Parochial Politics: Ethnic Preferences and Politician Corruption

Rohini Pande

No 147, CID Working Papers from Center for International Development at Harvard University

Abstract: This paper examines how increased voter ethnicization, defined as a greater preference for the party representing one's ethnic group, affects politician quality. If politics is characterized by incomplete policy commitment, then ethnicization reduces average winner quality for the pro-majority party with the opposite true for the minority party. The effect increases with greater numerical dominance of the majority (and so social homogeneity). Empirical evidence from a survey on politician corruption that we conducted in North India is remarkably consistent with our theoretical predictions.

Keywords: Ethnic Voting; Corruption; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O12 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-07
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (65)

Downloads: (external link)
https://research.hks.harvard.edu/publications/getFile.aspx?Id=397 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Parochial Politics: Ethnic Preferences and Politician Corruption (2007)
Working Paper: Parochial Politics: Ethnic Preferences and Politician Corruption (2007)
Working Paper: Parochial Politics: Ethnic Preferences and Politician Corruption (2007)
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:cid:wpfacu:147

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CID Working Papers from Center for International Development at Harvard University 79 John F. Kennedy Street. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chuck McKenney ().