Women’s political representation and educational attainments: a district-level analysis in India

Burchi, Francesco / Karan Singh
Externe Publikationen (2020)

in: Journal of South Asian Development 15(1), 7-33

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0973174120913722
Volltext/Document

This paper has three major objectives: (1) to analyse whether the gender of politicians in India is relevant to the educational achievements of the residents of the districts in which they were elected; (2) to test whether politicians are more sensitive to the needs of the people of same gender and (3) to explore the potential channels through which the above relationships operate. By applying econometric techniques to a dataset obtained by merging individual with district-level political data, we concluded that an increase by 10 percentage points in women’s political representation produces an increase by 6 percentage points in the probability of children completing primary school. We then found gender-differentiated results: women’s political representation affects significantly more girls’ than boys’ education. This relationship works partly through the improvement of women’s access to educational programmes like the Mid-Day Meal scheme, while an increase in school infrastructures does not appear to be an important mediating factor. While an in-depth understanding of the pathways through which women’s representation in politics impacts on children’s education is hindered by data constraints, our findings seem to point to the importance of the ‘role model’ effect.

Über den Autor

Burchi, Francesco

Entwicklungsökonomie

Burchi

Weitere Expert*innen zu diesem Thema

Balasubramanian, Pooja

Sozioökonomie 

Christ, Simone

Sozialanthropologie 

Dippel, Beatrice

Komparatistik 

Friesen, Ina

Politikwissenschaft 

Jaji, Rose

Anthropologie 

Loewe, Markus

Ökonomie 

Nowack, Daniel

Politikwissenschaftler 

Roll, Michael

Soziologie 

Sowa, Alina

Ökonomie 

Strupat, Christoph

Ökonom 

Stöcker, Alexander

Ökonomie 

Zintl, Tina

Politikwissenschaftlerin