From Uprising to the Ballot Box: Women's Political Participation in Bangladesh | Moogdho Mahzab

Mass political mobilization rarely ends in the streets. Whether, and under what conditions, it translates into changes in electoral behavior remains an open empirical question with important implications for democratic consolidation. The July–August 2024 student-led uprising in Bangladesh toppled a government that had been in power for fifteen years, ushering in a political transition and setting the stage for the country’s first genuinely competitive national election in more than a decade, held on February 12, 2026. This post-authoritarian transition, shaped by a salient and widely shared national event, offers a rare opportunity to examine how competing political narratives about collective mobilization and national history influence voter turnout and electoral choice.

This research investigates three questions. First, does exposure to a civic documentary that frames the upcoming election as the culmination of the 2024 uprising increase voter turnout? Second, does a gender-specific narrative emphasizing women’s leadership in the uprising differentially mobilize female voters? Third, how do these narratives compare with an alternative narrative centered on Bangladesh’s 1971 independence struggle, which emphasizes secular nationalism and religious harmony, in shaping vote choice? In particular, we examine whether these narratives differentially influence support for political parties associated with distinct roles in the 2024 uprising and varying positions on secularism and religious harmony. By examining how historical memory, gender representation, and competing accounts of national identity shape electoral behavior during a democratic transition, this study sheds light on the potential of civic narratives to mobilize voters and reshape political preferences.

 

 

Moogdho Mahzab, PhD, is a Research Fellow in the Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He is a development economist whose research examines political economy, democratic participation, governance, and the role of institutions in development, with additional interests in environmental economics, public health, and agriculture. Before joining IFPRI, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Virginia and received a U.S. Fulbright Scholarship from Bangladesh to pursue a master’s degree in Policy Economics at Williams College.