Research

Electoral quotas for marginalized groups are common, yet their effects on substantive representation are unclear. I show that minority representation improves welfare outcomes for minorities and also fosters inclusive gains in welfare. Advancing a theory of anchored embeddedness, I argue that these improvements are conditioned by inequality and shaped by the changes to political competition brought about by quotas. First, in contexts with high between-group inequality, coethnic networks that provide residence, informal credit, and daily social exchange are empowered to impose social sanctions on quota candidates (anchoring). Second, elections with quotas lower the costs of competition and encourage poorer aspirants to run for office, ultimately favoring those with grassroots leadership (embeddedness). Together, these forces uplift underprivileged minorities, move policy to closer toward the constituency median (more than open elections), and facilitate needs-based, cross-group redistribution. I test these claims in Uttar Pradesh, India, where village council presidencies are reserved for Scheduled Castes (SCs). Quota assignment is as-if-random at population-share thresholds, enabling a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. I link this design to administrative records from India’s rural unemployment benefits program, local organization membership records, and survey data. The paper offers causal evidence that temporary quotas for a small, disadvantaged group can deliver inclusive redistribution and advances our understanding of the conditions under which quotas will — and will not — work.

Mandated ethnic representation has a puzzling record: while quotas reliably boost descriptive representation, their substantive effects — especially at upper tiers of governance — are often negligible. I show that the same quotas that appear weak at upper levels produce strikingly different outcomes locally, and when layered across tiers, substantially improve the upward translation of public goods demands. I link 16,000 legislator-funded projects in India’s largest state with village council presidencies, leveraging a regression discontinuity design across tiers. Scheduled Caste (SC) quotas at the local level significantly increase localized projects — those requiring detailed, village-specific knowledge. These gains multiply when quotas exist simultaneously at both tiers, even though legislator quotas alone produce no marginal improvements. Theorizing that these differences accrue from inequality, enhanced political competition, and leader's embeddedness, I compare candidate affidavits, party membership records, and local organization registers. Lacking fiscal and political capital, quota candidates compete through grassroots ties, door-to-door ‘problem solving’ appeals, and acquire granular knowledge of local needs. While open elections select wealthy politically entrenched elites, quotas recruit embedded minority newcomers. For these newcomers, advocating upwards demonstrates competence and builds political networks. By transforming who enters politics, how they compete, and winner's incentives for upwards advocacy, local quotas improve the upward translation of public goods demands.

The persistence of political dynasties is a global concern in democracies, most acutely manifesting in accounts of husbands fielding wives to bypass institutional constraints. We show that this phenomenon is less pervasive in India than commonly portrayed. We develop a novel measure of familial succession by matching spouses' and candidates' names across elections. We find that in both, newly and previously reserved seats, spouses are more likely to run and win. Strikingly, even in always unreserved seats held by female incumbents, spouses are more likely to win the next election, indicating that spousal succession is not driven by bench warming alone. We theorize a new explanation for dynastic politics: the gendered costs of incumbency and political competition. Women face a steeper incumbency disadvantage when running against male challengers. Voters do not punish incumbents for fielding spouses, who perform comparably in policy implementation to other incumbents. Fielding husbands reduces the gendered costs of competing against male challengers. Dynastic politics persists not only to transmit inherited advantages, but also to offset the gendered costs of incumbency, and is sustained by voter indifference.

How does identity messaging by political parties affect their priorities over welfare provision? I argue that top-down elite messaging creates a substitution effect by altering relative issue salience among ingroup voters, enabling parties to maintain winning coalitions while reducing material expenditures benefiting their identity group. This framework explains how ethno-nationalist parties simultaneously engage in populist rhetoric, yet pursue economically conservative policies that diminish group-specific benefits. Examining the effect of messaging by India's largest national parties, I measure historic elite polarization through manifesto analysis and correlation with citizens’ issue salience using longitudinal election survey data. Identity polarization by ethno-nationalist parties like the BJP increases identity salience among ingroups, with effects amplified through direct party worker contact. Next, a difference-in-differences design exploits the 2019 Pulwama attack to establish a causal effect on public goods expenditures. Following the attack and subsequent ethno-nationalist campaign messaging, identity salience increased among ingroups in constituencies with military connections; legislator spending data shows decreased project funding in these constituencies, demonstrating the substitution effect in practice.

Do citizens use local elections to enhance political selection and accountability? We introduce a novel Indian Local Elections dataset that tracks over three million candidates across two electoral cycles in India’s largest states. Local politics involves highly competitive contests with remarkable participation rates: nearly one percent of adults run for office and turnout exceeds seventy percent. We document that electoral quotas ensure representative politicians across caste and gender dimensions, while generating substantial political turnover. Most politicians are newcomers due to quota-induced disruption and persistent incumbency disadvantage affecting both reserved and unreserved seats. Despite high political turnover and quota-induced disruption, we find that local elections serve as effective mechanisms for improving political selection and ensuring accountability through performance-based re-election. The political class becomes more educated over time, despite upper-caste men becoming ineligible and exiting due to quota disruption. For accountability, we examine welfare policy outcomes and find that re-elected incumbents delivered substantially higher performance in the previous term, suggesting voters effectively use elections for retrospective accountability.

Classical models of redistribution link preferences to current income. A complementary perspective emphasizes redistribution’s insurance function, highlighting how citizens use policy to smooth consumption and guard against economic shocks. Expectations about future income shape preferences alongside present resources. In this paper, I explore a case where these intuitions diverge: beneficiaries of asset-based reforms, such as land redistribution. While such recipients gain productive, collateralizable assets that raise expected income, they also face novel risks which induce volatility in these expectations. I develop a minimal land economy model with elite landowners and farmers, a progressive tax and transfer system, and alternative smoothing (e.g., informal credit or private insurance). By varying output risk-sharing and insurance capacity, the framework isolates when beneficiaries of reform demand social insurance. Asset transfers do not have uniform effects: support for redistribution hinges on beneficiaries’ ability to withstand early risks before realizing income gains. Beneficiaries initially demand additional social insurance because their ability to borrow privately or informally remains especially constrained in early periods, when volatility in income expectations is particularly costly and unpredictable. This trend reverses when networks deepen and new asset owners improve their information contexts -- as increased income expectations stabilize and alternative smoothing mechanisms become available, demand for redistribution reduces. An interactive game experiment tests these predictions.