Essays on Culture, Citizenship, and Political Economy

Campillo Betancourt, Eduardo

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-5att-3732

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Essays on Culture, Citizenship, and Political Economy

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Chapter 1. Caste, Bureaucracy, and the Limits to Political Affirmative Action. The aim of political affirmative action policies is to ensure that disadvantaged groups are represented in their governments and, in turn, that laws preferred by this group are more likely to be instituted. Often, however, they have not been found to be effective. I explore two reasons for this: 1) these policies target large, heterogeneous groups and ignore rigid boundaries within them, and 2) minority politicians might not have direct control over resource allocation. I focus on the context of India, where certain seats for state legislators are reserved for the historically discriminated lower castes (Dalits). Dalits belong to many heterogeneous castes and state legislators must influence local bureaucrats in order to affect the distribution of public goods. To overcome a lack of individual caste data, I exploit the link between names and caste membership and create a new dataset including the caste of workers involved in a public workfare program (NREGA). With this dataset and based on the fact that constituencies are reserved for low-caste legislators through a population cutoff rule, I use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of having a Dalit state representative on the timing of payments to Dalit laborers within NREGA. I find that low-caste workers represented by a low-caste state legislator experience a 12% higher probability of receiving their payments late. The effect is constant across all individual castes and is concentrated in areas where politicians have lower bargaining power over the local bureaucrats. Hence, my findings point to the importance of considering vertical power structures when designing policies aimed at empowering under-represented minorities around the world. Chapter 2. Citizenship Policy and the Spread of Communicable Diseases (with Fabiola Alba Vivar and José Luis Flor Toro). We study a controversial 2013 policy in the Dominican Republic that targeted as much as 10% of the country’s population based on their Haitian ancestry and limited their safe access to public health services. Beyond the direct negative effects such policies may have on the targeted group, we argue that they have important indirect effects through the contagion of communicable diseases. We exploit the timing and differential exposure to these policies across the country, as well as highly disaggregated epidemiological data to provide evidence of these indirect effects. Our estimates evidence a notable increase in the number of dengue cases, a highly contagious disease. We find no increase in the incidence of non-communicable diseases. These findings show how restricting access to public services for specific groups might have a deleterious effect on the non-targeted population.

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