significant effects on any categories of crime not specifically targeted against women – such as kidnapping of men, crimes against property or crimes against public order.
This strongly
suggests that there is no overall deterioration in law and order conditions or policy changes other than the political representation that are driving our results. Given the opposing effects of politician identity on reported crime outlined above, we interpret this increase in observed crimes against women as driven by a net increase in reporting of crime rather than in actual crime incidence. This is consistent with the fact that we find an insignificant effect of political representation on categories of crime such as murder, where the reporting bias is least likely to be a problem. Further, there is no evidence that the presence of female political representatives leads to a deterioration of police effort. The number of arrests increased significantly after the introduction of women’s representation, particularly for cases dealing with kidnapping of women. The quality of police effort, measured by the percentage of cases where the prima facie evidence for arrests was upheld by a magistrate, also showed no decline after this reform. These findings raise our confidence that the relative increase in reported crimes is driven by improved reporting of such crimes rather than a rise in the actual crimes committed against women. Survey data on interactions with police also show a higher degree of satisfaction and lower bribes paid by women when their village council was headed by a woman. In contrast to previous work on the effect of mandated reservations, we are able to examine whether additional representation at higher levels of government are important for crime outcomes. Having a woman as head of the district council has a much smaller effect on the reported crimes against women, over and above the broad-based representation of women in village and district councils. There is no effect of the presence of women in the state legislature.
