The policy of mandated representation (reservation) for disadvantaged social groups in Indian village councils or Gram Panchayats has been the subject of numerous studies. The implicit, and often unstated, assumption that underlies most of these studies is that the president of the council is...

Decentralization reforms have been the overwhelming response to failures in the targeting of public resources by the central state in developing countries. The policy debate on decentralization typically revolves around several a priori hypotheses on how the design of formal institutions of...