Caste and Punishment : The Legacy of Caste Culture in Norm Enforcement | Land Portal

Resource information

Date of publication: 
March 2012
Resource Language: 
ISBN / Resource ID: 
oai:openknowledge.worldbank.org:10986/4233
Copyright details: 
Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0

Well-functioning groups enforce social
norms that restrain opportunism, but the social structure of
a society may encourage or inhibit norm enforcement. This
paper studies how the exogenous assignment to different
positions in an extreme social hierarchy - the caste system
- affects individuals' willingness to punish violations
of a cooperation norm. Although the analysis controls for
individual wealth, education, and political participation,
low-caste individuals exhibit a much lower willingness to
punish norm violations that hurt members of their own caste,
suggesting a cultural difference across caste status in the
concern for members of one s own community. The lower
willingness to punish may inhibit the low caste s ability to
sustain collective action and so may contribute to its
economic vulnerability.

Authors and Publishers

Author(s), editor(s), contributor(s): 

Hoff, Karla
Kshetramade, Mayuresh
Fehr, Ernst

Data provider

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