Parochial Politics: Ethnic Preferences and Politician Corruption

Does party competition along ethnic lines worsen politician quality? We show that, in a world with incomplete policy commitment, a greater tendency to vote along ethnic lines reduces politician quality even when it does not aect the availability of good candidates and there are no systematic dierences in candidate quality across parties. In particular, ethnic party competition lowers the average winner quality for the pro-majority party. The opposite holds for minority party winners and, overall, relative to losers, the average winner quality in a jurisdiction falls. Empirical evidence from a survey on politician corruption that we recently conducted in North India is remarkably consistent with the predictions of the theory.