Electoral quotas for women are the most common institutional solution to the problem of political gender inequality today, but widespread qualitative evidence from India – home to the largest such quota policy – suggests that men can co-opt these institutions. We measure actual and perceived political authority using data from elected officials and their families, bureaucrats, and citizens across two states and more than 6,000 respondents in rural India. Our data reveal that local Indian politics, across the board, is a family affair. Unlike typical conceptions of representative democracy, we document how local governance tasks are collectively shared between elected representatives and their family members in both male and female-led localities. However, female representatives have significantly less political authority than male representatives. We provide suggestive evidence that this authority gap derives from resource inequalities and patriarchal decision-making. We further show that women's political authority is associated with citizen political behavior. These findings have implications for our understanding of democratic accountability and representation.