The feminisation of Indian politics is an exciting phenomenon of our time
Women legislators in India raise economic performance in their constituencies by about 1.8 percentage points per year more than male legislators. When average growth is 7%, this implies that the growth premium associated with female legislators is about 25%
Raising the share of women in India’s state legislative assemblies is not only likely to lead to better representation of women’s and children’s concerns in policymaking, it is also likely to lead to higher economic growth. Research suggests that women favour redistributive politics and, thus, have a tolerance of higher taxes. This makes it plausible that, at least in the short to medium term, women politicians are less effective than men at promoting economic growth. Using comprehensive data for 4,265 state assembly constituencies for 1992-2012, we — T Baskaran, B Min, Y Uppal and I — show that the opposite is the case.
Women legislators in India raise economic performance in their constituencies by about 1.8 percentage points per year more than male legislators. When average growth is 7%, this implies that the growth premium associated with female legislators is about 25%.
To understand the mechanisms underlying this striking finding, we explored differences between male and female legislators in corruption, efficiency and motivation, each of which has been associated with economic growth in developing countries. We found evidence in favour of women in each case.
Male legislators are about three times as likely as female legislators to have criminal charges pending against them when they stand for election, and we estimate that this can explain about one fourth of the difference in growth between male and female-led constituencies. We buttress this result with estimates of actual corruption in office, measured as the rate at which women accumulate assets while in office. We find this is 10 percentage points lower per year than among men. These findings line up with experimental evidence that women are more fair, risk-averse and less likely to engage in criminal and other risky behaviour than men.
Since economic infrastructure is an important input to growth in developing countries, we analysed MLA performance in implementation of the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, the massive federally-funded village road construction programme. We find that male and female politicians are equally likely to negotiate federal projects for road building in their constituencies. However, women are more likely to oversee completion of these projects. The share of incomplete road projects is 22 percentage points lower in female-led constituencies.
Source: Hindustan Times, 8/01/2019
