Do Quotas Promote Ethnic Solidarity ?

Previous research on ethnic politics suggests two contrasting effects of ethnic quotas: a " competition " effect—in which various groups whose members are all eligible for quotas compete for benefits—and a " solidarity " effect, in which hostility between various groups eligible for quotas diminishes, perhaps due to in-group dynamics familiar from social psychology. Yet, evaluating the effects of quotas is typically challenging, because electoral institutions are not typically assigned at random. Using an unusual combination of natural and field experiments in the Indian state of Karnataka, this paper investigates the causal impact of quotas for candidates from marginalized castes and tribes on voters' political attitudes and preferences. While there is some evidence for both competition and solidarity effects, the solidarity effect here appears to be stronger. 3 Scholars of ethnic politics suggest that electoral institutions, political leadership, and the sanctioning of particular ethnic categories by the state may all shape political attitudes and behaviors, as well as the salience of broad forms of ethnic identification An abundance of observational evidence seems to support this basic proposition. In the United States, the creation of a census category for Hispanics is seen to have created an important basis for political mobilization (Rodríguez 2000). The recent election of Bolivia's first indigenous president, Evo Morales, coincides with a large increase in the percentage of Bolivians who identify as indigenous in public opinion surveys (LAPOP 2008: xxx-xxiii; Madrid 2008: 485, 490). The election of black mayors in white-majority cities in the United States is viewed as reducing prejudice on the part of whites towards Yet, previous research on electoral institutions and ethnic politics leaves important substantive questions unaddressed, because it sometimes treats the ethnic groups it studies as undifferentiated categories. In fact, ethnic categories are often nested within a hierarchical categories such as Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe combine individual castes and tribes as constituent components. While electoral institutions may empower particular ethnic " groups " such as Hispanics or Scheduled Castes, how they affect political relationships among and between the subgroups that comprise those broader categories is not often addressed. For example, how do electoral quotas for politicians from a broad ethnic category shape the preferences of voters for candidates from their own subgroups , relative to candidates from a different subgroup but the same broad category? 4 The broader literature on ethnic politics provides two contrasting predictions here. On the one hand, …