States as laboratories: The politics of social welfare policies in India

Abstract

This article examines the role of India's states in shaping the implementation and framing of social policy within India's federal system. Since the 2000s, the central government has overseen a substantial expansion of social welfare policies partly through a new push towards rights-based social provision. Most of the existing literature on the shift in social welfare coverage focuses on the national level. Yet, as we demonstrate in this article, it is India's states that are both responsible for an increasing proportion of total public expenditure on social welfare provision as well as determining the nature and effectiveness of that provision across space. In addition to being the level of implementation for centrally designed programs, some states have themselves innovated by designing new social welfare programs, expanding national schemes or improving the capacity of the local state to effectively implement programs in more rule-bound ways that are less subject to local political intermediation. Factors internal to political competition within states also impact the ways in which relationships between states and markets have been altered in the course of implementing a new generation of welfare programs. Drawing on a comparative research programme across pairs of Indian states, we identify three critical factors in explaining how state-level political environments shape social policy: the role of policy legacies in shaping policy frames; the role of social coalitions underpinning political party competition; and the role of political leaders in strengthening state capacity to achieve program goals. 2 States as Laboratories: The Politics of Social Welfare Policies in India Rajeshwari Deshpande, KK Kailash and Louise TillinThis article examines the role of India's states in shaping the implementation and framing of social policy within India's federal system. Since the 2000s, the central government has overseen a substantial expansion of social welfare policies partly through a new push towards rights-based social provision. Most of the existing literature on the shift in social welfare coverage focuses on the national level. Yet, as we demonstrate in this article, it is India's states that are both responsible for an increasing proportion of total public expenditure on social welfare provision as well as determining the nature and effectiveness of that provision across space. In addition to being the level of implementation for centrally designed programs, some states have themselves innovated by designing new social welfare programs, expanding national schemes or improving the capacity of the local state to effectively implement programs in more rule-bound ways that are less subject to local political intermediation. Factors internal to political competition within states also impact the ways in which relationships between states and markets have been altered in the course of implementing a new generation of welfare programs. Drawing on a comparative research programme across pairs of Indian states,...

Understanding the dynamics of notification and implementation of Article 5.3 across India’s states and union territories

“…for welfare policies, 17 notably education, pensions and social security. 18 Public health is distinctive in the autonomy delegated to states under the constitution, 18 19 creating the potential for subnational policy innovation and patterns of divergence and convergence across individual states.…”

Federalism, multi-level elections and social policy in Brazil and India

“…Like Brazil, most areas of social policy are concurrent subjects in the Indian constitution, giving the central government and state governments shared jurisdiction. The main exception is public health, which is exclusively a state subject (see Deshpande, Kailash, & Tillin, 2017). State governments, and in the colonial period provincial administrations, have long designed local schemes to respond to local needs or more often crises such as famines or worker unrest.…”

“…Poorer states have long spent less than they are entitled to under federal schemes as a result of lower state capacity (Mathew & Moore, 2011), meaning that central programmes are not well targeted to the poorest citizens. As a wide literature attests there is also substantial variation among poor -and rich -states in terms of how well centrally sponsored social programmes, such as MGNREGA, are implemented (see, for instance, Chopra, 2015;Deshpande et al, 2017;Drèze & Khera, 2014;Drèze & Khera, 2015;Maiorano, 2014;Roy, 2015;Tillin, Deshpande, & Kailash, 2015).…”

Reimagining Safety Net Programs

“…It has been widely established that the increase in expenditure on safety nets of late has been attributed to the greater role of state governments primarily driven by three factors: history of political legacy, social coalitions and resultant political party competition, and political leaders' influence in strengthening state capacity for program delivery (Deshpande, Kailash, & Tillin, 2017). Since the 1990s, there has been a greater role of the regional parties in central politics enabling the state governments to have a greater say in the policy space (Kennedy, 2017).…”