Research Project
Politics and Development in India: A micro-level study of who gets what, when, and how
Despite a dramatic growth in development in India at the aggregate level, there is great variation in development outcomes at the local level. The delivery of public goods are hampered by corruption and inefficiency, and in some villages nothing is done, while in others development projects are implemented as planned. This variation in implementation, we argue, can be attributed to politicians and bureaucrats prioritizing some areas over others. It is often assumed that politicians in India work more for co-ethnics.
We argue that the uneven public goods delivery is driven by political incentives, and that politicians are probably working harder for villages that voted for them, that have a high turnout, or are competitive. By combining the data efforts of the three collaborating partners from the USA, India and Norway, we intend to test these claims on unique village-level data from across India. The findings will contribute to discussions about the variation in development across India and about what motivates political actors.
Watch the book launch seminar for Francesca Jensenius' 2017 publication Social Justice through Inclusion - The Consequences of Electoral Quotas in India:
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Participants
Articles
Nils Klim Prize awarded to NUPI researcher
"An outstanding political scientist and ideally suited as a role model for younger researchers." This is how the jury characterizes this year’s Nils Klim Prize laureate, Francesca R. Jensenius.
Quotas – what to expect?
At one level, the effects of quotas may prove to be less impressive than many have hoped – or even feared. But at another, the consequences may be greater than we have been realized.
New publications
Kinship in Indian Politics: Dynasties, nepotism and imagined families
While kinship is among the basic organizing principles of all human life, its role in and implications for international politics and relations have been subject to surprisingly little exploration in International Relations (IR) scholarship. This volume is the first volume aimed at thinking systematically about kinship in IR – as an organizing principle, as a source of political and social processes and outcomes, and as a practical and analytical category that not only reflects but also shapes politics and interaction on the international political arena. Contributors trace everyday uses of kinship terminology to explore the relevance of kinship in different political and cultural contexts and to look at interactions taking place above, at and within the state level. The book suggests that kinship can expand or limit actors’ political room for maneuvereon the international political arena, making some actions and practices appear possible and likely, and others less so. As an analytical category, kinship can help us categorize and understand relations between actors in the international arena. It presents itself as a ready-made classificatory system for understanding how entities within a hierarchy are organized in relation to one another, and how this logic is all at once natural and social.
Social Justice through Inclusion: The Consequences of Electoral Quotas in India
Across the world, governments design and implement policies with the explicit goal of promoting social justice. But can such institutions change entrenched social norms? And what effects should we expect from differently designed policies? Francesca R. Jensenius' Social Justice through Inclusion is an empirically rich study of one of the most extensive electoral quota systems in the world: the reserved seats for the Scheduled Castes (SCs, the former "untouchables") in India's legislative assemblies. Combining evidence from quantitative datasets from the period 1969-2012, archival work, and in-depth interviews with politicians, civil servants, and voters across India, the book explores the long-term effects of electoral quotas for the political elite and the general population. It shows that the quota system has played an important role in reducing caste-based discrimination, particularly at the elite level. Interestingly, this is not because the system has led to more group representation - SC politicians working specifically for SC interests - but because it has made possible the creation and empowerment of a new SC elite who have gradually become integrated into mainstream politics. This is a study of India, but the findings and discussions have broader implications. Policies such as quotas are usually supported with arguments about various assumed positive long-term consequences. The nuanced discussions in this book shed light on how electoral quotas for SCs have shaped the incentives for politicians, parties, and voters, and indicate the trade-offs inherent in how such policies of group inclusion are designed.
Competing inequalities? On the intersection of gender and ethnicity in candidate nominations in Indian elections
Quotas for women and ethnic minorities are implemented to increase diversity in political institutions, but, as they usually target only one group at a time, they may end up increasing the inclusion of one under-represented group at the cost of another. Recent work has emphasized the institutional underpinnings of the variation in such outcomes. In this article I show how the intersectional effects of quotas may also vary within the same institutional context, as changes in the pressure to include excluded groups interact with the informal opportunity structures within political parties. Looking at the nomination of female candidates across India over time, I show that, as the efforts to include more women in politics intensified, much of the increase in female candidates occurred in constituencies reserved for ethnic minorities. This pattern may in part be the result of parties resisting changes to existing power hierarchies by nominating women at the cost of the least powerful male politicians, but can also be seen as evidence that minority quotas have created a political space that is more accessible to women.
Development from representation? A study of quotas for the scheduled castes in India
This paper estimates the constituency-level development effects of quotas for the Scheduled Castes (SCs) in India, using a unique dataset of development indicators for more than 3,100 state assembly constituencies in 15 Indian states in 1971 and 2001. Matching constituencies on pretreatment variables from 1971, I find that 30 years of quotas had no detectable constituency-level effect on overall development or redistribution to SCs. Interviews with politicians and civil servants in 2010 and 2011 suggest that these findings can be explained by the power of political parties and the electoral incentives created by the quota system.
Fragmentation and decline in India's state assemblies: A review, 1967-2007
Tracing activity in 15 Indian state assemblies from 1967 to 2007, we find that overall legislative activity declined but there was also considerable variation across states. States with large electoral constituencies and politically fragmented assemblies showed the worst performance, which suggests a link between political fragmentation and institutional performance.
Fieldwork in Political Science: Encountering Challenges and Crafting Solutions
Mired in Reservations: The Path-Dependent History of Electoral Quotas in India