qualifications and experience. Subjective assessments point towards a decrease in the quality of service delivery. While evidence on accountability, political participation, and willingness to contribute to public goods is more mixed, more detailed analysis will be required to identify gendered impacts.

# **3.1 Data sources and variable construction**

In most states the panchayat operating at the time of data collection in 2008 had come to power in 2004, implying that sufficient time had passed for it to have an impact that could be assessed by respondents. Data on the quality of public good delivery are constructed from the response to the question of whether the situation pertaining to certain issues was „better‟ or „much better‟ than in the previous panchayat. We group responses for 14 types of goods in the questionnaire into 3 broad categories, one pertaining to water, schools, health, and sanitation, one for roads, electricity, street lights, and irrigation, and one pertaining to government schemes, credit, communication, and natural resource management. A normalized indicator that varies between 0 (no improvement at all) and 1 (improvement in all reported categories) that serves as our main outcome variable is constructed for each group. This is then used to test if female reservations lead to a change in perceived quality of public goods provided by local government, overall or for females.

The survey contains information on whether matters improved with respect to government employees‟ absence from their duties, whether it is easy to get problems with local service delivery (local roads, street lights) fixed, how simple it is to hold local officials to account for functions they are expected to perform, and the transparency of beneficiary selection for various government schemes. For each of these, we construct indicator variables that equal one if either the situation has improved or if it is „not a problem at all‟ or „very easy‟ to achieve accountability or transparency.<sup>12</sup> To avoid reliance on hypothetical and rather abstract information, we complement the above indicators with information on actual meeting participation during the last four _gram sabhas_ held in each village. For each meeting, information on attendance and active participation (by discussing issues rather than just observing) is complemented with the number of issues discussed at the meeting that respondents considered to be of relevance for themselves.

Finally, we use individuals‟ stated willingness to contribute a modest amount (100 Rs.) to different categories of public goods if doing so would allow securing a matching government contribution of much

> 12 The wording for the three questions on holding local leaders to account was as follows: „How easy is it for you to get problems associated with local service provision (such as repairing the road in front of your house, ensuring that the street lights function, etc.) fixed?‟, „How easy is it for you to hold local officials accountable for the functions they are supposed to be performing?‟ and „How transparent is the process of beneficiary selection regarding various government schemes in your village?‟ For the first two, possible answers were coded as 1 not a problem at all; 2 very easy; 3 relatively easy; 4 quite difficult and 5 impossible. For the third question, answers were coded as 1 completely transparent; 2 very transparent; 3 relatively transparent; 4 quite non-transparent; and 5 completely non-transparent.

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