to one key difference between Prillaman and Kabeer. While agency is a central concept in both books, each maps the path to women’s agency differently. For Prillaman, agency is acquired through ties outside the household that let women participate on their own terms. For Kabeer, agency is acquired as the household’s guarantees of stability fail. Both books show that political agency varies substantially and meaningfully; future work in political science would do well to examine this outcome variable across all genders.

While both books see the household as the relevant unit of analysis, they observe it at different stages of decay. The Patriarchal Political Order posits a strong household in the case of India that constrains women until they build ties outside of it. In Madhya Pradesh, India’s second-largest state, these ties are built through top-down interventions. Renegotiating Patriarchy takes a more bottom-up view of change, showing that renegotiation happens in the household. This is partially because events in Bangladesh’s history have weakened traditional household ties. Patriarchal risk in this case predicts that women will build stronger ties with a natal, rather than marital family, which can decrease son preference (a key feature of patriarchy) over time.

Prillaman and Kabeer also confront the same measurement problem: household dynamics are extremely difficult to observe. Each book meets that difficulty in an innovative and instructive manner. Specifically, coercion cannot be observed directly, so Prillaman assembles a preponderance of evidence while remaining explicit about its limitations. Vote choice, notoriously vulnerable to social desirability bias, is elicited via tablet, and spousal preference distance is captured through a measure about political issues that is legible to survey researchers working elsewhere. Researchers studying household constraint in another setting could adopt the preference-distance measure directly.

Kabeer deals with the same problem using different tools. For example, rather than smoothing over apparent inconsistencies in survey data, the book interprets contradictions in respondents’ answers as meaningful, reading them as evidence of the very seeds of change that explain social progress in Bangladesh. Another particularly valuable technique the author employs is revisiting and interviewing the same women over time, providing a rare longitudinal perspective that captures shifts in both structural conditions and individual-level aspirations.

Taken together, these books describe two routes out of patriarchy. Gender and politics researchers should read the books as a paired demonstration that the household is a political institution rather than a background condition. Students of research design should read them for the contrast in how each author makes hidden institutions such as the household visible and measurable. Finally, those interested in South Asian political economy should read these books for the reminder that India and Bangladesh, often collapsed into a single region, have produced patriarchal orders that are unraveling on very different terms.