The recent election results have once again shown that economic growth alone does not guarantee electoral victory. Pranab Bardhan, one of India’s foremost development economists and professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that voters are often influenced less by GDP growth than by jobs, welfare benefits and leadership. Trained at Cambridge University, Bardhan’s work spans political economy, inequality, rural institutions and development policy, often bringing together insights from economics, political science and social anthropology. Edited excerpts from an interview with Ashlin Mathew.
Why GDP Growth Doesn’t Win Elections: Jobs, Welfare and Identity Politics in India
‘Why GDP Growth Doesn’t Always Translate Into Votes’
The recent election results suggest that high growth rates don’t guarantee sweeping mandates. What breaks the link between macroeconomic performance and voting behaviour?
I don’t think the GDP growth rate is influential with voters. To them, the economic issues that usually matter are jobs, prices, corruption and specific welfare benefits. Macro economists tend to assume that good growth is accompanied by job expansion. But in India this is not always true. During the past decades—and the last decade is certainly one of them—the expansion of jobs (particularly for the low-skilled) has not matched the expansion of GDP. And in looking at the unemployment data, people usually draw the wrong conclusions.
The data for unemployment—technically what is called by the National Statistical Office ‘usual-status’ unemployment—categorise ‘unemployed’ only to those who did not seek work over the past six months. If you are poor, you cannot afford to wait for six months. You scrounge around and find something, usually some unproductive or low-paying job. So the usual unemployment data grossly misrepresent the real underemployment situation. On corruption, most voters assume that all politicians are corrupt. So in actual voting, the corruption effect washes out, unless there has been some big corruption scandal just before the election. Also, most voters are worried about the cases of petty corruption they face in their day-to-day life. The big cases of top-level corruption do not usually affect voting. For example, India is a country with acute crony capitalism; to me crony capitalism is corrupt capitalism, but this kind of corruption does not much affect voting, however much Rahul Gandhi keeps shouting about crony capitalists.
In actual voting, non-economic issues—like identity, dignity, security, charismatic leadership—often predominate. I have often noticed that Dalits will get worked up, and rightly so, if a political leader makes some comment that possibly can be interpreted as casting aspersions on their dignity. But if the same political leader does not make offensive remarks but his policy—say in neglecting issues of public health—results in the death or illness of thousands of Dalit children, that is never an electoral issue.
Another case where identity plays a paradoxical role is when a communal party foments communal tensions or riots, it actually helps the communal party as it generates the feeling of insecurity—and fear and anger—particularly among the majority community regarding the minority community.
“For the poor voters, reduction of poverty, economic insecurity and creation of jobs are more important than the issue of inequality.”
Your work highlights clientelism—an asymmetric political or social exchange system where patrons—politicians, elites—provide goods, services, or special favours to clients—voters, groups—in direct exchange for political support, such as votes. Are we seeing a shift from programmatic development—infrastructure, growth—to targeted welfare as the dominant electoral strategy?
Clientelism in terms of personal benefits through handouts is usually more important than public goods for the voter. This has become more important with the digital age, as direct electronic transfers have made it more transparent and leakage-proof. I think the voter often values these handouts more than public goods because the handout is immediate and obvious—“a bird in hand”—compared to public goods which require a long time to build, and once it is built, there is a possibility of the elite capturing the benefits. There are many other uncertainties about how much of the benefit from the public good will ultimately accrue to the individual voter. The voter does value some public goods like roads and schools, but apart from the question of time in building them, there are uncertainties about their quality—will the road be maintained regularly, how good the school will be from the child’s learning point of view.
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Has “development” as a campaign narrative lost its mobilising power compared to identity, welfare or leadership factors?
For the poor voters, reduction of poverty, economic insecurity and creation of jobs are more important than the issue of inequality. Insecurity—job insecurity, income insecurity—is particularly salient. For these voters, how the top one per cent is making more money or how many billionaires there are now are abstract issues when it comes to their votes.
What would it take for political narratives to integrate both identity and economic justice rather than treating them as competing priorities?
Constructing political narratives to integrate both identity and economic justice is tough. Our political leaders who talk about ‘vikas’ or ‘viksit Bharat’ towards the end of election campaigns when the going gets tough inevitably resort to identity issues about the minority community as ‘traitors’ or ‘infiltrators’. Maybe politicians at the local level can work on the pride of their local community identity—“my village” or my municipal ward—where if we can collectively do a development project that benefits the entire local area, we may be able to integrate identity with economic benefit for all.
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