Record Details

Can Gender Quotas Improve Public Service Provision?Evidence from Indian Local Government

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Can Gender Quotas Improve Public Service Provision?Evidence from Indian Local Government
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/IO9SLQ
 
Creator Karekurve-Ramachandra, Varun
Lee, Alexander
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description What effect do gender quotas have on political responsiveness? We examine the effect of randomly
imposed electoral quotas for women in Mumbai’s city council, using a wide variety of objective and
subjective measures of constituency-level public service quality. Quotas are associated with differences
in the distribution of legislator effort, with quota members focusing on public goods distribution, while
non-quota members focus on individual goods, member perks, and identity issues. These differences in
effort seem to influence institutional performance: perceived quality of local public goods is higher in
constituencies with quota members, and citizen complaints are processed faster in areas with more quota
members. We suggest that men’s more extensive engagement with extralegal and rhetorical forms of
political action has led to men and women cultivating different styles of political representation.
 
Subject Social Sciences
 
Date 2023-09-20
 
Contributor Karekurve-Ramachandra, Varun