The Effects of Ethnic Quotas on Grassroots Participation in Local Democracy

• In Event: Poster Session: Comparative Politics II & State Politics and Policy
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Comparative Politics II

Abstract

Participatory decentralization reforms have swept the developing world in recent decades, due in part to the hope that service delivery will be more efficient and responsive if local populations are empowered to more effectively demand public goods and services. However, one of the most common findings gleaned from 20th-century experiments in participatory decentralized governance is that local politics are often dominated by members of the privileged elite ethnic (Mansuri and Rao 2012). One policy prescription to promote the local political inclusion of disadvantaged ethnic minority groups that has gained relevance in recent decades is the use of reserved seats—quota systems that mandate descriptive representation of minority groups in local governance institutions. India has undertaken such a reform, mandating increased representation of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes (state-recognized disadvantaged minority groups) on the councils of gram panchayats—local village councils responsible for the administration of key public goods (Dunning and Nilekani 2013). However, while the goal of the reservation system is to improve the representation of ethnic minorities, its effects on the mass political participation of members of these groups are not well-understood. This theoretical gap is policy-relevant in the rural Indian context, where active participation in gram panchayat meetings appears to be an important mechanism through which ethnic minority households claim access to public goods and services (Kruks-Wisner 2018; Parthasarathy, Rao, and Palaniswamy forthcoming).
I use data from a large-scale representative survey in India, focusing on two states in which reserved seats were assigned to villages quasi-randomly in order to estimate the effects of the reservation on the grassroots political participation of scheduled caste and scheduled tribe citizens. Results suggest that members of scheduled caste and scheduled tribe groups are 11% less likely to attend gram panchayat meetings when the executive seat of their village council is occupied by an ethnic minority candidate elected under a reservation, whereas the reservation has no measurable impacts on the meeting attendance decisions of non-minority villagers. The theoretical explanation for this finding is that gram panchayat meeting attendance is a particularly costly form of participation for scheduled caste and scheduled tribe villagers seeking access to public goods and welfare benefits (Kruks-Wisner 2018), and that scheduled caste and scheduled tribe villagers operating under bounded rationality may choose to forego these costs if they anticipate improvements in public goods provision and welfare benefit-targeting due to a change in representation—even if these improvements never materialize. Additional analyses suggest that scheduled caste and tribe households see negligible public good benefits from living in a village where the position of the gram panchayat executive is reserved for scheduled castes or tribes. Taken together, these findings suggest that ethnic quotas may sometimes undermine the political inclusion of disadvantaged ethnic groups without delivering tangible benefits to those groups. Furthermore, the findings suggest that theories of minority ‘empowerment’, which argue that descriptive representation boosts the political participation of minority groups, may not be a good fit for contexts where participation is particularly costly, and where minorities expect tangible benefits to follow from descriptive representation. More generally, the analysis suggests that the design of more equitable local institutions requires a deeper understanding of the complex relationships between the behavior of disadvantaged minorities and the local governance contexts in which they operate.

References

Dunning, Thad, and Janhavi Nilekani. 2013. “Ethnic Quotas and Political Mobilization: Caste, Parties, and Distribution in Indian Village Councils.” American Political Science Review 107(1): 35–56.

Kruks-Wisner, Gabrielle. 2018. Claiming the State: Active Citizenship and Social Welfare in Rural India. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Mansuri, Ghazala, and Vijayendra Rao. 2012. Localizing Development: Does Participation Work? Washington, D.C.: World Bank Publications.

Parthasarathy, Ramya, Vijayendra Rao, and Nethra Palaniswamy. “Deliberative Inequality: A Text-as-Data Study of Tamil Nadu’s Village Assemblies.” American Political Science Review. Forthcoming.

Author

• Nathan Cook, University of Colorado at Boulder