Money and Votes

Abstract

While ‘vote buying’ theories tend to treat parties to cash exchanges as either transaction agents or as information-gap bridges, this paper seeks to show that people involved with moving money are key actors in broader political economies, and that the networks through which cash flows are the very same ones through which the resources of off-season social and economic life is produced, assembled, and transformed. We draw from our respective ethnographic research in two very different (in some ways even ‘most different’) sites in contemporary India—the first from the city of Mumbai and the secondly from rural Bihar. Examining the origins and distribution of exchanged money in our sites unsettles received wisdom concerning the directional flow of monetary exchange, demonstrates that money originates not just from parties but rather from a wide variety of sources and that the money that changes hands at election time produces and articulates socio-political networks that infuse everyday life far beyond election day.