Abstract
Reserving political office for members of a specific, usually disadvantaged, group is a common form of political quota in many parts of the world. This has been shown to improve distributional access in favor of reserved groups, but often conjectured (and shown in some cases) to come at the cost of governance quality. We develop a theoretical model to demonstrate that a political quota can, in contrast, improve governance if it weakens a village leader’s hold on power, making them more accountable to their supporters. The model establishes a tight set of predictions regarding when improvements should be expected to occur, and when not. We show, in a Maharashtrian (India) sample of rural villages, that governance outcomes dramatically improve under reservations for some, but not all, villages, and demonstrate a pattern of improvement that lines up with the predictions of the theory.