Replication data for: Art of Modeling Covered the Facts of Data: Uncovering an artifact of the change in reporting system of crimes against women in India

Does female representation in legislature result in more crimes against women? Iyer et al. (2012) asserts a positive causal link between Indian state-level policy implementation mandating 1/3 of legislative seats to women (claiming exogeneity of this relationship) and reported crimes against women with some supporting evidence to show that the incidence of crime remains unchanged. We show that the increases in reporting do not correspond with implementation of the reservation policy; rather, they coincide with the year in which crime data was reclassified to introduce more categories of crimes against women. When restricting the dataset to the years in which total crimes against women were consistently aggregated, we find that the reservation policy is not significantly associated with crime reporting. Further, we claim that the delay in implementing the reservation policy was not exogenous, and show, with limited power, that the year of implementation is associated with progressivity of the state.