CIAO DATE: 10/2014
September 2014
Center for the Advanced Study of India
Local brokers are thought to possess fine-grained information on voters’ political preferences, material needs, and even social preferences. Research on clientelism assumes that brokers meet the most basic informational requirement of knowing voters’ partisan preferences, if not their votes. This assumption drives theoretical predictions on the types of voters politicians should target with selective benefits, and whether or not a quid pro quo exchange of benefits-for-votes is an efficient electoral strategy relative to programmatic distribution. Nonetheless, existing scholarship does not test this assumption and analysis of variation in brokers’ ability to identify voters’ partisan preferences has not been conducted. To test this assumption, this paper develops a behavioral measure – guessability – based on whether or not village council presidents in Rajasthan, India correctly guess the partisan preferences of voters sampled from their local areas. I find guessability to be lower than existing theory and low-information benchmarks expect. Local leaders can identify the partisan preferences of voters who are most guessable either because they belong to core partisan ethnic groups or because they are integrated into their local co-partisan networks. However, they perform poorly at identifying those whose partisan preferences are uncertain and require monitoring to reveal. This has consequences for the targeting strategies parties and politicians pursue.
Resource link: Does Clientelism Work? A Test os Guessability in India [PDF] - 1.5M