Evaluating Political Selection under Institutional Constraint in India

• In Event: Elections, Representation, and Accountability in India

Abstract

To remedy historical inequalities in political representation, over 100 countries across the world have implemented electoral quotas for underrepresented groups. A substantial literature has demonstrated the positive impacts of these institutions on the representation of targeted minorities. While important, these studies mostly fail to grapple with the fact that people simultaneously hold multiple identities. The latter raises the possibility that quota-driven improvements in people’s representation on one dimension might come at the cost of representation on another dimension. How do quotas change the nature of political selection? Do political quotas worsen representation on some dimensions even as they improve representation on others? Under what conditions, and why or why not? We examine the effects of quotas on political selection in one state of India, where quotas are randomly assigned to villages and where we have unique, population-level, census data. Matching politician and population data, we examine (1) who runs for and wins local or village-level political office, (2) what are the effects of electoral quotas on political selection, and (3) how these patterns of political selection vary spatially.

Authors

• Soledad Artiz Prillaman, Stanford University

• Rikhil R Bhavnani, University of Wisconsin, Madison

• Alba Huidobro, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin