Incumbents and Criminals in the Indian National Legislature Toke Aidt, Miriam A. Golden and Devesh Tiwari 13 September 2011 CWPE 1157 Incumbents and Criminals in the Indian National Legislature1 Toke Aidt University of Cambridge
[email protected] and Miriam A. Golden University of California at Los Angeles
[email protected] and Devesh Tiwari University of California at San Diego
[email protected] September 13, 2011 Version 5.1. Comments welcome. 1Portions of the work reported here were presented at the 2009 and the 2010 Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association, the 2011 meetings of the International Society for New Institutional Economics, the University of California at Riverside, Georgetown University, the World Bank (New Delhi), the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, the University of Virginia, Loyola Marymount University, and the University of California at Los Angeles. For comments, we are grateful to Scott Desposato, John Echeverri-Gent, Philip Keefer, Stuti Khemeni, and Kevin Morrison. Funding for the research reported here was provided to Miriam Golden by the Academic Senate, the International Institute, and the Center for International Business Education and Research at the University of California at Los Angeles. Abstract Utilizing data on criminal charges lodged against candidates to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Lok Sabha, India’s lower house of representatives, we study the conditions that resulted in approximately a quarter of members of parliament elected in 2004 and in 2009 facing or having previously faced criminal charges. Our results document that Indian political parties are more likely to select alleged criminal candidates when con- fronting greater electoral uncertainty and in parliamentary constituencies whose populations exhibit lower levels of literacy.