How Do Voters Respond to Welfare vis-à-vis Public Good Programs? An Empirical Test for Clientelism

Pranab Bardhan, Sandip Mitra, Dilip Mookherjee and Anusha Nath

No 605, Staff Report from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

Abstract: This paper examines allocation of benefits under local government programs in West Bengal, India to isolate patterns consistent with political clientelism. Using household survey data, we find that voters respond positively to private welfare benefits but not to local public good programs, while reporting having benefited from both. Consistent with the voting patterns, shocks to electoral competition induced by exogenous redistricting of villages resulted in upper-tier governments manipulating allocations across local governments only for welfare programs. Through the lens of a hierarchical budgeting model, we argue that these results provide credible evidence of the presence of clientelism rather than programmatic politics, and how this distorts the allocation of government programs both within and across villages.

Keywords: Welfare programs; Public goods; Clientelism; Voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H40 H75 H76 O10 P48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49
Date: 2020-07-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-dev, nep-pbe and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedmsr:88338

DOI: 10.21034/sr.605

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