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Are Politicians More Responsive Towards Men’s or Women’s Service Delivery Requests? A Survey Experiment with Ugandan Politicians

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2021

SangEun Kim Open the ORCID record for SangEun Kim [Opens in a new window]  and
Kristin Michelitch Open the ORCID record for Kristin Michelitch [Opens in a new window]
SangEun Kim
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University, Commons Center PMB 0505, 230 Appleton Place, Nashville, Tennessee 37203-5721, USA. Email: sangeun.kim@vanderbilt.edu
Kristin Michelitch*
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University, Commons Center PMB 0505, 230 Appleton Place, Nashville, Tennessee 37203-5721, USA. Email: sangeun.kim@vanderbilt.edu
*
Corresponding Author: Email: kristin.michelitch@vanderbilt.edu. Twitter: @KGMichelitch
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Abstract

This study examines whether politicians exhibit gender bias in responsiveness to constituents’ requests for public service delivery improvements in Uganda. We leverage an in-person survey experiment conducted with 333 subnational politicians, of which one-third are elected to women’s reserved seats. Politicians hear two constituents request improvements in staff absenteeism in their local school and health clinic and must decide how to allocate a fixed (hypothetical) budget between the two improvements. The voices of the citizens are randomly assigned to be (1) male-school, female-health or (2) female-school, male-health. We find no evidence of gender bias toward men versus women, or toward same-gender constituents. This study expands on the mixed results of prior studies examining gender bias in politician responsiveness (typically over email) by adding a critical new case: a low-income context with women’s reserved seats.

Keywords

Politician responsivenessgenderdiscriminationpublic service delivery
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , Winter 2022 , pp. 326 - 338
Open Practices
Open data Open materials
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

*

This paper is from a larger project coauthored between Guy Grossman and Kristin Michelitch conducted by Innovations for Poverty Action in partnership with Advocates Coalition for Development and Environment. We are grateful to the Carnegie Corporation of New York and Democratic Governance Facility for its generous funding. We thank Christine Goldrick, Ana Garcia Hernandez, Austin Walker, Areum Han, and Maximilian Seunik for research assistance and the Vanderbilt RIPS lab, Experimental Studies of Elite Behavior Conference, Mia Costa, Tariq Thachil, and Amanda Clayton for feedback. This study is pre-registered with EGAP.

This article has earned badges for transparent research practices: Open Data and Open Materials. For details see the Data Availability Statement.

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