Does Gender Representation Affect Police Legitimacy? Evidence from India

Does the presence of women officers afford the police greater institutional legitimacy in the developing world? Most studies about police legitimacy have been restricted to the global north, and few have used experimental techniques. However, the researchers restricted their survey experiments to the very specific contexts of domestic violence and traffic enforcement, respectively. In this paper, researchers further broaden the analysis of gender representation and police legitimacy to the developing world (India); their main goal is to understand how the nature of the crime, including those of a heinous nature, moderates any potential increase in levels of perceived legitimacy.

In sum, this project seeks to make two contributions: to categorize crime along a spectrum in order to examine whether women police are viewed differently as well as expand scholarship on gender and policing to the developing world with a novel experimental design. Morsel collected 1000 respondents in Maharashtra state comprising 50% male and 50% of female respondents.