Factions and Distributive Politics in India

• In Event: Democracy, Political Networks and Distributive Politics in India

Abstract

I theorise and investigate how intra-party factions affect electoral outcomes, the distribution of bureaucratic capacity, and the provision of public goods and services. I conceptualise distributive decisions as attempts by intra-party factions to survive and become powerful within the party, attempts which may or may not be in line with the party’s electoral gains. In doing so, I provide a novel non-electoral logic for distributive decisions, which is an alternative explanation to why we see deep variation in provision of goods and services that cannot be particularistically; and why we continue to observe the distribution of resources to stronghold regions across the developing world. I combine new data on within party caste identity and original network data on party factions with data on a variety of public goods and services, such as rural roads, education inputs, electricity, employment funds and use IV and regression discontinuity regressions to provide evidence for my theory. While existence of factions and party switching in India is well documented, this is the first examination of electoral and distributional consequences of factions within India.

Author

• Tanushree Goyal, University of Oxford