Abstract
We develop a political economy model where political clientelism co-exists with elite capture and derive its implications for targeting of local government benefits. The model helps explain targeting impacts of gender and caste based political reservations in West Bengal local governments documented by previous empirical studies. We argue these targeting patterns cannot be explained by standard political economy models, or by the presence of either elite capture or clientelism in isolation.
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Notes
BMP provided a heuristic explanation of these facts based on coexistence of clientelism and capture. The current paper formalizes these arguments by developing an explicit model and deriving comparative static predictions that make this explanation precise.
These results pertain to the distribution of private benefits, rather than the allocation of local government expenditures across different public good programs (which was the focus of the well known work of Chattopadhyay and Duflo (2004)).
Bardhan et al., (2020) study a related model of pure clientelism where B is endogenously determined by upper level officials to maximize the re-election prospects of their respective parties. Such an extension is useful in studying implications of political distortions for inter-village allocations. We abstract from the issue of inter-village allocations in this paper, and focus entirely on intra-village allocations. The main empirical facts relating to the effects of gender and caste based reservations that we discuss later pertain to intra-village benefit share of SC/ST groups.
The equalized consumption level among the poor equals \(c_D \equiv \frac{B}{F_D} + E[\omega _i | i \le D] < \omega _{D+1}\) where \(F_D\) denotes the fraction of households in groups \(i=1,\ldots , D\).
See Bardhan and Mookherjee, (2000) for further elaboration of this point.
Sarkar (2014) and Bardhan and Mookherjee, (2018) describe how pre-election rallies organized by rival political parties represent a mechanism by which citizens ‘reveal’ their political loyalties to party operatives. Specifically, parties can condition distribution of post-electoral benefits on attendance of citizens in their respective political rallies. This induces citizens to attend the rally of the party they intend to vote for in the election.
Alternatively a fraction \(\theta\) of voters within each group are not subject to clientelistic control of either party: this will generate the same expression for vote shares.
A pure capture model with no clientelism (\(z^p_i=0\) for all i) would predict that women reservations would lower the relative elite-nonelite welfare weight \(\frac{\delta _E}{\delta _i} = \frac{h {{\hat{\gamma }}^p} + \theta \sigma _E }{\theta \sigma _i}\), and hence raise the SC-ST share.
These issues are discussed in some detail in Bardhan and Mookherjee, (2018).
However, the specific mechanism described in Beaman et al., (2008) is different, based on greater credibility of women leaders in the eyes of local citizens as the former spend more time in office.
This is illustrated by Ruud, (1999)’s ethnographic account of two West Bengal villages in Bardhaman district. Ruud shows how the Left Front forged a close relationship with a particular scheduled caste, the bagdis favoring them in the distribution of land titles and subsidized IRDP loans disproportionate to their demographic shares, while other scheduled castes such as the muchis received substantially less. The bagdis received 23-24% of land titles and IRDP loans, while comprising only 7.6% of the village population; muchis and scheduled tribes (santals) received between 5–7% while comprising 5% of the population each. As a result the bagdis almost doubled their (per household) ownership of agricultural land over the past three decades, and controlled by the 1990 s nearly the same amount of land as the previous dominant caste, the aguris. Both these groups owned approximately 29% of land in the village by 1993, in contrast to 14% and 47% respectively in 1960. The muchis owned less than 3% of the land, both in 1960 and 1993.
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Research for this paper was funded by IGC Grant 2010-12-002 and UNU-WIDER grant 605UU-00221. The paper has benefited from comments of Joydeep Bhattacharya and Pan Liu. We are grateful to Monica Parra Torrado for collaborating with us on previous research which motivated this paper. The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.
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Bardhan, P., Mookherjee, D. Political clientelism and capture: theory and an application. Ind. Econ. Rev. 58 (Suppl 1), 17–34 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41775-023-00169-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41775-023-00169-w