• Politics

Politics & corruption

This paper examines how increased voter ethnicisation, defined as a greater preference for the party representing one's ethnic group, affects politician quality. The paper argues that if politics is characterised by incomplete policy commitment, then ethnicisation, not suprisingly, reduces average winner quality for the pro-majority party with the opposite true for the minority party. The effect increases with greater numerical dominance of the majority (and so social homogeneity). The paper draws on empirical evidence from a survey on political corruption in Uttar Pradesh, India.

The paper provides the following:

• a review of existing literature on the relationships between ethnicity-based politics
• a summary of the historical background and social context of this study in Uttar Pradesh
• a discussion of a simple model of political competition which identifies how increased ethnicization of the voter population reduces politician quality
• a description of the data set hilighting measurement and estimation issues
• a discussion of the main results from the study about the differential trends in political corruption for dominant party winners vis a vis other winners
• a discussion of how, over time, changes in the quality of the average winner in a jurisdiction, relative to the quality of the runner-up, are consistent with the given model

Key findings from the paper include:

• significant evidence that voter ethnicization increases the likelihood that the politician had a criminal record in jurisdictions where the party's ethnic identity reflects that of a larger fraction of the population and less so in other jurisdictions
• relative to the runner-up in the jurisdiction, the winner's propensity to benefit economically increases if there is greater voter ethnicization
  

• Full text of document
• Publisher details
• Send to a friend