Can Gender Quotas Improve Public Service Provision? Evidence from India

• In Event: Gender Quotas, Women’s Political Participation, and Leadership

Abstract

What effect do gender quotas have on the quality of public service provision? We examine the effect of randomly imposed electoral quotas for women in Mumbai’s city council, using a wide variety
of objective and subjective measures of constituency-level public service quality. The perceived quality
of local public goods is higher in constituencies with quota members, and citizen complaints are processed faster in areas with more quota members. One mechanism for this effect is differences in the
focus of legislator effort. In their legislative participation, quota members focus on public goods distribution, while non-quota members focus on individual goods, member perks, and identity issues. We
suggest that men’s more extensive engagement with informal forms of political action, often criminal
and clientelistic, has led to men and women cultivating different styles of political representation.

Authors

• Alexander Lee, University of Rochester

• Varun Karekurve-Ramachandra, University of Rochester