Does Affirmative Action Work? Evaluating India’s Quota System

• DOI: 10.1177/0010414021989755
• Published date: 01 August 2021
• Date: 01 August 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414021989755

Comparative Political Studies

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DOI: 10.1177/0010414021989755

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Article

Does Affirmative Action

Work? Evaluating India’s

Quota System

Alexander Lee1

Abstract

This paper examines two common critiques of ethnic quota policies in

government hiring and education: that they do not benefit the target

group, and that any benefits are unevenly distributed within the target

group. It focuses on the effects of educational and hiring quotas for Other

Backward Class (OBC) castes in India, using difference-in-difference and

triple di fference designs that take advantage of the gradual introduction of

these quotas. The results provide little support for these critiques: affirmative

action is associated with small increases in educational attainment and

government employment among eligible age cohorts, though the increases

in government employment may be a result of other social and political

trends. These benefits extend even to poorer OBCs (though not the very

poorest), and increase the chances of social contact between uneducated

OBCs and government officials.

Keywords

affirmative action, caste, ethnic quotas, other backward classes, race, ethnicity

and politics

Introduction

Many countries have severe economic inequalities between ethnic groups,

often the result of deep-seated social discrimination or legacies of previous

1University of Rochester, NY, USA

Corresponding Author:

Alexander Lee, Department of Political Science, University of Rochester, 327 Harkness Hall,

Rochester, NY 14607, USA.

Email: alexander.mark.lee@rochester.edu

989755

CPSXXX10.1177/0010414021989755Comparative Political StudiesLee

research-article

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2021, Vol. 54(9) 1534 –1564

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discrimination (Cederman et al., 2010). One of the most common proposed

solutions to such problems is the introduction of quotas or other preferential

practices in educational admissions and government hiring processes. For

example, in the United States African American and Latino/a applicants are

granted preferential treatment in admissions to most universities and in hiring

for many government or private sector jobs, while in India a proportion of

places at public universities and jobs in public sector institutions are “reserved”

for members of specific lower caste groups. The efficacy and justice of these

policies have been, and continue to be, fiercely debated (e.g., Kennedy, 2013;

Sowell, 2005).

In both the United States and India, critics of affirmative action frequently

make empirical claims about the effects of these polices. First, some claim

affirmative action does not fulfill its primary goal of raising the socioeco-

nomic status of the targeted group due to limited scope or poor “matching” of

recipients to opportunities, leading to high rates of failure and no lasting

gain (Sander, 2004). Second, some claim that any benefits of affirmative

action are disproportionately concentrated among the socio-economic elite of

the targeted group (Galanter, 1984; Massey et al., 2006; Sowell, 2005). If this

is correct, quotas might not change the proportion of the disadvantaged group

that is disadvantaged, and might even lead to poor applicants from the advan-

taged group being disfavored relative to wealthier ones from the disadvan-

taged group.

Despite the importance of the question, the purely empirical literature on

educational and hiring preferences is modest in size, particularly relative to

the flourishing literature on the effects of electoral quotas (Chauchard,

2014; Dunning & Nilekani, 2013; Jensenius, 2017; Karekurve-Ramachandra

& Lee, Forthcoming), and the effects of quotas on institutional efficiency

(Bertrand et al., 2010; Bhavnani & Lee, 2019). In fact, only the first of these

critiques has been the subject of sustained empirical investigation, much of

it challenging the “matching” hypothesis (Arcidiacono, 2005; Hinrichs,

2012; Howard & Prakash, 2012; Loury & Garman, 1993). However, there is

virtually no empirical little work on the distribution of benefits within the

target group, or effects outside the immediate beneficiaries. The institutional

effects of quotas are thus somewhat better understood than their social

effects, despite the importance of the social effects in normative debates on

the topic.

This project focuses on a particularly controversial instance of affirmative

action: the gradual implementation of hiring quotas for members of the Other

Backward Classes (OBC) social category in India. Some Indian caste groups

(jatis) are much poorer than others, whether because of different traditional

occupations, colonial policies, or continuing discrimination against “low”