Does Clientelism Work? A Test Of Guessability In India

Research on clientelism broadly assumes that local political agents, or brokers, possess fine-grained information on voters’ political preferences, and often can directly or indirectly monitor their votes. This assumption drives theoretical predictions on the efficiency of an electoral strategy of quid pro quo exchange of benefits-for-votes— relative to programmatic distribution — and on whether politicians should target core or swing voters with selective benefits. Despite its pervasiveness in this literature, scholarship does not test the monitoring assumption and analysis of variation in brokers’ ability to identify voters’ partisan preferences has not been conducted. This paper tests this assumption in the context of rural Rajasthan, India. I develop a unique measure, guessability, which measures whether or not an elected village council president correctly guessed the partisan preferences of voters sampled from their local areas. I find that local leaders perform no better on guessability than low-information benchmarks, contrary to the expectations of existing theory. Local leaders perform well at identifying the partisan preferences of voters who belong to ethnic groups closely identified with particular political parties or co-partisans. They perform poorly at identifying those whose partisan preferences are less certain and require monitoring to reveal. The magnitude of errors on guessability suggests that either a strategy of quid-pro-quo clientelism is extremely inefficient or it is less pervasive than existing theory suggests.