Percent Of Seats Research Articles

Spillovers in Affirmative Action: Evidence from OBC Quotas in India

This paper empirically investigates if making access to college easier with affirmative action can incentivize students to continue enrolment in secondary school and complete high-school. In 2008, the central government in India implemented the legislation for 27 percent of seats to be reserved for Other Backward Classes (OBC), a disadvantaged caste-group, in all colleges funded by the central government. Exploiting the quasi-experimental nature of this policy, I use a difference-in-differences (DID) empirical strategy to estimate the differential effects on schooling outcomes of OBC students as compared to other social groups. The results show that college enrolments for OBC increased by an additional 2.9 percentage points more than the comparison groups, and high-school completion rates increased by an additional 5.1 percentage points. There was a significant differential change in school enrolments of 6.2 percentage points for 15-17 year olds, and of 2.1 percentage points for 13-15 year olds, and no statistically significant difference for younger students enrolled below the secondary level. These estimates are consistently higher in the urban sample for all outcomes evaluated.

After the Arab Spring: Do Muslims Vote Islamic Now?

Abstract: “Do Muslims Vote Islamic?” asked an article by Charles Kurzman and Ijlal Naqvi in the April 2010 issue of the Journal of Democracy . The answer, at that time, appeared to be rarely. This essay presents updated data on Islamic political parties’ performance in parliamentary elections through the end of 2014, along with an expanded set of electoral platforms. Since 2011, the trend toward liberal themes has stalled, but Islamic parties have not fared much better in elections since the Arab Spring than before. As in earlier years, a handful of Islamic parties have won pluralities of the vote, especially in “breakthrough” elections after long periods of autocratic rule, while most Islamic parties received less than 2 percent of seats in parliament. The Islamic political sector as a whole—that is, the proportion of seats won by all Islamic parties in each election—has remained virtually unchanged, with a median figure of 14 percent both before and since the Arab Spring.

Latin Women Take the Helm

Latin Women Take the Helm

Employment Status of Engineering Students Belonging to Socially Backward Categories - A Case Study of Karnataka State

The government has given special emphasis and encouragement to students belonging to socially backward categories to participate in education through the reservation policy. About fifteen percent of seats for scheduled caste (SC) and three percent of seats for scheduled tribe (ST) students are reserved for admission to courses at under-graduate and post-graduate levels in technical education. Although the Government has made provision for education to the underprivileged category students, there is dearth of information to explore and evaluate the extent to which these students have benefited. Only few studies are conducted on determining the status of the passed out students, their employability and their economic status. This paper addresses some of the issues listed above. The paper also highlights the findings of the survey on such students conducted by the NTMIS – Nodal Centre for Karnataka State.

It Takes a State: A Policy Feedback Model of Women's Political Representation

American women attain more professional success in medicine, business, and higher education than do most of their counterparts around the world. An enduring puzzle is, therefore, why the US lags so far behind other countries when it comes to women's political representation. In 2008, women held only 16.8 percent of seats in the House of Representatives, a proportion that ranks America lower than 83 other countries. This article addresses this conundrum. It establishes that equal rights alone are insufficient to ensure equal access to political office. Also necessary are public policies representing maternal traits that voters associate with women. Such policies have feedback effects that teach voters that the maternal traits attributed to women represent strengths not only in the private sphere of the home but also in the public sphere of the state. Most other democracies now have such policies in place, but the United States lacks such policies, which accounts for its laggard status with regard to the political representation of women.

Polls Apart: South African Women and the 1999 General Election

More than one million more women than men registered to vote in South Africa’s second democratic election in 1999. The election saw 29.8 percent of seats in the national legislature (or 119 out of 400) going to women (up from 27 percent in the previous Parliament and in stark contrast to the less than 3 percent of women parliamentarians prior to 1994). Eight ministers and eight deputy ministers in South Africa’s new Parliament are women. The new cabinet has women in charge of nontraditional portfolios, such as foreign affairs, public service, mineral and energy affairs, communications and land affairs, in addition to health and housing. This doubles the number of female members compared to the previous executive.

The October 1993 Election and the Canadian Party System

As a result of the 1993 Canadian General Election the Canadian party system has undergone a profound change. The Liberal Party that dominated Canadian politics for much of the century prior to 1984 won a majority in the House of Commons, but the opposition has been fragmented between a Quebec separatist party (Bloc Québécois) and a western-based neoconservative populist party (Reform Party), with the governing Conservatives, and what was formerly the largest third party, the social democratic NDP, together reduced to fewer than 4 percent of seats. The brokerage character that distinguished the Canadian party system in the past has been altered with the success of the Reform Party and the tradition of governments based on combining votes in English-speaking Canada with substantial support in Quebec has been challenged as a result of Bloc's majority in Quebec. With uncertainty concerning Quebec's future in Canada and a volatile electorate in the rest of Canada, the future shape of the Canadian party system remains unpredictable.