From the Periphery to Power: The Impact of Underrepresented Groups in the Indian Governmen

Abstract

This paper studies the impact of gender on parliamentary speech in India through the analysis of “Question Hour” between 1999 and 2023. I use transformer-based language models to demonstrate the existence of gender differences in parliamentary behaviour and categorise speech into distinct and meaningful topics. I also use quasi-experimental variation in the gender of legislators to explore its effect on question content and find that women consistently prioritise women and children’s issues in parliament. I show that these priorities are driven by women’s perspectives on general legislative issues. These results suggest that India’s future quotas to increase the number of women in parliament will have significant impacts on public policies designed to benefit women.