Citizen Voice, State Exit: Electoral Incentives and Education Provision in India

• In Event: How the State Shapes Society: Comparative Education Politics

Abstract

How politicians accumulate power is fundamentally linked to how they connect with citizens. State-provided public services provide an unparalleled opportunity for states to forge these connections, exchanging services for compliance, undercutting political rivals, connecting front-line bureaucrats with citizens, and shaping how and what citizens think about the state. The quotidian state-citizen interactions inherent to service delivery shape identity, can foment nationalism, and persuade and mobilize voters to support a political party. Ultimately, these citizen-facing public services are at the core of state-building projects. Why, then, do states forgo the opportunity to build these connections by outsourcing service delivery to non-state actors? Why do some states centralize control over service delivery, while others remain content to leave it in the hand of potential competitors?

Using evidence from education sector design in India, I argue that there is a relationship between electoral competition and outsourcing education provision. States with more competitive elections tend to have a larger non-state education sector. I provide a theory to explain this trend, hypothesizing that political elites strategically outsource to non-state actors to borrow capacity and facilitate development despite relatively weak state capacity. By incorporating the non-state sector into a study of the relationship between electoral competition and service provision, I therefore argue that more services does not necessarily mean more state, updating theories of service delivery to account for the large and robust non-state sectors that are active throughout much of the world (Post et al 2017).

Author

• Blair Read