Gender Quotas and Upward Political Mobility in India

This paper uses the staggered implementation of gender quota policy in India to understand whether women who won office due to quotas go on to win higher-level office. Indian local government elections impose mandatory gender quotas, but state elections do not. This provides a setting to assess if there is an increase in women’s representation at higher levels of governance due to quotas at the local level. The identification strategy allows me to ascribe an increase of 3 percentage points in the share of women at the state level to gender quotas in local government. Additionally, to establish upward political mobility of local-level leaders I tracked political biographies of over 1000 women legislators across India’s 15 major state assemblies. In doing so, I identify that political dynasties, and ground-level leadership — those who entered politics due to mandatory gender quotas — are the two primary channels that enable entry of women into state-level politics. Further, I show that the effect of democratic entry of women into politics via quotas is pronounced in states with parties that are reliant on empowered rank and file members. Overall, these results highlight the importance of gender quotas as a democratic state-building tool and provide evidence for career advancement of women in politics whose democratic entry into politics was facilitated by the implementation of mandatory gender quotas.