POLITICAL PARTICIPATION, CLIENTELISM AND TARGETING OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS: Analysis of Survey Results from Rural West Bengal, India

This paper provides evidence concerning political participation (turnout, awareness, attendance at meetings, campaign involvement, voting) and its relation to local governance in a developing country, based on a rural household survey in West Bengal, India. With the exception of education and immigrant status, we find that reported participation rates varied remarkably little with socio-economic status. Within villages, benefits disbursed by local governments displayed no relation to wealth, caste, education, gender or political affiliations. In contrast, allocation of benefits across villages by higher-level governments displayed bias against poor and low caste groups; these biases were larger in villages with more unequal landownership and lower participation rates in village meetings. Political support among voters for the dominant Left party was positively correlated with receipt of recurring benefits and help provided by local governments in times of personal need, but not long-term one-time benefits or local public goods provided. 1 This paper was based on a household survey funded by a research grant to Sandip Mitra and Abhirup Sarkar from the Economics Research Unit of Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta. We are grateful to Rashmi Barua for excellent research assistance, and the National Science Foundation Grant No. SES0418434 for supporting Bardhan and Mookherjee’s research. 2 Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley CA 94720 ([email protected]) 3 Economics Research Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, 203 BT Road, Kolkata 700035, India ([email protected]) 4 Department of Economics, 270 Bay State Road, Boston University, Boston MA 02215 ([email protected]) (Corresponding Author) 5 Economics Research Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, 203 BT Road, Kolkata 700035, India ([email protected]) * Title Page