Why do people want more women in politics—and what kind of representation do they expect from them? While women’s numeric representation has increased globally, we know little about how individuals link numeric representation to substantive policy influence. We study this relationship in Tanzania, a case of institutionalized gender quotas, using three survey waves and survey experiments with students at the University of Dar es Salaam (2020–2021). We develop a novel measure combining respondents’ estimates and ideals of women’s representation and a committee-level Inclusion Index. We find that support for increasing the number of female MPs is primarily driven by expectations of greater substantive influence. Higher perceived representation gaps are aligned with support for gender equality, but not for Tanzania’s current gender quota. In our survey experiments, respondents with higher perceived representation gaps consider the importance of political capital investments to be higher for female than for male candidates, but are not significantly more likely to donate money to support female candidates themselves. In general, respondents favor affirmative action policies aimed at equality of opportunity over equality of outcome.
