Ethnic Quotas and Political Mobilization: Caste, Parties, and Distribution in Indian Village Councils Thad Dunning Janhavi Nilekani Associate Professor Ph.D. Student in Public Policy Department of Political Science JFK School of Government Yale University Harvard University
[email protected] This version: March 7, 2011 Acknowledgements: We thank M.R. Hegde and his staff at the Karnataka State Election Commission, U.A. Vasanth Rao of the World Bank’s Gram Swaraj Project, and especially Padmavathi B.S. and her researchers from Bangalore University for their help. We are also grateful to Abhijit Banerjee, David Blakelee, Kanchan Chandra, Miriam Golden, Don Green, Rajeev Gowda, Macartan Humphreys, Lakshmi Iyer, Trevor Johnston, Drew Linzer, Jim Manor, SS Meenakshisundaram, Adam Meirowitz, Brian Min, Vipin Narang, Vijayendra Rao, Ken Scheve, Prerna Singh, Sandeep Shastri, Pavithra Suryanarayan, Ashutosh Varshney, Steven Wilkinson, Adam Ziegfield, and seminar participants at IIM-Bangalore, Dartmouth, Essex, the LSE, Michigan, Oxford, Princeton, Yale, UCLA, and the Harvard-MIT-Brown Seminar on South Asian Politics for their suggestions. Abstract: Electoral quotas for marginalized castes and tribes in India, like ethnic quotas more generally, are often expected to boost the distribution of material benefits to disadvantaged groups. Yet, the presence of an ethnic quota does not imply that political mobilization takes place along ethnic lines: quotas may even create incentives for the formation of more inclusive multi- ethnic parties, since all parties must run candidates from particular ethnic categories to contest ethnically-reserved seats. This may lessen the tendency of parties to target benefits selectively to particular castes, plausibly mitigating the distributive effects of quotas.