Electoral quotas and developmental outcomes: Evidence from India

Electoral quotas for disadvantaged groups aim to promote social justice by ensuring that all groups, including those who are otherwise excluded, participate in the government’s policy-making process. In India, electoral quotas have been in existence since the first election in 1951. An important research question is to evaluate the effect of electoral quotas for disadvantaged groups on the developmental outcomes of these groups. In this paper, we study whether electoral quotas for erstwhile untouchable castes i.e. Scheduled Castes (SCs) in India, lead to better developmental outcomes for Scheduled Castes. We consider four important indicators of welfare: primary schooling, infant mortality, access to subsidized food grain and employment under a government workfare scheme. We find that SCs in districts with a higher proportion of SC-reserved seats fare worse in terms of education, child health, and access to subsidized food grains. However, the probability of getting employed in a large government workfare scheme is higher for SCs from districts with a higher proportion of SC-reserved seats. Our results suggest that politicians prioritize providing targetable goods such as workfare while under-providing broad-based public goods such as education and healthcare or public goods like subsidized food grains, which offer higher opportunities for rent extraction.