Nine out of ten parliamentarians in India are men. Such dismal figures reveal the lasting grip of unfavourable social norms. Women’s disadvantage on a complex set of social and economic factors effectively keeps them at the margin of political life. Six decades have gone by since...

The recent book on ‘Violence and Social Orders’ by the Nobel Prize winner Douglass North and others distinguishes between limited access and open access states. Most states in the world remain limited access, or natural, states dominated by coalitions of elites capturing rents from the...