Efficiency Consequences of Affirmative Action in Politics: Evidence from India

Does Political Affirmative Action Work, and for Whom? Theory and Evidence on India’s Scheduled Areas

“…Evidence also suggests that women exert more effort and outperform men when positions of political influence are available to them (Beaman et al, 2010). Das, Mukhopadhyay and Saroy (2017) argue that in the presence of asymmetric group sizes, affirmative action can improve the efficiency of outcomes. Finally, government performance could remain unchanged if quota politicians perform no better or worse than non-quota politicians, as Bhavnani and Lee (2019) find for Indian bureaucrats.…”

“…Prior work suggests that quota effects are largest where the targeted minority group constitutes a large share of the population (Chin and Prakash, 2011;Jensenius, 2015;Pande, 2003;Das, Mukhopadhyay and Saroy, 2017). For instance, Jensenius (2015) reports that some SC politicians want to divert funds to SC constituents but do not do so "because they are scared of being branded as 'too SC"' (p.203) by the majority of voters who are non-SC and on whose votes they depend.…”

Essays on state capacity, governance and public good

“…Though institutional bias may be open to misuse or manipulation by political agents(Daxecker 2020, 163), but this institutional design works in a constructive manner. In a way, affirmative action improves provision of public goods as it eliminates the problem of moral hazard(Das et al 2017) by bringing the disadvantaged group into formal positions of the state.…”