Proxy Politics: Representation and Political Inequality in Rural India

• In Event: Advances in the Study of Gender Inequality in Politics

Abstract

Over the past two decades, political scientists have provided much evidence suggesting that political inequality is a challenge in all representative democracies. Citizens rarely have equal influence over the public policy process (Gilens 2012); besides, members of disadvantaged groups are much less likely to participate (Verba et al 1995), be able to access their representatives (Butler and Broockman 2011, Kalla and Broockman 2016, McClendon 2016), contribute to their campaigns (Winters 2011) or run for office themselves (Carnes 2018, Bernhard, Shames, and Teele 2020).

Here, we focus on a different, thus far under-documented type of political inequality amongst elected elites: substantive inequality after they are elected, in the degree to which they actually perform the role they have been elected to perform. Proxy politics – the focus of this study – is a common form of representative politics in which an elected official lacks the will or the ability to perform her duties - as they are defined by law, leading another individual to perform them in her place. Proxy politics may derive from violent forms of political exclusion imposed by others, particularly those with entitlements to power under the status quo (Htun 2016; Brulé 2020). It may alternatively be due to political inexperience, a dearth of information about newly elected officials precise roles and how to enact them, or even personal disinclination (John 2007). In order to empirically evaluate the degree of proxiness of elected officials from various groups, we deploy the concept of institutional centrality rather than a number of possible alternatives such as power, influence, or agency. We think of centrality as the degree of centrality of a given official in the decision-making processes, delineated by a given set of institutional rules. We in turn define centrality in this context on a continuum, as the degree to which an individual appears to be the most decisive actor within a collective and deliberative institution, defined by a set of rules.

In this paper, we investigate the correlates and the causes of variation in institutional centrality. We utilize a large-scale field experiment to identify whether changes in formal rules of discussion in an institution can affect the centrality of elected officials. We argue that minor changes in formal discussion rules may alter engagement of elected leaders in decision making processes. We also hypothesize that changes in formal discussion rules affect the responsiveness of peers to the substantive input of elected leaders, both in public (based on the outcomes and process of decision-making) and in private (by moving the private preferences of other institutional actors).

Authors

• Rachel E. Brule, Boston University

• Simon Chauchard, Leiden University

• Alyssa Heinze, University of California, Berkeley