Week 5

Participation, contestation, and inclusion are widely regarded as co-evolving pillars of democracy, yet institutional designs can generate trade-offs among them. Drawing on over 167,000 local-level elections held across two decades in the Indian state of West Bengal, this paper demonstrates inclusion—via quotas for women and marginalized groups—reduces voter participation and electoral competition. These effects are strongest with intersectional quotas. We trace this trade-off to the interaction of political-economy incentives and electoral design that encourages ruling parties to pursue hegemony rather than bare victory. Reserved wards become sites of political control because eligibility rules narrow the challenger pool, marginalized candidates are more vulnerable to coercion, and welfare delivery depends on alignment with ruling parties, fostering co-optation. By highlighting how inclusionary institutions can entrench partisan dominance, the study contributes to literature on the effects of quotas and elite capture, political control, and the institutional origins of sub-national authoritarianism in democracies.

Bjarnegård, E., & Zetterberg, P. (2022). How Autocrats Weaponize Women’s Rights. Journal of Democracy 33(2), 60-75. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jod.2022.0018.

Mai Hassan, Daniel Mattingly, Elizabeth R. Nugent. 2022. Political Control. Annual Review Political Science. 25:155-174. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-051120-013321