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 define
female political participation in the local governance of Bangladesh? What is
the availability and quality of these studies: and what are the obstacles to
effective female participation? A systematic, search strategy using search
keys and boolean operators were used for finding out the studies which met
the main questions of the review. A step by step process followed by a
specifically defined inclusion-exclusion criteria was used for synthesising
the final studies for the review. From a large number of studies, the present
review finally included ten studies which were most relevent to the central
purpose of the review. The reviewed studies which defined political
participation from diverse perspectives have been synthesied here. The
quality of the reviewd studies were assessed based on four criteria: study
design, sample size, data collection methods, and data analysis. Based on
these evaluation criteria, most of the reviewed studies were found to have
small sample size, unspecified study design, vague mode of data collection,
and superficial data anaylsis. The key barriers to the female political
participation were found to be institutional, economic, socio-cultural and
psychological in nature.