The Erosion of Bureaucratic Capacity under Party Competition in India

• In Event: (Un)building States and Nations

Abstract

When do governments invest in building the institutional capacity of the state? The conventional wisdom states that electoral competition encourages parties to improve state effectiveness. Contrary to this approach, I argue that parties have short time horizons under competition. Electoral competition incentivizes politicians to interfere in day-to-day administration to extract state rents and resources, which erodes bureaucratic capacity. Instead, dominant parties are more likely to build effective state institutions since they have long time horizons and anticipate benefiting from investing in the state. I test this argument in India with an original dataset on the postings of Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers. Longitudinal data from 1953 to 2019 on the national and subnational levels show that competitive elections lead to an increase in political interference in the bureaucracy while single-party dominance results in the opposite. Qualitative archival data and interviews provide evidence for the causal mechanism, demonstrating that this rent-seeking behavior is politically motivated and negatively impacts bureaucratic capacity.

Author

• Natasha Murtaza, Harvard University