Clients or Constituents? Distribution Between the Votes in India

Abstract

Empirical accounts suggest that senior politicians in India expend considerable time assisting their constituents to acquire basic public benefits, yet recent research on clientelism focuses substantially on understanding the role of local brokers in structuring the supply of services, or mediation from below. How can we adjudicate between these differing perspectives on distributive politics? I argue that senior politicians often play an important role in facilitating access to state benefits, engaging in mediation from above, a dynamic that the dominant broker-oriented view of clientelism misses. Variation in these activities also cannot be explained by reference to strategic supply of assistance, and instead depends on choices made by informed individual constituents. Drawing on new and unique data from surveys administered to a random sample of citizens, bureaucrats, and politicians in India, including identical survey experiments, I show that citizens often seek assistance for particularistic benefits through direct contact with senior politicians, even relative to contacts with local brokers. Moreover, experimental evidence supports the argument that citizens differentiate their requests for assistance depending on the perceived power of politicians at different levels of government to assist with their requests. These findings suggest that existing accounts of distributive politics ignore important dynamics of demand-driven constituency service.