Do local leaders prioritize the poor: Identifying the distributive preferences of village politicians in India

Abstract

We investigate the distributive preferences of elected leaders in local democracies, who are tasked with ”everyday assistance” and personally know their constituents. In this setting, economic distribution is driven more by leader preferences and less by efficiency concerns, as in the lower information setting typically described in the literature. In local democracy, we argue voters can explicitly select leaders who prefer to distribute to a broad group of supporters, who further conform to norms of targeting the most needy among supporters. In this article, we develop a novel behavioral measure that isolates leaders’ distributive preferences from direct electoral benefit, which we implement in villages across the Indian state of Rajasthan. We find elected leaders prefer to distribute 94% more to supporters and 17% more to supporters one standard deviation below the mean village wealth. This suggests local elections are consistent with significant distribution to the poor, albeit with political biases.