Essays on Political and Economic Inequality

This dissertation examines how the democratic participation and representation of disadvantaged minority groups affect various dimensions of social and economic wellbeing--including labor market performance, protection from violence, and access to redistributive social programs. Across three chapters, I examine diverse forms of minority political inclusion. In one part of the dissertation (Chapter 1), I examine the effects of "top-down" political empowerment, stemming from the formal extension of franchise protections to a disadvantaged minority. In the second part of the dissertation (Chapters 2 and 3), I examine "bottom-up" political empowerment; specifically, I examine how the political organization of minorities into identity-based political parties allows minorities to redirect public resources in ways that are beneficial to these subpopulations./nIn Chapter 1 (co-authored with Carlos Avenancio-Leon), I examine whether a minority group’s access to the franchise is capable of not only protecting the group’s right to participate politically, but also improving its substantive socioeconomic wellbeing. Although a central concern for racial and ethnic minorities is having an equal opportunity to advance group interests via the political process, there is surprisingly little evidence about whether policies that advance political equality are connected causally to social and economic equality. In this paper, we examine whether and how the expansion of minority voting rights contributes to advances in minorities' economic interests. Specifically, we consider how the political re-enfranchisement of black Americans in the U.S. South, stemming from the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), contributed to improvements in their relative economic status during the 1960s and 1970s. Using spatial and temporal variation arising from the federal enforcement provision of the VRA, we document that counties where voting rights were more strongly protected experienced larger reductions in the black-white wage gap between 1950 and 1980. We then show how the VRA's effect on the relative wages of black Americans operates through two demand-side channels. First, the VRA contributed to the expansion of public employment opportunities for black workers and afforded these workers existing public-sector wage premia. Second, in line with previous work on the importance of civil rights laws, the VRA contributed to and complemented the enforcement of labor market policies such as affirmative action and anti-discrimination laws./nIn Chapter 2, I (along with S. K. Ritadhi) examine whether improving the political voice of historically-marginalized minority groups can reduce human and civil rights abuse. To answer this question, we examine the impact of political parties dedicated to representing India's Scheduled Castes and Tribes (SC/STs) on caste-based violence. We address the endogenous selection of minority-favored politicians using state-level variation in aggregations of close election outcomes. We find that a 10 percentage-point increase in the fraction of SC/ST politicians reduces the incidence of SC/ST-targeted violence by three percentage points. Improved attitudes of SC/ST citizens toward state institutions suggest that our results are not the product of negative reporting bias. Further analysis suggests that the crime reductions are consistent with deterrence induced by politicians influencing the operation of the law enforcement bureaucracy in favor of SC/ST citizens./nFinally, in Chapter 3, I (along with S. K. Ritadhi) explore the impact of minority political parties on redistributive spending. Specifically, we study how caste-based political parties affect the welfare of low caste citizens in India -- including Scheduled Castes and Tribes (SC/ST groups). These caste-based parties emerged in response to the perceived inadequacy of electoral quotas, and were unique in their singular focus on improved low-caste welfare. We use the outcome of close elections between caste-based and mainstream parties for exogenous variation, and document two novel findings. We show that low caste party legislators increase low caste households' consumption from the PDS along both the extensive and intensive margins.

Advisor: Dal Bo, Ernesto
Walker, William R.