# **3.1. Data and descriptive statistics**

To explore possible links between political and economic empowerment, we use individual data from a complete enumeration of all adult residents in 190 villages in 13 states implemented in 2014/15 as part of the long-running ARIS-REDS panel.<sup>6</sup> Information was collected on 275,677 individuals in 91,984 households. Of these 23,350, generally the most disadvantaged ones, had a job card allowing household members to apply for work under NREGS. To obtain a conservative estimate of reservation-induced effects, we limit our analysis to these households.

In addition to standard demographic and socio- economic characteristics at individual and household level, the survey obtained detailed information on actual and desired labor market participation at individual level. For individuals who participated in NREGS, data were gathered on key features of program implementation including whether dated work receipts were issued, payment was deposited directly in beneficiaries’ own account, if they were paid less than the statutory wage and, if yes, whether a complaint was lodged. For a subsample of states with traditionally high levels of discrimination against women, an extra module was administered asking about individuals’ involvement in key household-level decisions. In addition, a village questionnaire was also administered to, among others, elicit characteristics of all village leaders elected from 2005 together with election details, including if the election was ‘reserved’.

Table 1 illustrates the timing of panchayat elections in sample states. Most states held elections in 2005/06 so that the local government had been recently elected when NREGS was launched in 2006-2008. Another round of elections was held in 2010 or 2011 and the village council leaders elected then had just completed their terms when our data were collected. Random assignment of female leadership reservation to villages provides an opportunity to assess if exposure to female leadership in the current or immediately preceding election period improved women’s ability to take advantage of labor market opportunities in NREGS or the private sector although we are unable to analyze impacts of reservation and NREGS separately.

Household, individual, and village characteristics are reported in tables 2-4 separately for the entire sample (col. 1) and for villages that had or had not been reserved in the two previous election periods (cols. 2 and 3) with p-values from testing for equality of means between ever and never reserved groups reported in col. 4.<sup>7</sup> If, as stipulated by law, villages to be reserved were chosen randomly, covariates unaffected by the

> 6 The original survey, in 1971, was based on a representative sample of about 4,500 households in 252 villages in 16 states. Subsequent rounds took place in 1982, 1999, and 2006. While resource limitations precluded expansion of this exercise to all states, villages in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Orissa and West Bengal were revisited in 2014/15 by IRMA with funding support from Brown University, German Development Institute, and the World Bank. 7 Tables providing a more detailed distinction between villages that have been reserved now and in the previous period are included in appendix tables A1 to A3. For those villages that are reserved in current period, previous period and reserved in either current or previous period, respectively, while column 4 reports the means of these characteristics of village councils that are never reserved. Relevant p-values in cols. 6-9 do not allow us to reject the hypothesis that relevant variables were balanced between the different types of villages.

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