The Institute for Economic Development at Boston University -------- ---------------------------Research Review Spring 2001

“Women’s Leadership and Policy Decisions: Evidence from a Nationwide Randomized Experiment in India”
Raghabendra Chattopadhyay and Esther Duflo
IED Discussion Paper 114, May 2001

It is becoming almost conventional wisdom nowadays that increasing the political representation of women is a “win-win” proposition. Familiar arguments include the improvement of equity owing to a better representation of women’s needs, increasing levels of efficiency due to women’s (perceived) greater zeal in channeling investment toward child health and education, both of which are recognized as having a significant long run impact upon growth. Historically however, women’s political representation has advanced rather slowly inspite of rapid economic advancement in a large number of countries. One policy measure that nations are increasingly resorting to in order to increase representation is the reservation of political offices for women candidates. For example, since 1990, ten Latin American countries have passed electoral laws stipulating a requirement that a minimum proportion of candidates be women for all parties. In the context of this policy innovation, an open question is whether different policy preferences of women translate into a different menu of policies or is it the case that institutional factors (for example, women representatives merely acting as proxies for their spouses) dictate the course of policy making?

In this paper, Chattopadhyay and Duflo study the policy consequences of such mandated representation by taking advantage of a unique experiment implemented recently in India: since 1998, a third of all positions of chief of village councils have been reserved for women, and moreover, the reserved councils are selected randomly. The council chief
makes decisions about which public goods to provide, and where to provide them. This is especially important given that in 1993, a constitutional amendment gave substantial power to village councils to define and implement local development projects and to maintain local infrastructure using state funds. Chattopadhyay and Duflo conduct a detailed survey of all investment in local public goods in all the councils in the district of Birbhum in West Bengal, and compare investments made in reserved and unreserved councils. Since the councils were randomly selected for reservation, differences in investment decisions can be attributed to the policy of mandated representation of women.

Chattopadhyay and Duflo’s results suggest that reservation does affect policy. Women elected as leaders under mandated reservation invest more in public goods most closely linked to women’s concerns. These include drinking water, fuel, and employment generating activities such as road construction. These are precisely the issues most frequently raised by women in the villages surveyed by the authors. This correspondence with women’s needs also strongly suggests that the effects of women’s reservation on public goods provision are mostly due to gender rather than other consequences of altering the political competition through quotas. Another positive impact of mandated reservation is to be found in the significantly higher participation of women in the political process in councils that are reserved for women. On the other hand, the authors find no evidence that women leaders are more efficient or less corrupt than their male counterparts. Therefore, one cannot make welfare statements concerning the impact of reservation without specifying a social welfare function.

Page 4
Table of Contents
IED Home page
Updated: 7/11/01