How Do Voters Respond to Welfare Vis-a-Vis Public Good Programs? Theory and Evidence of Political Clientelism
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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Copy CitationPranab Bardhan, Sandip Mitra, Dilip Mookherjee, and Anusha Nath, "How Do Voters Respond to Welfare Vis-a-Vis Public Good Programs? Theory and Evidence of Political Clientelism," NBER Working Paper 32158 (2024), https://doi.org/10.3386/w32158.Download Citation
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Published Versions
Pranab Bardhan & Sandip Mitra & Dilip Mookherjee & Anusha Nath, 2024. "How do voters respond to welfare vis‐à‐vis public good programs? Theory and evidence of political clientelism," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 15(3), pages 655-697, July. citation courtesy of 
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