Thank you for sharing this!

Rather than undermining the effectiveness of quotas, we argue there exists significant variation in the ability of women to be de facto leaders that needs further examination.

The validation exercise provides evidence in favor of our measure as a robust predictor of proxy status. However, the disproportionate role played by male family members in female reserved village councils (vis a vis unreserved councils) is striking.

Using a phone measure can possibly overestimate proxy status. So, in a subset of villages we correlate the phone and citizen measures. We find that citizens were significantly more likely to correctly name their female mukhiya if she also responded to our phone survey herself.

We also find interesting heterogenous effects by state. As expected, female politicians are significantly less likely to be proxies in Maharastra than Bihar. Remember, not only is MH more developed, it also implanted quotas about 9 years before Bihar.

Positive takeaway: There is significant variation in proxy status i.e.not all women are proxies! The ability of women to be de facto leaders varies significantly. However, 30 years since quotas were implemented, there is a consistent gender gap in proxy status across our measures

Drawing on our fieldwork, we called ~1000 politicians in Bihar and Maharashtra to respond to our governance related phone survey and identified who *actually* responds to it. We supplement this with an in-person citizen survey where respondents had to name their village leaders.

During our fieldwork we saw husbands sitting in the female mukhiya's chair and even campaign posters for women with their husband photos (see below). Beyond these anecdotes, how widespread are proxy leaders? We develop & validate a measure of proxy leadership to address this

The paper can be found here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

This paper is about 35 pages but was written while sipping chai across multiple continents – in coffee shops, shady hotel rooms and expansive corn fields.