Abstract
This paper has three major objectives: (1) to analyse whether the gender of politicians in India is relevant to the educational achievements of the residents of the districts in which they were elected; (2) to test whether politicians are more sensitive to the needs of the people of same gender and (3) to explore the potential channels through which the above relationships operate. By applying econometric techniques to a dataset obtained by merging individual with district-level political data, we concluded that an increase by 10 percentage points in women’s political representation produces an increase by 6 percentage points in the probability of children completing primary school. We then found gender-differentiated results: women’s political representation affects significantly more girls’ than boys’ education. This relationship works partly through the improvement of women’s access to educational programmes like the Mid-Day Meal scheme, while an increase in school infrastructures does not appear to be an important mediating factor. While an in-depth understanding of the pathways through which women’s representation in politics impacts on children’s education is hindered by data constraints, our findings seem to point to the importance of the ‘role model’ effect.
Highlights
During the past two decades, a growing body of literature has investigated the effects of women’s political representation on a range of economic, political and social indicators
The other two research questions are (b) does women’s political representation affect more girls’ than boys’ probability to attain primary education? This helps to shed light on whether female politicians appear to pay more attention to the education of girls and (c) what are the possible channels through which women’s political representation affects educational achievements? Given data constraints, we focus on a few possible channels, such as the availability of schools—already examined, for example, by Clots-Figueras (2012)—and the coverage of the MidDay Meal (MDM) scheme, which has not been explored in the literature
While our paper is interested in educational outcomes, the following sub-sections focus on other dependent variables, which can help understand the channels through which women’s political representation may affect education and because, more generally, they could shed light on whether politicians are more sensitive to the needs of people of their own gender
Summary
During the past two decades, a growing body of literature has investigated the effects of women’s political representation on a range of economic, political and social indicators. These studies have focused on high-income countries, as well as middle- and low-income countries (Panday, 2008; Powley, 2006). In the literature on political economy, the ‘citizen–candidate model’ views the identity of politicians as one of the fundamental determinants of investment choices (Osborne & Silvinsky, 1996). Building on these models, scholars have investigated the specific role of politicians’ gender in policy-making Men and women are assumed to have different preferences, and make different choices once they obtain important political responsibilities
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