Working Paper No. 2012/97 Political Clientelism and Capture Theory and Evidence from West Bengal, India Pranab Bardhan1 and Dilip Mookherjee2 November 2012 Abstract We provide a theory of political clientelism, which explains sources and determinants of political clientelism, the relationship between clientelism and elite capture, and their respective consequences for allocation of public services, welfare, and empirical measurement of government accountability in service delivery. Using data from household surveys in rural West Bengal, we argue that the model helps explain observed impacts of political reservations in local governments that are difficult to reconcile with standard models of redistributive politics. Keywords: clientelism, elite capture, service delivery, government accountability, corruption, political reservations JEL classification: H11, H42, H76, O23 Copyright © UNU-WIDER 2012 1 University of California, Berkeley, email:
[email protected] and 2 Boston University, email:
[email protected] This study has been prepared within the UNU-WIDER project on ‘Land Inequality and Decentralized Governance in LDCs’, directed by Pranab Bardhan and Dilip Mookherjee. UNU-WIDER gratefully acknowledges the financial contributions to the research programme from the governments of Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. ISSN 1798-7237 ISBN 978-92-9230-561-1 Acknowledgements We are grateful to Michael Luca and Anusha Nath for excellent research assistance, and to Monica Parra Torrado for collaborating with us on previous research, which inspired this paper and provided the basis for empirical results reported here. The World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) was established by the United Nations University (UNU) as its first research and training centre and started work in Helsinki, Finland in 1985.