The Politics of Public Service Provision in India

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Despite the prevalence of public programs and institutions designed to improve the socio-economic well-being of citizens, many in the developing world continue to suffer considerably due to a lack of adequate access to basic amenities such as law and order, electricity, roads, schools and healthcare. Why do governments sometimes fail to provide public services that meet the basic needs of citizens? Why are they sometimes successful in doing so? Although there is a large literature that has shed light on the role of political factors in shaping public service provision, there are still several gaps in our understanding of which key political factors matter and of precisely how these factors shape the incentives of state actors charged with providing public services.

This panel seeks to address these gaps by examining the politics of public service provision in India. The Indian context provides fertile ground for developing and testing new insights about the politics of public service provision due to the considerable variation exists within its borders in terms of how, when and where public services are provided. While some of this variation can be explained by frameworks in the extant literature, some of the patterns challenge the conventional wisdom on the factors shaping public service provision and some give rise to new questions about why different types of goods and services may be provided differently. Thus, these patterns found in the Indian context present new opportunities to improve our collective understanding of the politics of public service provision.

Each of the four papers on this panel build on these opportunities using innovative research designs and fine-grained data from the Indian context. They do so by collectively shedding light on two important questions that have remained under-explored in the extent literature on public goods provision. The first of these questions is: how does bureaucratic organization shape public service provision? The second is: how do the incentives to provide goods and services vary based on the nature of the good or service being provided?

With regard to the first question, Rikhil Bhavnani and Alexander Lee use a novel dataset on the recruitment and backgrounds of Indian Administrative Service officers to examine how the characteristics of officers shape the implementation of a anti-poverty program. Their results, based on a natural experiment, show that the caste of the officer plays an important role in shaping implementation. Meanwhile, importantly, the qualifications of the officer were found to have little bearing, one way or the other, on implementation. Meanwhile, Akshay Mangla uses an array of intensive field methods to examine everyday policing in the state of Madhya Pradesh and to shed light on the factors shaping the ability of the police force to maintain law and order. Interestingly, Mangla’s research shows that the way in which junior police officers exercise discretion in the performance of their duties is shaped not only by rent-seeking, but also by organizational norms and a desire for status amongst officers. Due to their focus on the characteristics and behavior of individual officers, both of the above papers contribute new insights on the micro-foundations of bureaucratic behavior and how this behavior affects public service provision.

With regard to the second question, Jennifer Bussell examines how the electoral logic of the individual assistance that politicians provide to voters compares with that of the provision of pork. Using two unique sources of data: a comprehensive dataset on the deployment of constituency development funds by Indian state legislators, and a field experimental audit of politician responses to citizen requests for assistance, Bussell finds robust evidence of partisan allocation of pork. However, interestingly, she uncovers no evidence that partisan considerations drive responses to the requests for individual assistance finding instead that politicians provide constituency service in an effort to boost their personal vote. Meanwhile, Anjali Thomas Bohlken and Brian Min examining how two crucial types of infrastructure - road construction and electrical grid projects - are distributed in relation to one another. They develop the argument the properties of different infrastructure projects yield distinct political externalities for incumbents, which in turn shape the incentives to provide infrastructure projects and influence their sequencing. They then test the implications of their framework using fine-grained data from some 25,000 villages on the timing of two large-scale national programs aimed at providing roads and electricity across rural India. Both of the papers thus contribute new insights on the politics of public service provision by challenging the notion – implicit in much of the previous literature – that a single logic governs the provision of different kinds of public services.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 12: Comparative Politics in Developing Countries

Individual Presentations

• When Are Legislators Partisan? Distribution and Constituency Service in India - Jennifer L. Bussell, University of California, Berkeley

• Roads vs. Power: The Political Dynamics of Infrastructure Provision in India - Anjali Thomas Bohlken, Georgia Tech; Brian Min, University of Michigan

• Does Affirmative Action Hurt Development? Evidence from the Indian Bureaucracy - Rikhil R. Bhavnani, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Alexander Lee, University of Rochester

Chair

• Steven I. Wilkinson Yale University

Discussant

• Erik M. Wibbels Duke University