Reservations and the politics of fear

Siwan Anderson and Patrick Francois

Journal of Public Economics, 2023, vol. 225, issue C

Abstract: Reserving political office for members of a specific, usually disadvantaged, group is a common form of political quota in many parts of the world. This has been shown to improve distributional access in favor of reserved groups, but often conjectured (and shown in some cases) to come at the cost of governance quality. We develop a theoretical model to demonstrate that a political quota can, in contrast, improve governance if it weakens a village leader’s hold on power, making them more accountable to their supporters. The model establishes a tight set of predictions regarding when improvements should be expected to occur, and when not. We show, in a Maharashtrian (India) sample of rural villages, that governance outcomes dramatically improve under reservations for some, but not all, villages, and demonstrate a pattern of improvement that lines up with the predictions of the theory.

Keywords: Politics of fear; Political quotas; Indian Panchayats (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272723001457
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:pubeco:v:225:y:2023:i:c:s0047272723001457

DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2023.104963

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Public Economics is currently edited by R. Boadway and J. Poterba

More articles in Journal of Public Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().