When Losing the State Drives Opposition to Redistribution: An Experiment in India

• In Event: Beyond Backlash: Political Reactions to Socio-Economic Transformations

Abstract

Studies of redistributive politics do not take seriously how the composition of the state – who controls the bureaucracy – shapes how voters feel about redistributive policies. It is not obvious why bureaucratic composition should matter to redistributive preferences. In advanced industrial societies, politics of redistribution typically derive from class-based coalitions. Political wins and losses of parties representing wealthy or poor voters are tied to shifts in the policy agendas of bureaucrats. Additionally, bureaucrats in these contexts are considered to be non-political actors, immune from social and political pressures. In this paper, we argue that “who” controls the state is a salient issue for groups that have historically used the state to maintain their group’s social dominance. In ranked societies, losing the state presents a peril: that the state not only redistributes, but also undertakes social integration of the traditionally privileged community with other lower-ranked groups. Changes to the composition of groups within the bureaucracy will be associated with changes in group support for government-led redistribution as both wealthy and poor members of high rank groups turn mistrustful of the state. We test our claims using a survey-experiment in the Northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. We compare the responses of two types of dominant groups in India – a high-rank group of upper castes, and a historically low-ranked but wealthy group of backward castes. We find that upper-caste respondents when primed about their shrinking numbers in the Indian Administrative Service were less likely to support redistribution compared to a control group. The results are stronger for poor upper castes and those who live in localities where upper castes were more historically dominant. No such pattern emerges for the backward castes. These results suggest that socially dominant groups respond to a loss of control of the state by turning anti-redistributive.

Authors

• Pavithra Suryanarayan, London School of Economics

• Simon Chauchard, University Carlos 3 of Madrid