Reservation in India's Politics: Development Impacts for All? Not Worse Overall.

Scheduled AreasReservation SystemPolitical RepresentationEconomic RedistributionAsian Politics APSR 2 Stata files Dataverse

India's Scheduled Areas, home to 100 million citizens and featuring reserved political offices for historically disadvantaged Scheduled Tribes, are examined systematically through a new village dataset. This study evaluates the effects on key pro-poor programs like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme.

Findings:

Overall Development Impact: Reservation policies do not worsen outcomes overall.
Targeted Minority Benefits: Significant gains for Scheduled Tribes in program access and political representation.
Redistribution Effects: These improvements redistribute benefits, sometimes affecting relatively privileged groups more than others.

Broader Implications:

The findings suggest that reservation mechanisms better align economic benefits with population distribution across all targeted groups. This challenges the skeptical view that such affirmative action inherently harms development.

Does Political Affirmative Action Work, and for Whom? Theory and Evidence on India's Scheduled Areas was authored by Nicholas Haas, Saad Gulzar and Benjamin Pasquale. It was published by Cambridge in APSR in 2020.