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NORGLOBAL-Norge - Global partner

India: Politics and Development in India: A micro-level study of who gets what, when, and how

Awarded: NOK 4.3 mill.

Development is a central theme in Indian politics. Politicians make promises of improved roads and schools, a better supply of electricity and new irrigation systems, and voters blame politicians when such projects are not implemented. Academic models of development often focus on how policy choices affect the overall development indicators in an area, but within policy areas there is also great variation in development patterns. To what extent can vote choices and the characteristics o the person in power explain who ends up being prioritized within a policy area? And how do development patterns affect vote choice? This project looked at the association between electoral returns, the characteristics of who is elected, and development data to provide answers to these questions. The two main reasons why this has been fairly uncharted territory in the academic literature om India is a lack of election data in a format that can be easily analyzed quantitatively and the challenge of how to merge election data with development indicators. For this project we collected micro-level election data linked to development indicators in order to understand more about the association between politics and development in India. The project was a collaboration between three institutions: The Institute of International Studies at University of California Berkeley (IIS), the Center for the Study of Development Societies (CSDS) in New Delhi in India, and the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI). The project has resulted in two databases, two books, several articles in international journals, and various popular science articles and talks. To mention a few of the publications, in the journal article "Development from representation? A study of quotas for Scheduled Castes in India" (American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2015), Francesca R. Jensenius looked at the development effects of the electoral quotas for SCs (the former ?untouchables?) in India over a 30-year period. Drawing on electoral results, development indicators, and interviews with political elites, the article demonstrates that there has neither been more redistribution to SCs nor less overall development in reserved areas - both are patterns that many expect to observe. Francesca R. Jensenius continued the work on SC quotas and development in the book "Social Justice through Inclusion: The Consequences of Electoral Quotas in India" (Oxford University Press, 2017). The book explains why we should not expect to see different development patterns in areas with quotas and shows that although SCs have not benefited socio-economically from the quotas, being included in politics has been positive for the SC community, primarily because the quotas have contributed to weakening the status hierarchy associated with the caste system. In the article "Privileging one's own? Voting patterns and politicized spending in India", Francesca R. Jensenius and Pradeep Chhibber demonstrate how village-level voting patterns are associated with politicians? choices to distribute funding within their political districts. They show that politicians? choices are influenced by the type of networks that bring them to power. Politicians from parties closely linked to strong social networks (embedded parties) face pressures to allocate resources to areas that vote for them in high numbers. Politicians from parties without such ties (non-embedded parties) provide more funding to areas where they face a lot of political competition. The book "Constructing a majority: A micro-level study of voting patterns in Indian elections", by Francesca R. Jensenius, Pradeep Chhibber, and Sanjeer M. Alam (Cambridge University Press 2019), further explores the associations between voting patterns and development outcomes across India. Here it is argued that the type of and intensity of state presence can help us understand much of the observed variation in voting outcomes. This argument is developed drawing on both constituency level and village-level voting data linked up to development indicators. The PI on the project, Francesca R. Jensenius, received the Chr. Michelsen Prize for Outstanding Development Research 2016 and the Nils Klim Prize 2018 for her work on this project.

Despite a dramatic growth in development in India at the aggregate level, there is great variation in development outcomes at the local level. The delivery of public goods are hampered by corruption and inefficiency, and in some villages nothing is done, while in others development projects are implemented as planned. This variation in implementation, we argue, can be attributed to politicians and bureaucrats prioritizing some areas over others. It is often assumed that politicians in India work more fo r co-ethnics. We argue that the uneven public goods delivery is driven by political incentives, and that politicians are probably working harder for villages that voted for them, that have a high turnout, or are competitive. By combining the data efforts of the three collaborating partners from the USA, India and Norway, we intend to test these claims on unique village-level data from across India. Once we have established patterns in the quantitative data, we will probe the micro-foundations of the link between politics and development through case-studies. We plan to pick out extreme cases in the quantitative data as case-studies in order to explore why and how we see a clear link between political activity and development in specific villages. Streaml ining and merging data at the village level will require considerable effort, but we already have experience working with an excellent data entry team in New Delhi that has agreed to take on this task. The collaborating partners already have the needed st atistical expertise and field experience to conduct the suggested qualitative and quantitative analysis. The findings will contribute to discussions about the variation in development across India and about what motivates political actors. We also fores ee some possibly important policy implication if, for example, we find that higher electoral turnout can help increase the implementation of development project for the poor in India.

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NORGLOBAL-Norge - Global partner