How ‘Political Voice’ Empowers the Powerless

India is a country where many women struggle for survival from the day they are born. Girls in India are less likely to be breastfed than boys, for instance, and less likely to be immunized.

But India also has the highest number of elected female representatives in the world. A 1993 constitutional amendment meant to broaden the scope and accessibility of democracy called for the creation of directly elected local councils at the district, intermediate, and village levels, and mandated that one-third of all council seats be filled by women. The amendment is an ongoing policy experiment of sorts, on an epic scale.

“If you have a local leader who is from your social category, you are probably more likely to approach him or her for help.”

As Harvard Business School professor Lakshmi Iyer and her colleagues discovered, it's been producing encouraging results. Their research suggests that disadvantaged or minority groups in India whose members are elected to local governments have not only more of a "political voice" but also more access to and better results from the justice system.

In the working paper The Power of Political Voice: Women's Political Representation and Crime in India, Iyer, Anandi Mani (University of Warwick), and Prachi Mishra and Petia Topalova (International Monetary Fund) examine the effect that mandated political representation for women has had on crimes against women.

"We were hoping to find that this would reduce crimes against women," says Iyer. "But we found exactly the opposite."

When the researchers examined 22 years worth of data on reported crimes in a variety of gender-specific and gender-nonspecific categories they were initially surprised by what they found. After women assumed leadership positions, the rate of reported crimes against women went up: Kidnappings rose by 13 percent, rapes per capita increased by 23 percent, and the total number of crimes increased by an astonishing 44 percent.

Empowered To Act

Initially Iyer and her colleagues considered that the increase in crime might be due to a backlash effect; perhaps people were angry at seeing women in office and retaliated. But further research indicated that crimes against women probably weren't increasing. For one, murder rates of women did not increase. (Murder is one crime that always tends to be reported, says Iyer. "It's just very hard to hide a dead body.") And neither gender-neutral crimes (such as robberies or arson), nor crimes in which the victims were identified as male, showed any notable increase.

So the observed increase was likely caused by a greater number of crimes being recorded, either because more women victims were willing to come forward to report crimes, or because the police were more likely to give them a sympathetic hearing because of the increase in women's political representation.

Because there are very few victimization surveys in India that can be used to estimate the true incidence of crime, Iyer acknowledges there is no way to directly support a hypothesis of increased reporting of crimes. However, the paper presents several pieces of suggestive evidence that point in that direction.

Initial Results Confirmed

The initial results of their work led the researchers to examine other data sources. In one survey that included men and women, respondents were asked about their interactions with the police. For example, did you go to the police in the last two years? If so, was your complaint attended to? Did you have to pay a bribe? The survey included gender and location information for the respondents.

Further, data showed that women display greater satisfaction in their interactions with the police when they live in villages with a female council head (Table VIII, Panel B in the working paper). Women are slightly more likely to approach the police in such villages (columns 1 and 2). While the sample of respondents who actually had dealings with the police was relatively small, the researchers did find that women in villages with female council heads were significantly happier with their law enforcement interactions.

"We could clearly see that the women, in places where the village head was a woman, were much likely to say the police acted efficiently and the case was solved," says Iyer.

In another survey that looked at people's perceptions of the police, respondents said they believed that bringing a local influential person with them to report a crime would significantly increase the likelihood of a police response.

"When people were asked who is the leader you would most likely go to if you had a problem, most respondents said it would be a local village council member," says Iyer. "It ties in with this idea that if you have a local leader who is from your social category, you are probably more likely to approach him or her for help."

(Interestingly, local councils have no formal power over the police, who are under state government control. "There are no formal ways for them to punish a policeman if he refuses to help a crime victim," Iyer says. "So the fact that we see these effects despite this lack of formal power is very interesting. It speaks to these more informal ways of influence.")

Finally, though the data wasn't as strong as it was for women, the paper documents a similar rise in reported crimes against another disadvantaged social class in India: the Scheduled Castes. The SCs encompass members of the lowest tiers of the Hindu caste system that dominated India's social structure for many years. And like women, SCs were provided mandated political representation in 1993. This, posits Iyer, is further proof that when disadvantaged groups gain political representation, they feel more empowered.

The researchers also examined the impact of women in specific powerful positions (a district council chairperson or state legislator) and found that the effects of such presence were much smaller than that of increasing political representation in the aggregate. This is consistent with the finding that local representation matters for reported crimes against SCs, even though they have had mandated state-level political representation for more than four decades.

Overall the findings suggest that women (or other minorities) might be better able to maximize their voice by increasing their representation more broadly, rather than targeting a few high-level positions.

Informal ways of influence are of great interest to Iyer, an economist who studies the intersection of politics and economics in developing countries, examining how distribution of power impacts policy and social groups.

"I don't think we can understand the effects of economic policy without understanding the political setting," she says. "We can propose any number of potentially useful policies, but unless you understand the political setting, there's very little chance of them working."