Power, Performance and Bias: Evaluating the Electoral Quotas for Scheduled Castes in India

Many countries make special institutional arrangements to guarantee the political representation of minorities. This is usually justified as a way of reducing ethnic tensions and improving the quality of democratic representation. In addition, it is often assumed that minority representatives will act in the interest of their group. India has had reserved seats for the Scheduled Castes (SCs, the former `untouchables') in their state assemblies since independence. Reserved constituencies are single member districts where only SCs can run for election, while the whole population votes for them irrespective of their caste group. In this dissertation I explore the effects of these quotas between 1974 and 2007. I am able to control for the selection bias inherent in quotas being non-randomly assigned in the 1970s by matching more than 3,000 constituencies on pre-treatment variables from 1971. Using unique new data at the constituency-level for 15 Indian states, I show that the quotas have been effective at guaranteeing the political presence of SCs and integrating them into main-stream politics. Contrary to the bias often reported against SC politicians, they are not much different from other politicians: they represent similar parties, have similar rerunning patterns, and hold many cabinet positions. In fact, rather than being spokespersons of the SC community, SC politicians seem to be agents of their parties rather than agents of their group. The presence of SC politicians seems to have had positive effects on caste bias in society at large, though, with voters in reserved areas reporting less caste discrimination than voters in non-reserved areas. Considering how strong the social boundary of untouchability used to be in Indian society, this can be seen as a huge achievement in itself. But the integration of SC politicians, and the fact that they are answerable to mostly non-SC voters, also means that their presence has not done much to improve the substantive representation of SC interests. This can therefore serve as a reminder that there are clear trade-offs in institutional design and that an electoral system might work well to reduce social bias and prevent conflict without improving the substantive representation of minority groups

India: Politics and Development in India: A Micro-Level Study of Who Gets What, When, and How, 2018

This project has studied the relationship between politics and development in India. Academic development models often focus on how the different political elections affects the overall development trend in areas, but there is also a great variation in development trends within areas that officially have the same policy. The lack of data has made it difficult to study this variation empirically. As a part of this project we have gathered and analyzed election data tied to development indicators in order to understand the relationship between politics and development in India. For more information see: http://www.francesca.no/data-

Age of Marriage and Women's Political Engagement: Evidence from India

Although decades have passed since most women in the democratic world gained the right to vote and run for election, a large gender gap in political participation persists, particularly in developing countries. This short paper considers an important—and previously overlooked—factor limiting the political engagement of many women in the developing world: marriage age. Drawing on nationally representative data from India and instrumenting marriage age with menarche age, we find delaying marriage has substantial positive effects on women’s everyday political participation. A standard deviation increase in marriage age makes a woman 25 percent more likely to attend local council meetings, and 8 percent more likely to discuss politics with her husband. Exploring mechanisms, we show that education and time—rather than employment, mobility, and household decision-making power—appear to be the main channels. These findings underscore the critical role of early marriage in impeding women’s participation in the political sphere

Rethinking the Study of Electoral Politics in the Developing World: Reflections on the Indian Case

In the study of electoral politics and political behavior in the developing world, India is often considered to be an exemplar of the centrality of contingency in distributive politics, the role of ethnicity in shaping political behavior, and the organizational weakness of political parties. Whereas these axioms have some empirical basis, the massive changes in political practices, the vast variation in political patterns, and the burgeoning literature on subnational dynamics in India mean that such generalizations are not tenable. In this article, we consider research on India that compels us to rethink the contention that India neatly fits the prevailing wisdom in the comparative politics literature. Our objective is to elucidate how the many nuanced insights about Indian politics can improve our understanding of electoral behavior both across and within other countries, allowing us to question core assumptions in theories of comparative politics