How Representation Reduces Minority Criminal Victimization: Evidence from Scheduled Castes in India

Abstract

In this paper, we consider whether the representation of historically disenfranchised minorities in government can reduce violence suffered by these groups. To answer this question, we examine the impact of political parties that represent India’s marginalized Scheduled Castes (SCs). We address the endogenous selection of minority-favoring parties using state-level variation in aggregations of close election outcomes. We find that a 10 percentage-point increase in representation reduces the minority murder rate by 3 percentage points. An analysis of channels suggests that politicians respond to minority constituents by increasing police effort in responding to the victimization of SCs, which may have the effect of deterring future offenders. Moreover, improvements in self-reported attitudes toward government institutions suggest that our results are not the product of negative reporting bias in government crime statistics (JEL: J15, D72, K14).