Quantitative Economics
Journal Of The Econometric Society
Edited by: Stéphane Bonhomme • Print ISSN: 1759-7323 • Online ISSN: 1759-7331
Quantitative Economics: Jul, 2024, Volume 15, Issue 3
How Do Voters Respond to Welfare vis-à-vis Public Good Programs? Theory and Evidence of Political Clientelism
https://doi.org/10.3982/QE2315
p. 655-697
Pranab Bardhan, Sandip Mitra, Dilip Mookherjee, Anusha Nath
Using rural household survey data from West Bengal, we find that voters respond positively to excludable government welfare benefits but not to local public good programs, while reporting having benefited from both. Consistent with these voting patterns, shocks to electoral competition induced by exogenous redistricting of villages resulted in upper‐tier governments manipulating allocations across local governments only for excludable benefit programs. Using a hierarchical budgeting model, we argue these results provide credible evidence of the presence of clientelism rather than programmatic politics.
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Supplemental Material
Supplement to "How Do Voters Respond to Welfare vis-à-vis Public Good Programs? Theory and Evidence of Political Clientelism"
Pranab Bardhan, Sandip Mitra, Dilip Mookherjee and Anusha Nath
This Appendix reports additional results and analyses. Section A provides institutional details on how the budget is divided between different programs and the role of Gram Panchayats (GPs) in the allocation process. Section B provides details of the straw poll procedure used in the survey. It highlights the steps followed to ensure secrecy of the voting process and the data. Section C provides the following supplementary tables and figures.
Supplement to "How Do Voters Respond to Welfare vis-à-vis Public Good Programs? Theory and Evidence of Political Clientelism"
Pranab Bardhan, Sandip Mitra, Dilip Mookherjee and Anusha Nath
The replication package for this paper is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10805145. The authors were granted an exemption to publish parts of their data because either access to these data is restricted or the authors do not have the right to republish them. Therefore, the replication package only includes the codes and the parts of the data that are not subject to the exemption. However, the authors provided the Journal with (or assisted the Journal to obtain) temporary access to the restricted data. The Journal checked the provided and restricted data and the codes for their ability to reproduce the results in the paper and approved online appendices.
