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

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The literature on the politics of public goods has witnessed a renaissance in recent years. New data and methods – especially at subnational and local scales – have allowed scholars to empirically revisit debates once thought settled and open new theoretical vistas. What are the factors that enable some citizens to effectively demand public goods? Does economic growth lower corruption and other negative inhibitors of public goods provisioning? Does social heterogeneity always lead to coordination problems and under-provisioning of public goods? Is ethnic inequality a better predictor of public goods coordination than simply ethnic diversity? Why are some infrastructure projects preferred over others? How do traditional political economy accounts of public goods provision centered on state capacity and ethnic politics intersect with specific historical contingencies?

The proposed panel brings together four papers that span the public goods multiverse. The papers all at least partially focus on India, a sub-continent sized behemoth of over 1.3 billion people, which allows the authors to test multiple competing hypotheses surrounding public goods provisioning. The papers represent a range of methodological, analytical, and indeed disciplinary approaches. The panel also brings together fresh and significant data collection efforts including historical archival research, satellite data, independent India’s first census-scale enumeration and coding of caste categories, sub-national administrative data, high-resolution sub-national infrastructure data, and precinct-level electoral data from multiple state and local elections. Taken together, the papers make a strong case for reconsidering well-established mechanisms in the politics of public goods provision.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 12: Comparative Politics in Developing Countries

Cosponsor

• DIVISION 11: Comparative Politics

Chair

• Simon Chauchard Columbia University

Discussant

• Adam Michael Auerbach American University-SIS

Individual Presentations

• How Does Growth Affect Corruption? Exit, Empowerment and Voice in India - Amit Ahuja, University of California, Santa Barbara; Aashish Mehta, University of California, Santa Barbara

• Roads and Power: The Political Dynamics of Infrastructure Provision in India - Brian Min, University of Michigan; Anjali Thomas, Georgia Institute of Technology

• The Control of Contagion: Ideas, Institutions and Disease in China and India - Prerna Singh, Brown University

• Ethnic Diversity, Ethnic Inequality, and Public Goods - Deepak Malghan, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore; Andaleeb Rahman, Cornell University