Do Citizens Enforce Accountability for Public Goods Provision? Evidence from India’s Rural Roads Program

Abstract

While a vast literature examines the prevalence of ethnic voting and clientelism in low-income contexts, empirical tests of whether elections are being used to hold politicians accountable for public goods provision are few. Leveraging a rare exogenous variation in the World's largest rural roads program, a high visibility Indian program that is unprecedented in using informational devices to raise citizens' awareness about roads provision, this paper examines this question at a scale than has previously been possible. With an original dataset of 180,000 rural roads provided across half a million Indian villages aggregated to various electoral levels, national, state and polling booth, over last 20 years, I find that roads provision fails to boost electoral support for the incumbent party. Exploiting subnational variation in program implementation and Indian politics, I show that quality or corruption concerns, attribution errors, timing of provision or variation in political competition, media access or literacy, cannot explain these results. The findings have implications for democratic governance and suggest that information constraints are unlikely to be a barrier to accountability in low-income contexts.