How do social policies generate opportunities for clientelism? How do varying levels of decentralization in different states within the same country enable or constrain these opportunities? This project uses variation in the design of social programs in rural India to understand whether and how political parties rely on the distribution of public patronage to reach out to voters. It proposes to compare the implementation of the Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS) and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). The project seeks to test whether a design that emphasizes the demand for benefits (as is the case under NREGA) is more likely to challenge the parties' monopoly of access to public resources, which is believed to be essential to sustain clientelism.
The intellectual merit of the project is associated with its documentation of how the demand for benefits is politically activated or not. The project proposes to use variation in decentralization levels in two neighboring Indian states to test this implication in different institutional settings - one in which decentralization has been pursued (Uttar Pradesh) and another that is still centralized to a large extent (Bihar). After exploring the relationship between poverty levels and spending patterns under each program, the project will involve carrying out a survey experiment to gauge perceptions of political involvement in the attribution of benefits in communities along the states' common border, a bottom-up approach unusual in studies of rural clientelism. Additional interviews conducted with representatives from political parties and local government agencies will help hone in on the mechanisms of clientelism at the village level in India.
The recent growth of policies emphasizing the demand for benefits has generated interest, particularly with respect to their broader impact on the recipient communities. In India, this analysis has often limited itself to cases of corruption to the study of women and minority participation. The project goes one step further than a strict analysis of policy effectiveness by investigating the processes of discretionary benefit allocation, rather than the outcome of these processes. This project should be of interest to scholars of decentralization and clientelism as much as to development practitioners who want to make social and development programs as effective as possible in delivering assistance to the poor. Indeed, it focuses on two large social policies implemented in India that are comparable in size yet illustrative of two different approaches to poverty alleviation: whereas one centers on prior means-tested targeting by state agencies (TPDS), the other is implemented based on the anticipated demand for benefits by the beneficiaries themselves (NREGA).
