Whose Side Are You On? Identifying the Distributive Preferences of Local Politicians in India

The literature on decentralized public programs suggests that errors in the targeting of anti-poverty programs are rooted in the capture of these programs by local elites or local politicians. Consistent with the literature on moral economy in political science and experimental economics, we argue that voters in contexts of rural poverty prefer local leaders who target subsistence benefits to the poor. In a highinformation village context, where voters and leaders know each other, we argue that local elections lead to the selection of local leaders with pro-poor preferences over the distribution of these benefits. We show this with a novel theory of local politicians’ social preferences. We test our theory with unique data from a behavioral measure, conducted in the context of a lottery with a modest cash prize in rural India, that captures a scenario in which local leaders have full discretion and anonymity over allocation among members of their rural communities. We analyze our data using a novel estimation strategy that takes the characteristics of the pool of potential beneficiaries into account in decisions over allocation under a budget constraint. We find that local leaders have strong preferences for targeting the poor, and particularly those they believe supported them politically in the past. This article suggests that free and fair elections at the local level can powerfully encourage pro-poor targeting even in contexts of weak institutions and pervasive poverty. It also makes a fundamental contribution to research on distributive politics by challenging research in this area to demonstrate the effect of electoral strategies and other distortions on allocation relative to local leaders’ baseline distributive preferences. Mark Schneider is a visiting professor of political science at Swarthmore College; Neelanjan Sircar is a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania. We thank Devesh Kapur, Kimuli Kasara, Robert Shapiro, Adam Ziegfeld, Phillip Oldenburg, Anirudh Krishna, Lucy Goodhart, Lisa Bjorkman, Tariq Thachil, Rob Jenkins, Mona Lynn, Adam Auerbach, Emmerich Davies, and Pavithra Suryanarayan for helpful comments. We also thank Bhartendu Trivedi, Ved Prakash and Morsel for support with data collection. This project was made possible with funding from the National Science Foundation.