 "More attention needs to be paid to the incentives for political parties to implement welfare programmes well")
Gram panchayats (GPs) play a crucial role in the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). Do political incentives influence the allocation of funds by GP-level politicians to their constituencies? Do they favour certain wards in their constituencies, and if so, do they target their core supporters or swing voters? And, are there electoral rewards in targeting certain types of voters?
To address these questions, we examine whether ruling parties in local governments (GPs) in the state of West Bengal favoured their own constituencies in allocating funds for MGNREGA and in providing MGNREGA work to households residing in the constituency, and whether this had any electoral benefits. Voters in village council wards in West Bengal directly elect their representatives in the GP, and the party with the most number of elected officials in the GP gets to become the ruling party. We use a rich primary data set from 569 villages (or village council wards) over 49 GPs from three districts of West Bengal for 2010-2012.
GP elections took place in 2008 and 2013, allowing us to see whether there was a targeting of specific village council wards after the 2008 elections, and whether this had any electoral pay-off in the 2013 elections. During 2008-2013, there were two principal contesting parties in West Bengal with dissimilar political ideologies: A coalition of Leftist parties known as the Left Front (LF), led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M), and the Trinamool Congress, or TMC.
We find clear evidence that after the 2008 panchayat elections, the ruling party at the GP level significantly spent more MGNREGA funds in all the years that followed in its own party constituencies (village council wards), as compared to the constituencies of its opponents. Our estimates suggest that a village which is a ruling party’s winning village receives Rs 38,750 more in terms of MGNREGA expenditure, compared to a non-ruling party village, and that households in the ruling party’s winning village receive 3.59 days more of MGNREGA work compared with households in a non-ruling party village.
This is also evident in the figures. We see a sharp jump in the allocation of MGNREGA funds (as well as MGNREGA days worked) to constituencies where the ruling party won marginally, by just over 50 per cent of the votes, versus constituencies where they lost marginally to the opponent party. This suggests that the ruling party in West Bengal targets swing constituencies instead of the constituencies where it had core support (that is, constituencies where it had the majority of votes). However, we find that the targeting of marginal constituencies differs between the two main political parties — while TMC-run GPs target marginal constituencies, CPI(M)-run GPs do not.
Were there any electoral returns to the TMC for engaging in such partisan behaviour? We find strong electoral returns to such behaviour. GPs ruled by the TMC after the 2008 panchayat election managed to secure a higher percentage of votes as well as a higher probability of re-election in its own constituencies in the 2013 panchayat election, while such an outcome is not observed for LF-run GPs. The TMC, as a ruling party after the 2008 election at the GP level, realised a 1.5 percentage increase in its vote share in its own villages in the 2013 election by spending an extra Rs 100,000 MGNREGA funds annually in its own constituencies, compared to opponent-party constituencies. In contrast, the CPI(M), as the ruling party in the 2008 elections, experienced a fall in its vote share in its own constituencies in the 2013 elections, as it did not engage in such partisan behaviour.
What explains the difference in behaviour between the two political parties? We conjecture that the difference can be attributed to the anticipation of regime change in the state, as the TMC was making strong inroads in the GPs formerly held by the CPI(M), which provided little incentive for the CPI(M) to engage in targeting swing constituencies; as well as the class background of the potential beneficiaries of the MGNREGA, who were agricultural labourers that have historically not been core supporters of the Left regime in West Bengal.
Moreover, the decentralised nature of implementation of MGNREGA may have worked to its disadvantage in West Bengal, in cases where the GP leaders were not motivated to implement MGNREGA well. This implies that there may be a trade-off between the objectives of empowering GPs and of providing social protection to the poor, which was not fully realised by the advocates of MGNREGA, who wanted the scheme to be primarily implemented by local governments rather than by state and central governments.
Subhasish Dey is with New College of Humanities, London, and Kunal Sen is with Global Development Institute, University of Manchester.
Published with permission from Ideas For India (www.ideasforindia.in), an economics and policy portal
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