What effect do gender quotas have on political responsiveness? 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 nonquota members focus on individual goods, member perks, and identity issues. We suggest that men’s more extensive engagement with extralegal and rhetorical forms of political action has led to men and women cultivating different styles of political representation.
 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
 

Varun Karekurve-Ramachandra is a political scientist broadly interested in empirical political economy. His research focuses on the judiciary, women in politics, political institutions, and bureaucracies. His work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in the American Journal of Political Science and The Quarterly Journal of Political Science.

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