Do Gender Quotas Hurt Less Privileged Groups? Evidence from India

Abstract

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. Constituencies reserved for women are less likely than unreserved constituencies to elect members of groups where the status of women is low. In practice, this means they are less likely to elect members of several traditionally underprivileged groups (especially OBC castes) and more likely to elect candidates from the Hindu upper castes. The results highlight the difficulties of balancing descriptive representation on multiple, crosscutting dimensions, and the possible unintended consequences of the type of single‐dimension quotas currently proposed for inclusion in the Indian constitution.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 31 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.