The majority of maternal health interventions in India focus on increasing institutional deliveries to reduce maternal mortality, typically by incentivising village health workers to register births and making conditional cash transfers to mothers for hospital births. Based on over 15 months of ethnographically informed fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2017 in rural Assam, the Indian state with the highest recorded rate of maternal deaths, we find that while there has been an expansion in institutional deliveries, the experience of childbirth in government facilities is characterised by obstetric violence. Poor and indigenous women who disproportionately use state facilities report both tangible and symbolic violence including iatrogenic procedures such as episiotomies, in some instances done without anaesthesia, improper pelvic examinations, beating and verbal abuse during labour, with sometimes the shouting directed at accompanying relatives. While the expansion of institutional deliveries and access to emergency obstetric care is likely to reduce maternal mortality, in the absence of humane care during labour, institutional deliveries will continue to be characterised by the paradox of "safe" births (defined as simply reducing maternal deaths) and the deployment of violent practices during labour, underscoring the unequal and complex relationship between the bodies of the poor and reproductive governance.

What role does the international diffusion of gender norms play in determining recent increases in women's political representation? We argue that norm diffusion has larger positive effects on women's cabinet representation than on women's legislative representation. We also show that within cabinets, norm diffusion affects low-prestige appointments more than highprestige appointments. We test these arguments using an original database of ministers from 1979 to 2009 and find that the association of women's representation with three separate indicators of international diffusionlevels of women's representation among neighboring states, levels of women's representation among intergovernmental organization partners, and time since ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women-is consistent with our arguments.Women make up more than 50% of the world's population, but they are dramatically underrepresented in the world's most powerful decisionmaking bodies. In 2011, 19.3% of the world's national legislators and 16.0% of the world's cabinet ministers were women. Still, women have recently made substantial gains. Levels of women's representation moved sharply upward beginning in the 1990s (see Figure 1). The number of countries with all-male cabinets declined steadily.What factors explain the recent, relatively rapid global rise in the ranks of women political leaders? To date, scholars have focused on domestic sources of variation, calling attention to the roles of social structural, ideological, and political variables. Yet, the increasing visibility of international commitments to gender-balanced decision making and the coincident sudden upward ticks in women's representation suggest that international factors may also be affecting national outcomes. This article investigates the extent to which states' international interactions have propelled women's gains.While political scientists (Krook and True 2012) and sociologists (Paxton, Hughes, and Green 2006) have examined the evolution of a norm

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Drawing on vignettes from fieldwork in Andhra Pradesh, the article explores how political pressures shape bureaucratic practices around the government’s flagship Janmabhoomi programme. It argues that competitive state politics manifests in clientelist–populist voter mobilization leading to two-level political pressures—state politicians pressure higher bureaucracy which in turn pressures the lower bureaucracy tasked with implementation, and local politicians allied with the governing party put direct pressures on lower bureaucracy for favouritism. Lower level bureaucrats cope with these impossible pressures by subverting official procedures, so that actual practices hardly match the rational Weberian construction in official documents. The article’s contribution lies in linking the ‘political game’ and the ‘bureaucratic game’ in a grounded empirical context.

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Women’s representation in legislative and executive offices has increased in recent decades. We show, though, that while global legislative and executive trend lines have positive slopes, the two institutions experience distinctive temporal dynamics. When levels of women’s legislative representation rise, they tend not to slip back beyond their newly achieved level—women’s legislative representation tends to be characterized by a ratchet effect. This effect is relatively rare in cabinets, where increases in women’s representation are often followed by decreases. We call the latter phenomenon the see-saw effect: Countries experience one or more steps back for every step forward. These differences have normative and analytical implications. Normatively, we suggest that cabinet see-sawing is particularly problematic when domestic power balances are weighted toward executives. Analytically, we encourage researchers to use indicators of women’s empowerment that account for time and inter-institutional balances and identify factors that affect cross-country variation in temporal trends.

Will rising world powers tilt global norms in less progressive directions? While there has been much theoretical speculation on this question, few scholars have explored it empirically. This article uses existing empirical evidence to test the extent to which countries compromise their own values to gain favor with influential countries. We analyze the gender of ambassadors sent to rising powers and established powers and suggest that this analysis generates insight into the likely effects of rising powers on global norms. We find that the probability that a country will send a woman ambassador to a rising power is significantly lower than the probability that it will send a woman ambassador to an established world power. We show that this difference increases when the sending country exhibits high levels of international economic dependence. Our findings imply that the rise of countries like China, Russia, and India may undermine the global gender-balanced decision-making norm and progressive global norms more broadly.

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