FOI Seminar 10 June 2011

Rachel Brulé
(Doctoral Student, Department of Political Science, Stanford University / Visiting Fellow, Berghof Conflict Resolution Centre, Berlin):

 

When Reform Works: A Theory of Legal Impact

 

Friday 10 June 2011, 13.00-14.00, Building A, ground floor (the O.H. Larsen seminar room) Note time and place!

Abstract:

Legal reform is the state’s most potent weapon for aligning social life with democracy’s egalitarian principles. Yet failed reforms are also a visible symbol of state weakness (Scott 1998). Despite the high costs of failure, state attempts to implement egalitarian legal reforms abound. Egalitarian legal reforms are particularly challenging in India, where hierarchical customary law based on Vedic religious texts is 2,000 to 5,000 years old (Mulla 2010:4).

Many egalitarian legal reforms alter neither social nor economic realities (Bardhan 1970; Binswanger, Deininger and Feder 1993; Appu 1996; Rao and Bloch 2000; Galanter 2005; Ghatak and Roy 2007). However, where legislation is successful it can have significant positive spillovers in both social and economic domains (Stevenson and Wolfers 2003; Panda and Agarwal 2005; Roy 2009; Abadie et al. 2010; Deininger et al. 2010). Our understanding of the conditions under which legal reform alters individual social realities remains poor because theories of reforms’ impact are nearly non-existent.*

Prior analysis of property rights reform either provides a-theoretical impact measurement (Galini and Schargrodsky 2007; Field 2007; Pande and Agarwal 2008; Roy 2009; Deininger et al. 2011) or presents broad theories of institutional evolution (North 1990; Barzel 1997; Alston, Leibcap and Mueller 1999; Haber, Razo and Mauer 2003; Mokyr 2008).

This work develops a theory of individual-level legal impact. It defines legal impact as the translation of legal rights into concrete entitlements. In order to develop an appropriate theory, the paper examines four leading schools of thought. Prior theories posit that legal impact depends upon the rule of law, education, economic power, or civil society. This paper proposes a theory of socio-economic networks, where the scope and diversity of legal beneficiaries’ membership in socio-economic networks determines the direction and strength of legal impact.

The paper builds a formal model of legal reform’s micro-level impact by examining India’s 2005 reform of women’s property rights via the so-called Hindu Succession Act Amendment (HSAA). Subsequent papers will test the theory’s hypotheses regarding the HSAA’s individual-level impact. Tests will evaluate pre versus post-reform changes in female beneficiaries’ inheritance of land within and across rural Indian households in 17 Indian states. The material in this and subsequent papers draws on interviews with nearly 1,000 rural Indian women, discussions with elite policy-makers, historical Indian Parliamentary debates, and panel data based on 100,000 individuals.


* Exceptional work that develops and empirically test theories of legislative change’s impact on intra-household bargaining include: Lundberg and Pollack (1993, 1994); Stevenson and Wolfers (2003); and Rasul (2005).