Lower-Stakes Legislative Collaborations, Ethnicity, and Gender

Abstract

How do legislators decide with whom to collaborate? I argue that legislative collaborations are shaped by ethnicity and gender, with legislators from dominant ethnic groups and men legislators having more opportunities to collaborate than non-dominant legislators. These dynamics are likely present even when the nature of the collaboration is not particularly electorally salient. I test this hypothesis using newly collected data on question-asking from local legislators in Delhi. Dominant caste men legislators tend to dominate question-asking collaborations as expected, with men legislators consistently having more collaboration opportunities. The results suggest that legislative power dynamics are present even in lower-stakes interactions and may mean that simply encouraging additional legislator collaborations does not address underlying discriminatory patterns in how dominant legislators select their collaborators.