📢Excited to share the working paper related to our earlier post! We (cc @priyadarshiamar @ApurvaBamezai) develop and validate a phone-based measure to assess the magnitude of 'proxy' female politicians in gender-reserved villages in India. Full paper: �.

Thank you for having me! It was great to connect with you all.

RT @apsrjournal: From our new issue: "Who Knows How to Govern? Procedural Knowledge in India’s Small-Town Councils" by Adam Auerbach (@adam….

Many many congratulations to @ApurvaBamezai on being selected to be a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg! Such a great group at @KelloggInst yet again!.

The project benefitted the most from conversations with the women of Bihar. I t also included two surveys that were enriched by feedback from experienced enumerators as we braved the chilly winter mornings and strategized sampling. Indeed it does take a village!

While the paper is 35 pages, it was built on conversations I had while cutting across corn fields and drinking copious amounts of chai at the mukhiya's office. It was mostly written by the bay windows of a tiny apartment in Philly but also from a shady hotel room in Araria

I am grateful to my advisors and three anonymous reviewers whose excellent feedback tremendously improved the paper. Countless others have provided comments on multiple iterations of this paper and I am indebted to their generosity.

Since I've often posted about this project on Twitter, I wanted to share that my job market paper is now forthcoming at the Journal of Politics! This paper has been a labor of love and the source of much joy (and frustration). Excited that it found a home!

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Read the full paper with details and design and analysis here:

Rather than undermining the effectiveness of quotas, we argue there exists significant variation in the ability of women to be de facto leaders that needs further examination.

The validation exercise provides evidence in favor of our measure as a robust predictor of proxy status. However, the disproportionate role played by male family members in female reserved village councils (vis a vis unreserved councils) is striking.

Using a phone measure can possibly overestimate proxy status. So, in a subset of villages we correlate the phone and citizen measures. We find that citizens were significantly more likely to correctly name their female mukhiya if she also responded to our phone survey herself.

We also find interesting heterogenous effects by state. As expected, female politicians are significantly less likely to be proxies in Maharastra than Bihar. Remember, not only is MH more developed, it also implanted quotas about 9 years before Bihar.

Positive takeaway: There is significant variation in proxy status i.e.not all women are proxies! The ability of women to be de facto leaders varies significantly. However, 30 years since quotas were implemented, there is a consistent gender gap in proxy status across our measures

Drawing on our fieldwork, we called ~1000 politicians in Bihar and Maharashtra to respond to our governance related phone survey and identified who *actually* responds to it. We supplement this with an in-person citizen survey where respondents had to name their village leaders.

RT @amrita_kurian: I have a new article out on Geoforum on the Moral Economy of Standardization. I use history and ethnography to examine t….

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