Electoral goals and center-state transfers: A theoretical model and empirical evidence from India
Wiji Arulampalam,
Sugato Dasgupta,
Amrita Dhillon () and
Bhaskar Dutta
Journal of Development Economics, 2009, vol. 88, issue 1, 103-119
Abstract:
We construct a model of redistributive politics where the central government is opportunistic and uses its discretion to make transfers to state governments on the basis of political considerations. These considerations are the alignment between the incumbent parties at the central and state levels and whether a state is a swing state or not. A testable prediction from the model is that a state that is both swing and aligned with the central government is especially likely to receive higher transfers. We test this prediction using Indian data for 14 states from 1974-75 to 1996-97. We find that a state which is both aligned and swing in the last state election is estimated to receive 16% higher transfers than a state which is unaligned and non-swing.
Keywords: Redistributive; politics; Alignment; Swing; Electoral; competition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (209)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304-3878(08)00005-9
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
Working Paper: Electoral goals and center-state transfers: A Theoretical model and empirical evidence from India (2008) 
Working Paper: Electoral Goals and Center-State Transfers: A Theoretical Model and Empirical Evidence from India (2008) 
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:eee:deveco:v:88:y:2009:i:1:p:103-119
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig
More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().