Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: On Political Inequality--Measurement, Causes, Effects and Remedies

尽管许多社会寻求实现政治平等的理想，但所有社会在政治上都不同程度地不平等。学者们认为，政治不平等对健康和收入等一系列社会经济结果具有有害影响，并为政治不平等提出了许多补救措施。然而，缺乏对政治不平等的原因和影响以及补救措施的系统分析。这种情况至少有两个原因。首先，没有达成广泛共识的实用方法来衡量不同司法管辖区的政治不平等。其次，对政治不平等的研究很难确定政治不平等是否会导致各种社会经济后果，反之亦然。该项目将通过设计一项衡量任何司法管辖区政治不平等的“协议”来克服衡量问题，并将通过在印度实施该协议来展示其用途。它将通过分析印度一些“自然实验”的详细社会经济数据，来解决反向因果关系的可能性。印度是研究政治不平等的合适背景，因为该国在政治准入方面存在很大的次国家(地理、社区和阶级)差异，而且该国一再试图减轻这些不平等。所研究的自然实验将被用来在文献(议会制)没有考虑的背景下检查由于分配不当而造成的政治不平等的影响，并将分析政治不平等的常见补救措施(选举配额)的有效性。这项研究的更广泛的影响包括，通过证明政治不平等是可衡量的和可以研究的，有可能催化一个关于政治不平等的研究计划。由此产生的研究计划将具有重要意义，因为尽管政治平等是一个被广泛拥护的规范性理想，但我们对这一现象几乎没有经验知识。该项目还将有助于推进现有的政治招募和政策制定研究项目。最后，这项研究有望产生重要的政策影响，因为它将使我们能够更好地理解政治不平等的原因和影响，以及政治不平等的补救措施。

Although many societies have sought to attain the ideal of political equality, all societies are politically unequal to varying degrees. Scholars have argued that political inequality has pernicious effects on a number of socio-economic outcomes, such as health and income, and have proposed many remedies for political inequality. Systematic analysis of the causes and effects of, and remedies for, political inequality is lacking, however. This is the case for at least two reasons. First, there is no widely-agreed upon and practical way to measure political inequality across jurisdictions. And second, studies of political inequality have a hard time ascertaining whether political inequality causes various socio-economic outcomes or vice-versa. This project will surmount the measurement problem through designing a "protocol" to measure political inequality in any jurisdiction, and will demonstrate its use by implementing it in India. It will address the possibility of reverse causality by analyzing detailed socio-economic data from a number of "natural experiments" in India. India is an appropriate context for studying political inequality because the country has large sub-national (geographical, community and class-based) variation in political access, and because the country has repeatedly tried to mitigate these inequities. The natural experiments studied will be used to examine the effects of political inequality due to malapportionment in a context not considered by the literature (parliamentary systems), and will analyze the efficacy of a common remedy (electoral quotas) for political inequality. The broader impacts of this study include the potential to catalyze a research program on political inequality by demonstrating that political inequality is measureable and is amenable to study. The resulting research program will be significant because while political equality is a widely-espoused normative ideal, we have little empirical knowledge about the phenomenon. The project will also help advance existing research programs on political recruitment and policy making. Lastly, this research promises to have important policy implications since it will allow us to better understand the causes and effects of, and remedies for, political inequality.