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Abstract

Does legislators' gender identity affect representation, indicated by their participation in legislative activity? I ask whether their gender impacts the extent to which elected representatives present and relay issues to seek government action on. Are females inherently different as legislators in the democracy? This project uses a natural language processing approach along with a dynamic difference-in-differences strategy to investigate. Using a zero-shot classification technique, I create five outcome ``scores'' to evaluate the Indian Parliament's textual Question Hour data on: development, corruption, accountability \& transparency, programmatic representation, and clientilistic representation. The analysis reveals that female representation has minimal to no discernible normalized average total effect per treatment unit on development scores. Slight negative effects are observed in the cases of programmatic and clientelistic representation scores. However, a modest negative effect on accountability and transparency scores contradicts expectations, suggesting nuanced interactions that may not universally improve governance quality through increased female representation. In addition, the only positive effect, though small, on corruption scores reveals the priorities of female representation over time periods. These findings underscore the complexity of gender effects across different governance dimensions and temporal contexts, highlighting the importance of individual temporal effects and their association with specific electoral cycles in informing the dynamism in representation in developing contexts.

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