Democracy, Political Networks and Distributive Politics in India

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

These papers address how democratic elections and political networks influence distribution and delivery of public goods and services in India, and how democratic competition itself shapes the formation of political networks.

Factions and Distributive politics in India
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 or clientelistically targeted; 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.

Courting Votes Without Party Agents: Political Competition and Partisan Networks in Rural India
In many emerging democracies, political elites rely on local brokers to influence voters. In this article, we examine the extent to which these actors are partisan and advance an explanation for why they may not be. Wherever ideology matters less than distributive politics, we argue that the strength of partisan networks should coevolve with levels of political competition. When competition is high, local brokers prefer hedging between party networks. To test our argument, we rely on a cross-referencing survey in Bihar (India), a state with high levels of political competition. Analyses suggest that many electoral brokers are not party agents; besides, co-partisanship does not strongly predict the connections between voters and brokers. A second set of results suggests that local levels of partisanship among brokers vary with levels of competitiveness. This confirms the link between competitiveness and partisanship and suggests that partisan networks are difficult to maintain when competition increases.


How Electoral Cycles Shape the Implementation of Public Programs: Evidence from India
This study sheds new light on the welfare implications of electoral cycles by examining how election timing shapes the implementation of public works programs. Using data from a program in India that provides a fixed allotment to MPs to undertake public works projects in their constituencies, the analyses show that pre-election periods exhibited a significant increase - relative to other periods - in the proportion of funds allocated to projects that ultimately did not get completed. Further analyses cast doubt on the possibility that the results are driven by strained bureaucratic capacity, increased corruption or delays resulting from the manipulations of opposition parties. Instead, the results appear to be driven by incumbent turnover produced by the election as well as by the propensity of incumbents to propose a greater proportion of unqualified projects in pre-election periods. These results shed light on important mechanisms through which democratic elections undermine public service delivery.

Partisan alignment and fiscal transfers to local governments: The politics of decentralized governance in West Bengal
This study explores the politics of fiscal transfers in the decentralized context of West Bengal, India. We show that vertical party linkages between local and higher levels of government are crucial in explaining the allocation of welfare funds at the local level. Higher level governments divert funding away from local governments controlled by opposition parties in order to limit their electoral gains. Thus, partisan affiliations (re)shape the institutional arrangements designed for allowing local governments to effectively implement welfare programs. We look at welfare programs related to rural employment and housing where local governments have a discretionary role in beneficiary selection and implementation. By leveraging the phenomenon of staggered elections for local and state level governments together with, a diff-in-diff design, genetic matching, a close-election regression discontinuity design, we are able to causally identify the impact of partisan alignment across different levels of government on fiscal transfers. This paper deepens the existing understanding of conditions that limit effective decentralization of power to local governments.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 12: Comparative Politics in Developing Countries

Chair

• Adam Michael Auerbach American University-SIS

Discussant

• Aditya Dasgupta University of California, Merced

Individual Presentations

• Factions and Distributive Politics in India - Tanushree Goyal, University of Oxford

• Courting Votes Without Party Agents: Evidence from Rural India - Simon Chauchard, Columbia University; Neelanjan Sircar, University of Pennsylvania

• How Electoral Cycles Shape the Implementation of Public Programs - Anjali Thomas, Georgia Institute of Technology; Jonathan Parker Darsey, Georgia Institute of Technology--Sam Nunn School of International Affairs

• Partisan Alignment and Fiscal Transfers: Evidence from West Bengal - Anustubh Agnihotri, University of California, Berkeley; Anirvan Chowdhury, UC Berkeley