Female politicians and role-model effects: Evidence from India

Abstract

Despite being the largest democracy in the world, the political representation of women in India, is far below an equitable representation and literature points to such disparity as having potential to influence aspirations, stereotypes and gender norms. In this thesis, I exploit a fuzzy regression design and employ two-stage least squares regression (2SLS) estimation, to study the impact of female politicians at the district level (the second geographical level of administration) on outcomes of bargaining power, gender norms and financial empowerment. I use micro-data from India's NFHS-4(2015-16) survey and combine it with aggregated state constituency election data in India from 2010 to 2014, to find the impact of having a female elected representative on aforementioned outcomes. I also provide robustness checks for various margins of victory/loss and use sharp RD design on sample of only those districts that had a single man vs woman election. To the best of my knowledge, this thesis is the first in the literature to quantify effects of competitively elected female politicians on bargaining power, financial empowerment and domestic violence attitudes (gender norms) in the context of a developing country using individual level survey. The findings of this thesis contributes towards a growing field of literature related to the effects of female political leadership on women's empowerment. The findings are important as it demonstrates that greater gender representation in politics can have spillover effects on breaking stereotypes and gender-norms. To sum, female representation leads to improvements in bargaining power- specifically there is an increase in the ability to decide husbands' earnings and healthcare. Importantly, there is no significant impact on women's financial empowerment and improvement in gender norms as tested by using variables related to domestic violence attitudes. Thus, I argue that female political representation in India has limited impact on the local women's empowerment.