Do electoral gender quotas impact citizen attitudes about the appropriateness and capabilities of women in the political sphere? The case of Lesotho in Southern Africa provides an opportunity to understand the extent to which increased exposure affects citizens’ bias towards female leaders. The Lesotho Local Provisions Act of 2005 reserved 30% of all local election divisions to be headed by women. Similar to the much-studied Indian local quota provision (see Bhavnani 2009, Beaman et al. 2009/2010, Pande and Ford 2011), the reserved districts for women were distributed completely at random. To measure citizen attitudes towards female leaders, I rely on a series of Afro-barometer surveys conducted in Lesotho between 2003 and 2008, which include respondents’ attitudes before the quota, immediately following the quota, and several years after the quota. I also employ quantitative matching techniques to compare the responses of observationally similar respondents living in reserved and non-reserved districts. Similar to previous findings in the Indian context, preliminary results suggest that increased exposure to female leaders through the local reserved seat quota improves citizens’ perceptions towards the capabilities and appropriateness of female leaders.
