Ethnic Quotas and Political Mobilization: Caste, Parties, and Distribution in Indian Village Councils

Abstract

E thnic quotas are often expected to induce distribution of material benefits to members of disadvantaged groups. Yet, the presence of an ethnic quota does not imply that political mobilization takes place along ethnic lines: Cross-cutting affiliations within multi-ethnic party organizations may lessen the tendency of politicians to target benefits to particular ethnic groups. In this article, we evaluate the impact of quotas for the presidencies of village councils in India, a subject of considerable recent research. Drawing on fine-grained information from surveys of voters, council members, presidents, and bureaucrats and using a natural experiment to isolate the effects of quotas in the states of Karnataka, Rajasthan, and Bihar, we find weak distributive effects of quotas for marginalized castes and tribes, but suggestive evidence of the importance of partisanship. We then use survey experiments to compare the influence of party and caste on voting preferences and expectations of benefit receipt. Our results suggest that especially when politicians have dynamic political incentives to allocate benefits along party lines, cross-cutting partisan ties can blunt the distributive impact of ethnic quotas.

Race, Resources, and Representation: Evidence from Brazilian Politicians

“…For dichotomous measures, the inter-coder agreement is higher: for the binary white/black classification, all coders agreed on 63.54% of photographs. 22 Moreover, for the 1,154 politicians in our sample who re-ran for office in 2014 and are thus also included in the official TSE data, the data suggest much agreement between our coders' classifications and the self-identification of politicians-especially for candidates classified as white by our survey participants, about 84% of whom also self-identify as white (Appendix Tables B.10-B.15). However, 60% of candidates who were classified as non-white by our coders perceived themselves as non-whites (Appendix Tables B.10-B.13).…”

“…Together, our data provide the most systematic and comprehensive measurement of race of politicians in Brazil, and they suggest some striking racial discrepancies between politicians and citizens-generating the puzzle we explore in the third and fourth sections of this article. 22 Appendix Table B.9 depicts the percentage of non-unique modes for each of our measures. 23 In particular, as Appendix Tables B.14 and B.15 show, many of those classified as brown (pardo) by our survey participants classify themselves as white.…”

Caste, corruption and political competition in India

“…This strategic behavior was widely noted in the popular press because it was these General castes towards which the BSP had historically been openly antagonistic. 7 Caste issues have thus become more salient in Indian state politics, and our paper adds to the emerging literature that places these issues front and center in understanding patterns of political opinion and voting in India (Bhavnani 2013;Chandra 2004;Dunning and Nilekani 2013;and Lee 2013). We are also motivated by the theoretical perspective that we develop in the next section that ethnic biases can have substantial effects on policy outcomes, in particular the corruption of political parties.…”

Development from Representation? A Study of Quotas for the Scheduled Castes in India

“…While several studies have probed for socio-economic effects of quotas for SCs at the village level in India (Besley et al, 2004;Besley, Pande and Rao, 2005;Chattopadhyay and Duflo, 2004a;Bardhan, Mookherjee and Torrado, 2010;Dunning and Nilekani, 2013), the reserved seats in Parliament and the state assemblies have received less scholarly attention.…”