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A Foot in the Door: Ethnic Employment Quotas and Democratic Attitudes in Uruguay

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  • Soler-Lopez, Jorge

    (Bocconi University)

Abstract

Does bringing a marginalized group into the state raise its members' trust in democratic institutions? Uruguay's 2013 Ley 19.122, reserving eight percent of public-sector hires for Afro-descendant citizens, offers a rare test on the dimension representation theory names. Using the Uruguayan household survey and eight waves of the Latinobarómetro, we document a genuine but small first stage, Afro-Uruguayan public employment rose about 1.3 percentage points, a composition shift rather than a net gain, against a target the state met only fractionally. In addition, as second stage delivered a precise attitudinal null, with equivalence tests rejecting effects larger than roughly 0.15–0.20 standard deviations. The result establishes a scope condition rather than a refutation: at this level of exposure, bureaucratic inclusion produces no measurable attitudinal return. How much inclusion is required before the representation mechanism fires remains an open and newly quantifiable question.

Suggested Citation

  • Soler-Lopez, Jorge, 2026. "A Foot in the Door: Ethnic Employment Quotas and Democratic Attitudes in Uruguay," SocArXiv 9dphe_v1, Center for Open Science.
    • Handle: RePEc:osf:socarx:9dphe_v1
    DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/9dphe_v1
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