Dunning and Nilekani Caste and Distribution
When Formal Institutions Are Not Enough: Caste, Party Politics, and Distribution in Indian Village Councils Thad Dunning∗ and Janhavi Nilekani+ Yale University This version: May 12, 2010 Acknowledgements: We thank M.R. Hegde and his staff at the Karnataka State Election Commission, U.A. Vasanth Rao of the Chief Decentralization Analysis Cell of the Gram Swaraj Project, and especially Padmavathi B.S. of the international Academy for Creative Teaching (iACT) and her researchers at Bangalore University for their help with this project. Kanchan Chandra, Don Green, Drew Linzer, Ken Scheve, Steven Wilkinson, and seminar participants at Yale, Princeton, and the annual meetings of the Society for Political Methodology have provided very helpful comments on the broader project of which this paper forms part. ∗ Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Yale University + Yale College, Class of 2010 Abstract: The reservation of the presidencies of Indian village councils for politicians from marginalized castes, through electoral quotas, may generate greater policy benefits for members of those castes, as several previous studies have emphasized. However, using a regression- discontinuity design that allows us to compare otherwise similar village councils, and drawing on our original surveys of citizens, bureaucrats, members and presidents of councils in the state of Karnataka, we find very weak policy and distributive effects of reservation. We explore several classes of mechanisms that might explain the invariance of distributive outcomes to the presence of electoral quotas, including the dominance of local bureaucrats, the electoral power of majority castes, and party competition at the village council level. While our evidence on the mechanisms is necessarily tentative, the role of political parties appears particularly important.
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