Female political representation and its association with maternal healthcare and childhood mortality: evidence from India

• Main Authors: Chu, Shirley Xin Jin, Chong, Ji Jia, Chin, Cui Ning
• Other Authors: Akshar Saxena
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2023
• Subjects: Social sciences::Economic development; Social sciences::Political science::Political institutions
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/166295
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Female political representation has immense benefits, particularly in prioritizing policies related to their traditional roles as caregivers in the family and society (Macmillan, Shofia, & Sigle, 2018) which can improve the quality and access to maternal healthcare, improving child mortality. The two objectives of this paper are to assess the association of (1) female representation and maternal healthcare access, and (2) maternal healthcare access with improved health outcomes in children. We used a logistic regression model to access the associations between our variables of interest. Using a large representative data sample of 191,521 observations from India and accounting for potential endogeneity of political representatives’ gender and the sample composition of births, we find that a 1 percentage point increase in FPR is associated with a 0.013 increase in ANC visits as well as a 0.5 percentage point increase in opting for the premium package. In turn, adoption of the premium package is associated with a reduction in mortality by half - 44.6 percentage points in infant deaths, 54.3 percentage points in post-infancy deaths and 45.9 percentage points in under-5 deaths.