Abstract
This paper analyzes the long-term impacts of reservation of local political seats for women on children's learning and nutritional outcomes in rural Andhra Pradesh. Using the random rotation of seats reserved for women over different election cycles, and three rounds of a panel dataset, we analyze the impact of exposure to political reservation during critical periods in early childhood. The paper shows that the reservation policy for female leaders had the largest impact on learning outcomes in primary school when children were exposed to reservation in utero and very early in life.
Highlights
Childhood experiences are often thought to be crucial determinants of children’s cognitive and noncognitive development (Heckman, 2008)
We are able to attribute causality to the reservation policy in the Panchayat as the seats to be reserved were randomly allocated through a rotating mechanism
This paper shows long-term impacts of reservation of local political seats for women on learning outcomes in rural Andhra Pradesh
Summary
Childhood experiences are often thought to be crucial determinants of children’s cognitive and noncognitive development (Heckman, 2008). Clots-Figueras (2012) shows that female leaders have a positive effect on primary education attainment of children in urban India, though not in rural areas While these two papers identify the impact of female leaders by analyzing close elections, and do not analyze the reservation policy directly, they do indicate that female leaders might favor health and education investments. This paper builds on this literature and contributes by showing long term impacts of reservation of seats for women, in the Gram Panchayat (GP) elections in 1995 and 2001 elections, on children’s learning outcomes in rural Andhra Pradesh It further contributes by analyzing potential critical periods during early childhood in which such policies can be effective. Since the election reservation is done on a rotation basis, this data implicitly contains the election reservation data for the 1995 election (the GPs which did not receive reservation in 2001 and 2006, must have received reservation in 1995)
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