非洲经济研究中心-政治代表与司法结果：来自印度的证据（英）

Political Representation and Judicial Outcomes: Evidencefrom IndiaTaneesha Datta27th May, 2025AbstractThe economic impact of electing members of minority groups into positions of political poweris well-established. However, the impact of political representation on broader civil rights andliberties, and particularly access to justice, remains unexplored. This paper employs a close-election regression discontinuity design to explore whether female political representation canexplain judicial outcomes in the Indian context, focusing on crimes against women. Despitepoliticians having no formal influence over the judiciary, I find that the election of a femalepolitician generates a large and statistically significant increase in the likelihood of convictionfor crimes against women, relative to the election of a male politician. I do not find similardifferences in the likelihood of conviction for gender-neutral crimes, suggesting that femalepoliticians shape judicial outcomes within issue areas that align with gendered spheres ofinfluence and interest. Additional analysis—on whether female politicians cater to genderedpreferences in public goods and whether the effect of female representation on the likelihoodof conviction varies with local gender bias—points to two potentially important mechanisms.These include a policy channel, whereby female politicians actively attempt to act in women’sinterests, and an exposure channel, whereby observing female representatives positively informscitizens’ views on women’s competencies. This study emphasises the importance of politicalrepresentation in expanding vulnerable groups’ access to justice.Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Dr. Sanjay Jain for his helpful comments. All errors are my own.1IntroductionA well-established literature has highlighted the economic impact of electing members ofsocially disadvantaged groups into positions of political power, especially for public goodsprovision (Pande, 2003; Chattopadhyay and Duflo, 2004; Beaman et al., 2007, 2012). However,the impact of political representation on access to justice remains unexplored.While it isoften argued that vulnerable groups, particularly women, face major barriers to being heardwithin the criminal justice system (Jassal, 2024; Sharma et al., 2025; Dutt, 2018; Kadyan &Unnithan, 2019), no study has sought to test whether political representation can alleviate theseconstraints. This study seeks to address a gap in the literature by estimating the impact of femalepolitical representation on judicial case outcomes, focusing on crimes against women in theIndian context.I employ a close-election regression discontinuity (RD) design to isolate plausibly exogenousvariation in Indian electoral constituencies’ exposure to male or female politicians. The quasi-experimental RD design circumvents several of the empirical challenges associated with causalestimation of the effect of political representation. As numerous studies have previously argued,narrow