India: female politicians are good for education

Do female politicians make a difference to education outcomes? In India they certainly seem to, according to Irma Clots-Figueras at the LSE. Her recent paper, Are Female Leaders Good for education? Evidence from India (PDF), studies the impact of a politician's gender on the educational achievements of a representative sample of Indian citizens aged 13-39 in 1999/2000.

For this purpose I collected a unique and detailed dataset on politicians in India who contested in elections between 1967-2001 and I matched them to individuals by district of residence. These data allows me to identify close elections between women and men, which yield quasi-experimental election outcomes used to estimate the causal effect of a politician's gender.

I find that increasing female political representation by 10 percentage points increases the probability that an individual attains primary education in urban areas by 6 percentage points, which is 21% of the difference in primary education attainment between the richest and the poorest Indian states.

That seems like a remarkably strong effect. Clots-Figueras concludes her paper by noting that her findings "may have policy implications".

The issue of female political representation has been increasingly important in India and there have been growing pressures for female political reservation. In September 1996, the Government introduced a Bill in Parliament, proposing the reservation of one third of the seats for women in the Central Government and the State Assemblies. Since then, this proposal has been widely discussed in several parliamentary sessions, without an agreement being reached. Those in favour argue that increasing female political representation will ensure a better representation of their needs. Even those who oppose the reservation acknowledge the fact that female politicians behave differently than male politicians.

This paper corroborates these views with empirical evidence and may shed some light on these issues, by looking at the effect of the politicians’ gender on education. Clearly, reservation would increase female representation, but it would as well change the nature of political competition, either by changing the set of candidates available for each seat, by altering voters’ preferences or by changing the candidates’ quality.

Comments

[Andrew Leigh]

Trackback: http://imaginingaustralia.blogs.com/imagining/2006/01/politics_and_pr.html

[sial]

nice blog........

[r4 ds giochi]

Do female politicians make a difference to education outcomes? In India they certainly seem to, according to Irma Clots-Figueras at the LSE. Her recent paper, Are Female Leaders Good for education? Evidence from India (PDF), studies the impact of a pol…

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