Is Partisan Alignment Electorally Rewarding? Evidence from Village Council Elections in India
نویسندگان
چکیده
Is Partisan Alignment Electorally Rewarding? Evidence from Village Council Elections in India* Do ruling parties positively discriminate in favour of their own constituencies in allocating public resources? If they do, do they gain electorally in engaging in such a practice? This paper tests whether partisan alignment exists in the allocation of funds for India’s largest social protection programme, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) in the state of West Bengal in India, and whether incumbent local governments (village councils) gain electorally in the practice of partisan alignment. Using a quasi-experimental research design, we find that the village council level ruling-party spends significantly more in its own party constituencies as compared to opponent constituencies. We also find strong evidence of electoral rewards in the practice of partisan alignment. However, we find that the results differ between the two main ruling political parties at the village council level in the state. JEL Classification: H53, I38
منابع مشابه
Policy Uncertainty and Manufacturing Investment: Evidence from U.S. State Elections
We estimate the effect of electorally induced policy uncertainty on investment in the manufacturing sector. Because state governors exercise considerable influence over legislation and considerable discretion over regulation and permitting, and because the policies relevant to business investment vary systematically by party, uncertainty over the partisan affiliation of the future governor is a...
متن کاملRepresentation through Legislative Redistricting : A Stochastic Model
This paper builds a stochastic model of the processes that give rise to observed patterns of representation and bias in congressional and state legislative elections. The analysis demonstrates that partisan swing and incumbency voting, concepts from the congressional elections literature, have determinate effects on representation and bias, concepts from the redistrictihg literature. The model ...
متن کاملWomen as Policy Makers: Evidence from a Randomized Policy Experiment in India
This paper uses political reservations for women in India to study the impact of women’s leadership on policy decisions. Since the mid 1990’s, one third of Village Council head positions in India have been randomly reserved for a woman: In these councils only women could be elected to the position of head. Village Councils are responsible for the provision of many local public goods in rural ar...
متن کاملModeling Partisan Media Effects in the 2014 U.S. Midterm Elections
This study tested partisan media effects in the 2014 U.S. midterm elections. A survey was distributed to 992 residents of Georgia, Iowa, and North Carolina. A novel multigroup latent variable structural equation model tested the direct, indirect, and conditional effects of political interest, partisan media use, political information efficacy, and partisanship on affective polarization. Finding...
متن کامل