Reservations impact study Social justice through inclusion: the consequences of electoral quotas in India, Francesca R. Jensenius, Oxford University Press; Rs.408 Pages 228 Caste-based quotas, whether in education, jobs, or electoral positions, are routinely vilified for lowering the quality of the space they are applied to, because of the belief that those chosen through quotas are inherently inferior to those selected on open, or non-quota considerations. This widespread belief transcends the boundaries of academic arguments and popular perception. The only way to assess the validity of the ‘lower-merit’ argument is to analyse it empirically, in a rigorous manner. Collect data on the outcomes of interest (e.g, productivity of enterprises in which part of the workforce is selected through quotas, or various educational indicators for colleges etc), and assess if quotas have resulted in lowering the average (or shifted the distribution) for the particular outcome being assessed. This is easier said than done, even when there is inclination on the part of researchers. Most researchers (what to speak of journalists or lay persons) take the ‘lower-merit’ argument at its face value, and not worth researching. If something is as obvious as daylight, why spend time and effort investigating it? Thus, for instance, the spate of essays and commentaries produced by well-known academics in the aftermath of the MandaI Commission announcement in 1991 took this for granted, and deplored the quota mentality, viewing it through the prism of vote-bank politics, i.e, politics of appeasement, where quotas was one more instrumentality to secure more votes. Fortunately, that tide has started to turn during the past decade, certainly among academics. There is now a fair amount of empirically grounded, quantitative and methodologically rigorous research, a great deal of this from economists, but also from quantitatively-inclined political scientists and sociologists, which evaluates whether reservations, or affirmative action has made a measurable impact in India. The challenges in this field of research are testing. For one, because of the pre-independence history of quotas, there is no clear-cut and unambiguous ‘before-and-after’ data, which would allow neat identification of the incremental effect of quotas, after accounting for other changes that would have occurred in the interim. The volume under review, based on the author’s Ph D dissertation, is a very welcome and important addition to this branch of enquiry. She uses publicly available data (combining detailed data from the 1971-2001 censuses of India, with reservation status), and a clever empirical strategy to produce a nuanced, in-depth and solid treatise on the effect of electoral quotas at the constituency level over three decades. What adds value to her work is the fact that she supplements her study with more than 100 in-depth interviews with Indian politicians, civil servants, activists and voters from four states (Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka) as part of her qualitative fieldwork to understand the mechanisms that produce the results that her data reveal. As Francesca Jensenius shows, politicians in India spend most of their time in their constituencies, with a very small amount of their…
