Institutional Performance and Vote Buying in India

Abstract

Inefficient and corrupt institutions provide an incentive for citizens to focus on short causal chains, which prize instant benefits from direct, clientelist exchanges over the promise of uncertain and distant programmatic rewards. Drawing on a tightly controlled comparison arising from the bifurcation of a state within the Indian federal system into two units that have demonstrated marked differences in institutional development post division, and a survey administered across the new state boundary, we show that citizens are more responsive to small inducements in weak institutional settings where the delivery of basic goods by the state is less certain, but that these institutional effects weaken as the size of the inducement increases.

Policy Polarization, Income Inequality and Turnout

“…Under these conditions, the chains of electoral accountability are stronger and voters will have greater incentive to respond to the policy offerings of the parties (Birch, 2011; Norris, 2014). By contrast, in less established democracies, where political corruption is more evident, and the electoral process is occasionally flawed, chains of accountability may be disrupted and voters will have less incentive to prize the long term—yet uncertain—benefits that are promised by programmatic policies (Heath and Tillin, 2018).…”

Does India have subnational welfare regimes? The role of state governments in shaping social policy

“…States with very similar levels of administrative capacity made different choices. This is exemplified in the different paths adopted by Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh which were only bifurcated into separate states in 2000 and have since adopted markedly different approaches to social assistance (Chhotray et al, 2020;Heath & Tillin, 2018;Tillin et al, 2015). The choices made by state governments about how to administer or prioritize social assistance programmes were also not driven by patterns of partisan congruence between the state government and central government (contrary to patterns observed in Latin America in a similar period ;Niedzwiecki, 2018).…”

Religious market structure and democratic performance: Clientelism

“…The arrangement in which a religious actor substitutes various functions of the state, exemplified in the prominent welfare role of dominant churches in Southern Europe (van Kersbergen 1995), fosters a weaker type of state bureaucracy. Arrested institutional development exposes governments to stronger partisan pressures for the appropriation of collective resources for patronage purposes (on the link between historically weak government institutions and clientelism see Shefter 1994;Heath and Tillin 2018). This is another, indirect influence of uncompetitive religious markets on the preponderance of clientelistic politics.…”

“…Although alternative approaches have measured partisan clientelism at the voter level (Heath and Tillin 2018), the available instrument here is an expert survey that covers linkages between political parties and citizens in 88 electoral democracies for a total of 506 parties (Kitschelt et al 2009). The dataset includes mainly democracies with a population larger than two million that have held at least two elections prior to data collection.…”

“…Clientelism is one of the alternative "linkages" through which politicians attract voters alongside personal charisma, programmatic appeals and party identification (Kitschelt et al 2009: 742-745). It is a useful measure of the extent of democratic government quality (Stokes et al 2013;Fukuyama 2013;Varraich and Rothstein 2017;Heath and Tillin 2018).…”