Competing Inequalities? Gender Quotas and Caste in India Alexander Lee* Varun Karekurve-Ramachandra† March 27, 2019 Short Title: Competing Inequalities Key Words: Gender Quotas, India, Women in Politics, Caste, Intersectionality *Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Rochester. 333 Harkness Hall Rochester NY 14627. Email:
[email protected] †PhD Student, Department of Political Science, University of Rochester. 333 Harkness Hall Rochester NY 14627. Email:
[email protected]. The authors gratefully acknowledge Charles E Lanni fellowship that funded a part of this research. The authors also thank Prof. Rajeev Gowda, Ramprasad Alva and Avinash Gowda for help and encouragement during fieldwork in Delhi, the Takshashila Insti- tution and PRS Legislative Research for providing working space and amazing hospitality in Bengaluru and New Delhi respectively, and Harnidh Kaur for research assistance. Alessio Albarello, Sergio Ascensio, Emiel Awad, Tiffany Barnes, Salil Bijur, Saurabh Chandra, Praveen Chandrashekaran, Zuheir Desai, Ramanjit Duggal, Olga Gasparyan, Gretchen Helmke, Aravind Gayam, Aparna Goel, Nidhi Gupta, Gleason Judd, Adam Kaplan, Pranay Kotasthane, Sanjay Kumar, M.R.Madhavan, Prachee Mishra, Meenakshi Narayanan, Sundeep Narwani, Jack Paine, Aman Panwar, Akhila Prakash, Vibhor Relhan, Maria Silfa, Pavan Srinath, Ramachan- dra Shingare, Aruna Urs and Yannis Vassiliadis provided constructive suggestions, help, and comments. Responsibility for any errors remains our own. 1 Competing Inequalities? Gender Quotas and Caste in India Abstract How do political gender quotas affect representation? We suggest that when gender attitudes are correlated with ethnicity, promoting female politicians may reduce the descriptive representation of traditionally disadvantaged ethnic groups. To assess this idea, we examine the consequences of the implementation of random electoral quotas for women on the representation of caste groups in Delhi.