Malnutrition and female political representation in India

Malnutrition
casts a negative shadow over the course of the lives of a fifth of children
under the age of five who are stunted worldwide. Despite two decades of growth,
India has one of the highest wasting and stunting rates. Lack of political
awareness and poor governance, arguably related to an acute underrepresentation
of women in politics in India may explain why not enough is committed to this
matter. Increasing women’s political agency in elected bodies has brought
several documented benefits yet little is known about its impact on children’s
nutrition outcomes. Our analysis shows that increasing women’s political representation in India’s state legislatures could
reduce child malnutrition. We use a large cross-sectional district
representative household survey collected between 2002-4 through the second
round of the District Level Household Survey. It is merged with detailed state
legislative assembly election data we collected. These detail who contested
seats in each constituency and the gender composition of elected
representatives in India’s 17 largest states between 1993 and 2004. We find
that a ten-percentage point increase in women’s representation leads to a three
to five percentage point reduction in the likelihood of a child being
underweight. Malnutrition is a multi-faceted issue with different underlying causes,
and our work explores some of these. We
document that greater female political representation creates productive
ways to enhance public health by bringing improvements in households’ access to basic amenities and to
prenatal, birth and postnatal care among mothers. <br><br>The dataset deposited is used for a forthcoming publication in PLOS ONE. This upload forms part of the requirements from the journal PLOS ONE so that replications can be done.