Inclusive reforms as levers for social exclusion: The paradoxical consequences of quotas for women in rural India

Why do radical institutional changes to democratize who accesses power fail to change who realizes power in practice? We argue that disjunctures between formal changes in representation and actual shifts in decision-making power do not squarely fit into narratives of unintended consequences, path dependency, or elite capture. Instead, we posit that the paradoxically inegalitarian effects of egalitarian reforms can occur when reform-writing elites design policy to be radical by the numbers, while maintaining their hold on power through less publicized features of these reforms. We illustrate this argument about incongruous policy-making with the case of one numerically spectacular gender egalitarian reform: electoral gender quotas in Indian village councils. Leveraging micro-level survey data, historical analysis, and interview data, we present two main findings. First, we document what we term the gender quota paradox: the fact that quotas brought in globally unprecedented numbers of women to power formally, while granting them limited power in practice, and more broadly delegitimizing women’s political leadership on a societal scale with common acceptance of the ”proxy” narrative. Second, we study the sequence and nature of the reform, and identify how the paradoxical effects we document stem from the complex and at times contradictory incentives of policy-makers.