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.

中文翻译：

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妇女的政治代表和教育程度：印度地区层面的分析

本文有三个主要目标：（1）分析印度政治家的性别是否与选区所选地区居民的教育成就有关; (2) 检验政治家是否对同性人的需求更敏感； (3) 探索上述关系运作的潜在渠道。通过将计量经济学技术应用于通过将个人与地区级政治数据合并而获得的数据集，我们得出结论，女性政治代表人数每增加 10 个百分点，儿童完成小学教育的概率就会增加 6 个百分点。然后我们发现了性别差异的结果：女性的政治代表比男孩的教育显着影响女孩的教育。这种关系在一定程度上是通过改善妇女获得诸如午餐计划等教育计划的机会而发挥作用的，而学校基础设施的增加似乎并不是一个重要的中介因素。虽然数据限制阻碍了对女性在政治中的代表性影响儿童教育的途径的深入理解，但我们的研究结果似乎指出了“榜样”效应的重要性。