Does Female Politician Affect Policy Outcomes in Indonesia?

Women’s representation in Indonesia like many other countries in the world, remain considerably low. Therefore, both women activists and the government have been trying to increase women’s descriptive representation in order to increase their substantive representation, since it has been argued that females as lawmakers are more concerned about well-being issues. This paper focuses on the impacts of the descriptive representation of women in local politics. It examines the impacts of having more female in politics on the proportions of budget allocation in the municipalities budget by using data from municipalities in Indonesia between 2010 and 2017. This study also observes the gender effect on policies related to infrastructure access which women, as homemakers, strongly care about, namely household access to safe water, safe sanitation and electricity. The results indicate that the gender of a politician matters in terms of the policy outcomes. Women in the Regional House of Representatives are more likely to increase the budgets for environment, housing and public facility and health, but reduce the proportions allocated for economy and education. Likewise, a female leader is a statistically significant factor in the allocation of more government spending on health, but reduces funding for education. In terms of the more concrete policies, female representatives also positively affect the households’ opportunities to obtain better access to safe water, safe sanitation, and electricity, whilst a female regent/mayor only impacts household access to safe sanitation.