Political Responsiveness in a Patronage Democracy

Abstract

This chapter draws on accounts from sustained, in-depth shadowing of Indian politicians, as well as large-scale politician surveys, to characterize the nature of politicians’ engagement with their constituents. It highlights the importance these politicians place on making time for citizen interactions and responding to requests—to the extent that high-level politicians spend, on average, a quarter of their time interacting with individual citizens. Critically, the primary focus of these contacts is requests for assistance with the same types of goods and services that are typically also requested of local politicians such as village council presidents, providing preliminary evidence that demands may at least partially originate from individuals’ failure to acquire these benefits at the local level—a topic to which the book later turns. Chapter 2 also shows that the individual benefits directly provided to citizens by high-level politicians are substantial.

Patronage vs. ideology in Indian politics

“…In an award-winning book that marshals different forms of evidence in the service of a narrative account of the distributive activities of high elected officials, Bussell (2018) argues that constituency service preoccupies much of the time and energy of Indian politicians holding public office at the state and national level. Bussell then frames constituency service as representing a powerful, hidden means of addressing deficiencies in the provision of publicly-provided goods and services.…”

“…In Auerbach's (2020) account of the public infrastructure politics of Indian slums, brokers act as agents and intermediaries between parties and poor communities, mobilising votes for politicians but also enabling access to key public goods for client communities. For Bussell (2018), elected politicians, as public officials, perform constituency service through solving problems in the provision of goods and services for their constituents, regardless of ethnic identification and partisan advantage. And Kruks-Wisner (2018) has emphasised how mobilised and empowered citizens can make successful claims on the state for the delivery of welfare.…”

“…Yet scholars have been wary of separating distributive and electoral politics entirely. Rather, many view Indian citizens as primarily voting on the basis of performance, especially in the delivery of goods and services, whether by parties, by candidates, or by brokers (Auerbach & Thachil, 2020;Bussell, 2018). This might be an eminently reasonable proposition, and indeed one deeply embedded in normative theories of electoral democracy.…”

India's democracy before the democratic discontent, 1940s–1970s

“…64 64 There are excellent works on that subject from the 1980s, which is beyond the remit of this essay. For example, see Nayanika Mathur, Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015; Milan Vaishnav, When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017); Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey, Waste of a Nation: Garbage and Growth in India (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018); Francesca Jensenius, Social Justice Through Inclusion: The Consequences of Electoral Quotas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Jennifer Bussell, Clients and Constituents: Political Responsiveness in Patronage Democracies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); Lisa Björkman, Pipe Politics, Contested Waters. Embedded Infrastructure of Millennial Mumbai (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).…”

Bypassing the Patronage Trap: Evidence from Delhi Assembly Election 2020

“…A large body of literature on the subject has examined this relation within a clientelist paradigm, with its various actors—politicians, voters, local bureaucracy and intermediaries—intertwined in a quid pro quo exchange ritual. This assessment, however, is facing increasing pushback as new research looks at the importance of other factors such as constituency service (Bussell, 2019), institutional reform (Heath & Tillin, 2018), cultural bonds between actors (Piliavsky, 2014) and ideological concerns (Chhibber & Verma, 2018) that shape electoral behaviour.…”