Quotas Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The term quota implies allocation, allotment, apportionment, share, or distribution in cases of school admission, jobs, or seats in legislative bodies. Quotas are attained through legal or constitutional devices on the basis of criteria other than merit and qualifications. Highly controversial, yet necessary in representative democracies, quotas give an appropriate weight to the historically exploited, marginalized, unrepresented, or underrepresented sections of society. In particular, quotas aim to empower women or subaltern groups and are based on the premise of promoting group rights versus individual rights or entitlements.

Approximately forty countries have introduced quotas for women in their legislatures. In India, 33 percent of seats are reserved for women in the Lok Sabha house of parliament. There is also a quota of 15 percent for the scheduled castes and 7.5 percent for the scheduled tribes. Two seats are reserved for Anglo-Indians in the Lok Sabha, in case they are not adequately represented. Quotas are therefore fixed on the basis of two cardinal principles of representation: (1) equality of outcome opposed to the traditional notion of equality of opportunity, and (2) the focus on real equal opportunities or de facto equality rather than the rhetoric of equality of opportunity in the presence of vast sociocultural, economic, or political barriers.

A significant challenge of the twenty-first century is rapidly expanding diversity, along with stubbornly persistent inequities in terms of status and power based upon caste, race, ethnicity, class, language, citizenship, or region. Affirmative action is promoted as serving the interest of the underprivileged or underrepresented sections of society, on the one hand, and providing legitimacy and justification to them in a democratic polity, on the other. Examples of affirmative action, positive discrimination, reverse discrimination, reservation, or quotas in any nondemocratic system are rare—whether in the past or present.

Reservations or quotas are methods for promoting affirmative action. Different from a reservation or quota, affirmative action remains open-ended and without any fixed number. However, all such devices aim to serve as a corrective to the past sociocultural, governmental, or individual bias against certain individuals, groups, women, or minorities based upon caste, class, creed, or ethnicity. Such disadvantaged groups have often been subjected to unfair, derogatory, or discriminatory treatment for no faults of their own.

Pros And Cons Of Quotas

Some equate the concept of quotas to a social contract between the so-called winners and losers. Quotas may also be considered an outcome of the psychological mechanism toward reciprocal altruism among nonkin. Under this mechanism, people are encouraged to extend certain benefits and services to nonkin with the understanding that the benefactors reciprocate those benefits at some time in future—targeting those groups disadvantaged on the basis of sociocultural status, ethnicity, economics, education, geography, or gender.

The quota has always generated polarizing debate in democracies. Those who defend it argue that it is natural to find some ways and means to provide social justice and economic opportunities to all those who were deprived of the same. The nonbeneficiaries vehemently oppose it in the name of quality and meritocracy. Often referred to as reverse discrimination, opponents of the quota find it unfair and undemocratic.

The underlying goals of quotas include the following: compensation to the victims of past discrimination and maltreatment, redistribution of resources and opportunities from the privileged sections of society to those worse off, motivation of people from lower socioeconomic and disadvantaged classes to aspire for better positions in society, better appraisal of students in terms of potentiality and productivity, better access to social capital in terms of useful contacts and networks, and fostering a more legitimate and vital democratic order.

Quotas are a complex issue and need careful treatment, in part because they are a zero-sum game—improvement in the well-being of one group comes only at the cost of another group. Fortunately or unfortunately, the losers never take a backseat but instead actively protest at the earliest opportunity. Paradoxically, quotas can harm the interests of those very people they intend to protect by branding them as inferior or incompetent or both. Quotas may even lead to further polarization or stigmatization, despite the best intentions to the contrary.

The proponents of quotas for women contend that they are the most effective way to provide a better gender balance, circumventing conservative party leadership, offering role models for other women, engaging political parties in finding suitable women candidates, and removing some of the structural barriers that prevent women from being elected. Quotas, proponents argue, put women on the fast track and aim to empower them from above without having a massive following, capacity, or support at the base. However, incremental change in the increase of the number of women from one election to another is seen as a better mechanism of adaptation and assimilation. Since the causes behind adopting quotas as a political policy vary from country to country, their consequences are also likely to vary.

Much depends on how the very concept of representation is interpreted. It may mean representing the total society or it may mean serving the interests of one’s electorate. There should be resemblance between the representative body and the citizens at large. According to Melancton Smith, as cited by Herbert Storing in What the Anti-Federalists Were for: The Political Thought of the Opponents of the Constitution, “A full and equal representation is that which possesses the same interests, feelings, opinions, and views the people themselves would have were they all assembled. ”This view legitimates the debate about quotas and reverse discrimination in education, employment, and legislatures. The day when quotas will be no longer necessary may be far away, for as long as inequities prevail, quotas will also remain in some form or other.

Bibliography:

Gupta, Asha. “Affirmative Action in Higher Education in India and the U.S.: A Study in Contrast.” CSHE Occasional Paper Series: CSHE.10.06 (2006): 1–18.
Jones, O. D., and T. H. Goldsmith. “Law and Behavioral Biology.” Columbia Law Review 105, no. 2 (2005): 405–502.
Ross,T. “Innocence and Affirmative Action.” In Critical Race Theory:The Cutting Edge, edited by R. Delgado, 551–563. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.
Storing, Herbert. What the Anti-Federalists Were for: The Political Thought of the Opponents of the Constitution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Weisskopf,Thomas E. “Is Positive Discrimination a Good Way to Aid Disadvantaged Ethnic Communities?” Economic and Political Weekly, February 2006, 1–23.
Yang, Chulguen, Geeta C. D’Souza, Ashwini S. Bapat, and Stephen M. Colarelli. “A Cross National Analysis of Affirmative Action: An Evolutionary Psychological Perspective.” Management and Decision Economics 27, no. 2/3 (March–May 2006): 203–216.

This example Quotas Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.