Official Recognition and Political Participation Among Persons with Disabilities

Persons with disabilities are the world's largest minority, yet they remain understudied in political science. Existing research shows that electoral turnout among persons with disabilities is lower than in the general population, with mechanisms including challenges in accessibility, limited resources, social isolation, lower political efficacy, and experiences of stigma and discrimination. This paper examines an additional mechanism linking disability and political participation: the demobilizing effect of negative experiences with the government. Specifically, I examine the effect of official government (un)recognition of disability on political participation. I theorize that persons with disabilities who are not officially recognized by the government as "disabled" will exhibit lower levels of electoral participation. The denial of recognition may foster a perception that the state neither hears them nor responds to their needs, thereby reducing external political efficacy and political trust. To test my theory, I leverage a policy feature of India's disability benefits system, in which individuals who receive a disability assessment score of 40 percent or above are officially recognized as "disabled" and become eligible for government programs, seat reservations, and other private benefits, while those just below the threshold receive no such recognition and therefore no benefits. Exploiting this arbitrary cutoff, I employ a regression discontinuity design to isolate the causal impact of state recognition from the underlying impairment itself. Using original survey data collected from individuals who have undergone medical assessments that assign disability percentages, I compare political participation among respondents just above and just below the eligibility threshold.