 Clientelism and violence: The politics of informal economyAbhirup Sarkar and Abhinandan Sinha Economic Modelling, 2022, vol. 114, issue C Abstract: As opposed to acute political violence associated with riots and military coups, the paper addresses the problem of chronic and persistent political violence prevalent in less developed economies. In such economies, a significant part of the population is engaged in the informal sector where property rights are not well-defined and where political protection of rights is necessary for survival. To attract informal sector voters, political parties indulge in violence which signal their strengths to protect ill-defined rights. The paper shows that (a) a larger informal sector leads to more violence; (b) an increase in the relative size of the informal sector increases the winning probability of the worse performing party; (c) both worse performing and better performing parties indulge into same level of violence provided they have the same cost of causing violence. A high correlation between informal employment and political crimes among the Indian states empirically supports our argument. Keywords: Informal sector; Electoral violence; Political clientelism; Global games (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecmode:v:114:y:2022:i:c:s0264999322001523 DOI: 10.1016/j.econmod.2022.105906 Access Statistics for this article Economic Modelling is currently edited by S. Hall and P. Pauly More articles in Economic Modelling from Elsevier |
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