Roads and Power: The Political Dynamics of Infrastructure Provision in India

• In Event: The Politics of Public Goods in India: New Debates and Evidence

Abstract

How do states prioritize the allocation of different public goods and services? Recent literature has shown that allocation strategies can vary substantially across disparate goods. We build on this work by examining how two crucial types of infrastructure - road construction and electrical grid projects - are distributed in relation to one another. We theorize that 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. We test the implications of our 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.

Authors

• Brian Min, University of Michigan

• Anjali Thomas, Georgia Institute of Technology