Why Are Some Villages Better Served? Top-Down and Bottom-Up Determinants

• In Event: Accountability and Demand-Making in the Global South

Abstract

Why do government programs work well in some localities but poorly in others? This paper develops a theory of how the combination of top-down political connections together with bottom-up community civic engagement plays an important role in shaping the implementation of government programs across localities. The argument is developed with a simple model and applied to variation in the performance of a rural employment guarantee program across villages in India and tested with a survey of 2,250 households across 90 villages, nested within a close elections natural experiment. Additional analyses explore administrative data from over 200,000 panchayats observed over a decade across India. The data show that electing a ruling-party legislator improves household access to public works employment. However, these benefits primarily accrue to civically engaged villages, where residents subject local leaders, and by proxy the higher-level politicians to which they are connected, to broad-based pressure for service delivery. Disengaged villages are crowded out. The findings highlight the neglected but crucial role of bottom-up factors as a determinant of success in distributive politics.

Author

• Aditya Dasgupta, University of California, Merced