Party-Voter Linkages and Access to Selective Benefits in Rural India

• In Event: Vote Buying and Partisan Competition in the Developing World

Abstract

What structures Indian voters’ expectations of access to selective anti-poverty benefits? Until recently, the role of political parties at the local level in rural India was dismissed due to weak party organization at the grassroots. This paper builds on recent work that takes the importance of partisan ties on access to targeted anti-poverty benefits seriously. I evaluate the effect of co-partisanship on voters’ expectations of selective benefits, over which village politicians have discretion. I do this with a unique vignette survey experiment that randomizes the partisan affiliation of real village council politicians, whom voters identify as prominent in their village. When voters are asked to suppose that the previously identified, randomly selected partisan politician was elected village council president (sarpanch), they expect that a member of their household will be more likely to receive a job on a local infrastructure project or a below poverty line (BPL) card (which determines access to a range of welfare benefits) when the cued sarpanch is a co-partisan. The results of this paper suggest that partisan competition powerfully shapes access to welfare benefits.

Author

• Mark Allan Schneider, Pitzer College