Relative to their share in the population, women are under-represented in all political positions. Compared to economic opportunities, education and legal rights, political representation is the area in which the gap between men and women narrowed the least between 1995 and 2000. Political reservations for women are often proposed as a way to rapidly enhance women’s ability to participate in policymaking. This paper by Chattopadhyay and Duflo compares the type of public goods provided in reserved and unreserved Village Councils. The analysis is based on a data set collected from 265 Village Councils in West Bengal and Rajasthan.
Despite the importance of this issue for the design of institutions, very little is known about the causal effect of women’s representation on policy decisions. The reservation of a council affects the type of public goods provided. Specifically leaders invest more in infrastructure that is directly related to their own genders.
The results detailed here therefore indicate that a politician’s gender does influence policy decisions. More generally this paper provides new evidence on the political process, and provides strong evidence that the identity of a decision maker does influence policy decisions. The paper suggests that:
- Reservation affects policy choices. In particular, it affects policy decisions in ways that seem to better reflect women’s preferences.
- The authors further examine whether the effects on public good provisions can be attributed to the gender of the chief rather than to other consequences of reserving seats.
- They do not find any evidence that the impact of reservation is driven by features other than the gender of the chief.
- These results contradict the simple intuition behind the Downsian model and the idea that political decisions are the outcomes of a Coasian bargaining process.
- They also confirm, indirectly, that the Panchayat has effective control over the policy decisions at the local level.
Mandated representation of women has important effects on policy decisions in local government. Women elected as leaders under the reservation policy invest more in the public goods more closely linked to women’s concerns. For example, drinking water and roads in West Bengal and drinking water in Rajasthan. They invest less in public goods closely related to men’s concerns, for example education in West Bengal and roads in Rajasthan. These findings are important for several reasons:
- The results suggest that the direct manipulation of the policymaker can have important effects on policy.
- Reservations for women are increasingly being implemented at various levels of government.
- These findings have implications beyond reservation policy, suggesting that, even at the lowest level of decentralised government, all mechanisms that affect a politician’s identities may affect policy decisions.
- This is important at a time when many new decentralised institutions are being designed around the world.
