Speaker: Thibaud Marcesse

 

How does public policy reform change the incentives that political entrepreneurs have to distort public policies for their own benefit? This paper considers the introduction in India of rights-based policies, such as the Right to Work, as a new way to create a safety net in rural India and empower beneficiaries through local democratic institutions. India is typically described as a ‘patronage democracy,’ where political parties trade the distribution of benefits for political support typically ahead of elections. Welfare benefits represent an especially attractive target for parties where the majority of citizens are poor and dependent on state aid in some form.

In this paper, Dr Marcesse argues that while a policy emphasizing citizen claims such as the Right to Work is conducive to forms of clientelism at the village, this clientelism remains the product of rent extraction rather than partisan strategies above the village level. This is because of the modalities of policy implementation, but also the unique incentives for party—building at the local level in India, which emphasize the need to build broad coalitions.

The paper uses both quantitative data on public spending and partisanship along with qualitative data collected over two years of field work in rural Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s poorest but also largest states. In doing so, the paper makes a contribution to the literature on distributive politics in general, and in the Indian context specifically.