Co-ethnic Voters and Candidate Choice by Political Parties: Evidence from India

Tushar Bharati

No 20-05, Economics Discussion / Working Papers from The University of Western Australia, Department of Economics

Abstract: The paper introduces an asymmetric information candidate choice model to examine the inefficiencies arising from co-ethnic political preferences. Unlike past theoretical literature on the topic, political parties in the model internalize co-ethnic political preferences of voters and act strategically. The model predicts that a party’s choice to field a candidate of an ethnicity type depends on the ethnic composition of the constituency’s voters and the ethnicity of other rival candidates running for office. Data from parliamentary and assembly elections from the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in India support the model predictions. Using exogenous changes in information flow proxied by geographical connectedness via all-weather roads, I show that lower information cost or greater connectedness implies a lower level of strategic differentiation of candidates along ethnic lines. Evidence suggests that parties disregard potential candidate’s involvement in crime to be able to differentiate along ethnic lines. As a result, worse candidates get elected to office.

Keywords: elections; ethnic voting; political parties; crime (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D7 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
Note: MD5 = b92eaa67097b96ef2e5094c5da7e7bc5
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ecompapers.biz.uwa.edu.au/paper/PDF%20of%2 ... %2020.05_Bharati.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:uwa:wpaper:20-05

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Discussion / Working Papers from The University of Western Australia, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sam Tang ().