clientelism: implications for Political stability in rural west Bengal

Pranab Bardhan ([email protected]) is with the Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, US. Sandip Mitra ([email protected]) is with the Economic Research Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. Dilip Mookherjee ([email protected]) is with the Department of Economics, Boston University, Boston, US and Abhirup Sarkar ([email protected]) is with the Economic Research Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. A mongst all Indian states, West Bengal is the only one in which a single political party has uninterruptedly been in power at state and local levels of government over the past three decades. With some moderate fluctuations, the political supremacy of the Left Front has been maintained in both panchayat and assembly elections throughout the period 1977-2006. This is clear from Figures 1 and 2 (p 47). The seat shares of the Left reached a peak around 1987-88 and trended downward for three consecutive elections thereafter. But in the 2003 panchayat elections and 2006 assembly elections they picked up again so that no discernable downward (or upward) trend was present for the period as a whole. The purpose of the present paper is to understand and explain this unusual political stability on the basis of a household survey conducted by the authors during 2003-05.