Gender and Legislative Performance in India

Abstract

A large literature on the United States and Western Europe establishes that there is a correlation between gender and legislator activity. The article extends the literature to India by exploring a unique dataset of Question Hour activity in the lower house of parliament over a 30-year period (1980–2009). Compared with male legislators, female legislators ask 24% fewer parliamentary questions, and there are also significant differences in question content, even after controlling for important covariates. However, it is likely that female and male legislators differ on unobserved attributes that affect legislative activity. Using the intuition that the gender of winners in close elections between women and men is quasi-randomly determined, the article employs a regression discontinuity design to reestimate the gender effect. The results indicate that gender has zero causal effect on the volume of questions and most types of question content.