Obstacles to Political Participation of the Elected Female Representatives in the Local Governance of Bangladesh

Abstract

This paper addresses three areas of interest: how do existing studies definefemale political participation in the local governance of Bangladesh? What isthe availability and quality of these studies: and what are the obstacles toeffective female participation? A systematic, search strategy using searchkeys and boolean operators were used for finding out the studies which metthe main questions of the review. A step by step process followed by aspecifically defined inclusion-exclusion criteria was used for synthesisingthe final studies for the review. From a large number of studies, the presentreview finally included ten studies which were most relevent to the centralpurpose of the review. The reviewed studies which defined politicalparticipation from diverse perspectives have been synthesied here. Thequality of the reviewd studies were assessed based on four criteria: studydesign, sample size, data collection methods, and data analysis. Based onthese evaluation criteria, most of the reviewed studies were found to havesmall sample size, unspecified study design, vague mode of data collection,and superficial data anaylsis. The key barriers to the female politicalparticipation were found to be institutional, economic, socio-cultural andpsychological in nature.