Title: Whom are you doing a favor to? Governance Consequences of Political Alignment

Speaker: Sabyasachi Das, Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi

Gaurav Sabharwal， Princeton University

Abstract: We ask if political alignment (i.e., same party in power) across different levels of government (local and state) is necessarily beneficial for the local area. We depart from the existing literature on political alignment by focusing on (i) the allocation of human resources (i.e., bureaucrats) instead of financial resources and (ii) the effect of alignment on two categories of governance outcomes (infrastructure development and local law and order). We compile a unique panel dataset for the Indian state of Rajasthan, containing the complete career histories of administrative bureaucrats and police officers, information on road construction and crime statistics. We show that while districts that are aligned with the state government get a better allocation of administrative bureaucrats and, consequently, benefit from better road construction, the result is exactly the opposite for law and order. In aligned districts, “worse” police officers are allocated for longer duration, “better” ones are transferred out more frequently and, as a consequence, the crime situation is worse in aligned districts. We argue that the incentive of the locally aligned politicians to engage in or support criminal or disruptive activity for maintaining electoral advantages drives this result. This paper, therefore, overturns the received wisdom in political economy that local jurisdictions benefit from political alignment with higher level governments, and emphasizes the need to look at a broader set of measures in determining the consequences of political alignment.