Local Institutional Structure and Clientelistic Access to Employment: The Case of MGNREGS in Three States of India

Abstract

This work is a contribution, first, toward measuring and characterizing some features of rural clientelistic institutions and then toward exploring its impact on household access to an employment scheme (MGNREGS programme in India). We focus on patron-client relationship and the presence and intensity of that: i.e., on the nature and distribution of power in the rural society based on the data on personalized day-today interactions of the households residing in a village in economic, social and political spheres. We formulate a theoretical model to predict that the patrons use MGNREGS employment to secure political support of their respective clients. Using primary * This project is funded by the European Union under the 7th Research Framework Programme (Theme SSH.2011.1), Grant acknowledgement number 290752. Bhattacharya also acknowledges an RIS fund from the University of York. Kar acknowledges additional financial and infrastructural support from Centre for Development Economics, Delhi School of Economics. † We are indebted to the comments and suggestions of several seminar and conference participants. Peter Lynn provided very useful help in our sample design. We acknowledge excellent research assistance from Vinayak Iyer, Amit Kumar, Mamta and Nishtha Sharma. Pramod Dubey and Sunil Kumar diligently monitored the household surveys. Of course, the errors are ours.

Election by Community Consensus: Effects on Political Selection and Governance

“…Estimates at these alternate thresholds are either smaller in magnitude and not significantly different from zero, or the estimated coefficients are positive (as opposed to the negative estimates found at the samras threshold). Overall, these results appear to be consistent with a theory of clientelism, as prior research has shown that most elites in Indian villages are either upper caste or OBC whereas most clients are SC, ST or OBC (Bhattacharya et al , 2016). I discuss how clientelism may explain the regressive targeting results documented here in more detail in Section 4.5.…”

“…28 As Appendix Table A.4 shows, over half of all GP candidates are drawn from farm and business owning households. Bhattacharya et al (2016) also document that on average these households tend to be richer.…”

“…30 For instance, based on the probabilistic measure described above, OBCs won 29% of unreserved seats, while SCs and STs only won 9% of unreserved seats each in the 2011 elections. Bhattacharya et al (2016) also find that most elites qualify as upper caste or OBC, whereas most clients are SC, ST or OBC. 23 two cases, I turn to performance measures of the elected council.…”

“…We may then expect to see a reduction in pro-poor transfers in exchange for votes by the non-elite, a practice that is referred to as clientelism. Clientelism is well documented in the Indian village context (Bardhan & Mookherjee 2012, Anderson et al 2015 and workfare employment in particular has been shown to be a vehicle for clientelistic transfers (Bhattacharya et al , 2016). In their theory of clientelism, Robinson & Verdier (2013) explain why transfers are often in the form of public sector employment (rather than income or public goods) -employment is selective and reversible, and invests the voter in the success of her political patron.…”

Election by Community Consensus: Effects on Political Selection and Governance

“…The reduction in political competition ushers in younger, more educated representatives, but does not significantly increase the proportion of female politicians. I also test for effects on occupation, and find that the grant does not increase the proportion of candidates from farming and business, which are indicative of elite status within Indian villages (Bhattacharya et al 2016). Therefore, even though qualitative evidence suggests that the local elite have a greater say in consensus-based elections, I find suggestive evidence that they do not crowd themselves into political office.…”