Over the years, however, social scientists have recognized that voters are perfectly capable of voting in, rather than kicking out, candidates with less-than-angelic bio-sheets. The alleged reason for this state of affairs is entirely intuitive: voters might support bad politicians because they simply do not know any better. If voters are not able to identify criminal or corrupt candidates during election campaigns, they may become unwitting pawns in a game rigged by political elites. I refer to this proposition as the “ignorant voter” hypothesis. Restated simply, voters in democratic systems must have information on the quality of candidates if they are to hold their representatives accountable to a certain standard. If voters do not have reliable information on the backgrounds of politicians, democratic representation may not necessarily lead to political accountability. So perhaps the puzzle of support for criminality in politics is not such a puzzle after all?
In this chapter I hope to make two points. First, under certain conditions it can be rational even for well-informed voters to support politicians associated with illegal behavior. Second, electoral support for politicians with criminal records is not necessarily symptomatic of a breakdown in democratic accountability. Although the ignorant voter hypothesis provides a compelling explanation for why so-called bad politicians thrive, it leaves no room for the possibility that there can be an affirmative case for the selection of tainted politicians by voters.
Yet in contexts where the rule of law is weakly enforced and social divisions are rampant, a candidate’s criminal reputation could be perceived as an asset. In the rough-and-tumble of electoral politics, where there is a dynamic pattern of competition between rival social groups, voters just might value politicians who are willing to engage in extralegal tactics to protect the status of their community. If politics is viewed as a zero-sum game, a candidate’s criminality can provide an added advantage in two respects: it can mobilize support by both pledging to deliver benefits to a defined group of supporters while simultaneously weakening opposition from rival groups.
The popular embrace of candidates with criminal reputations at the ballot box doesn’t necessarily mean that wily politicians and party bosses are duping India’s voters or that elections are a sham. To the contrary, it is quite possible that many citizens are making a self-interested calculation by lending their support to such politicians.
This argument has far-reaching implications because it suggests that information about a candidate’s criminality is not only available to voters, but that it is central to understanding the viability of their candidacy. Voters aren’t ignorant or uninformed; they are simply looking for candidates who can best fill a perceived vacuum of representation. Viewed in this light, the electoral success of politicians associated with illegal activity might in fact be compatible with democratic accountability, albeit of a partial nature. Bad politicians can simultaneously engage in “bad” behavior and “good” politics, at least for some segment of the electorate. Ironically, the conventional hypothesis about information breeding accountability is correct—just not in the ways that proponents of this argument had foreseen.
INFORMATION, DEMOCRACY, AND ACCOUNTABILITY
Political scientists have long recognized that one of the principal advantages of democracy over alternative forms of governance is that democracy empowers a country’s citizens to hold their elected representatives accountable. Unlike authoritarian systems in which leaders can rule by fiat, diktat, or whim, democracies are marked by the rule by, for, and of the people. If citizens living in democratic systems no longer approve of the job their representatives are doing, they have a safety valve. Voters may not be able to exert total control over their representatives after they have been elected, but they can always withdraw their acceptance by refusing to reelect them when the time comes.12
Over time and based on a wide variety of country experiences, scholars have acknowledged that accountability is not an automatic feature of democratic politics. In the real world, the connection between democracy and accountability is often partial, imperfect, or completely broken.13 Instead, the link between democracy and accountability is contingent on the effective functioning of democratic institutions.
In the search for identifying the culprit to blame for breakdowns in accountability, there are many places one can point fingers. But in recent years, a consensus seems to have formed that for democracy to engender accountability, the average voter must have access to a free flow of information about the quality of candidates standing for elections.14
Armed with information, the logic goes, voters can collect information about the broader candidate pool and make informed voting decisions about who is best fit to represent their interests.15 “The degree of information citizens have, either through news media, personal networks, or their own direct experiences, curbs the opportunities politicians may have to engage in political corruption or mismanagement,” reports one oft-cited cross-country study.16
The idea that information about the behavior of public officials produces greater accountability is not a new one. In the late 1700s, the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote of the necessity of “publicity” in politics, referring to a situation in which information is both made available to, and used by, the public in electing their representatives. He writes: “The greater the number of temptations to which the exercise of political power is exposed, the more necessary is it to give those who possess it, the most powerful reasons for resisting them. But there is no reason more constant and more universal than the superintendence of the public. The public compose a tribunal, which is more powerful than all the other tribunals together.”17 Bentham argued that the public evaluation of politicians acts as a deterrent to behavior that the public would consider unacceptable: namely, any behavior that is contrary to the public interest. Where voters have perfect information, rent-seeking should disappear.
Ignorant Voters and Bad Politicians
The hypothesized link between access to information and better governance is not simply a theoretical one dreamed up by philosophers and democratic idealists. In recent years, a growing body of research provides empirical support for the idea that voters who are armed with more information can induce better government.
Bentham’s insights were brought back into the limelight more recently by the economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, who famously argued that the free flow of information is the essential variable that explains why democracies (such as India) do not experience famine, yet nondemocracies often do. Sen’s argument is twofold: thanks to the ballot box, democratic governments are already incentivized to prevent catastrophes, but it is a free flow of information in this democratic context (manifest by a free press) which gives citizens both the necessary information and the medium with which they can hold their leaders accountable.18
Economists Timothy Besley and Robin Burgess set out to validate Sen’s theoretical arguments.19 By looking at state-level data from India over a period of three decades, the researchers found that state governments are more responsive to shortfalls in food production (often caused by natural disasters) in places where newspaper circulation is higher. The intuition tracks Sen’s argument well: greater information flows about public policy create an incentive for governments to respond to the needs of voters because—if they fail to respond adequately—informed voters will express their displeasure at the ballot box by voting them out. This finding is not unique to India. For instance, scholars have discerned a similar pattern using historical data from the United States. In the wake of the Great Depression, U.S. counties with a greater share of radio listeners—a reasonable proxy for access to information—received more New Deal welfare funds, even after one adjusts for the severity of unemployment in those localities.20
These and other studies link information provision to better, more responsive government. But there is also emerging evidence that directly evaluates the importance of information when it comes to the fate of individual politicians. In 2003, Brazi
l’s federal government randomly selected municipalities to receive a thorough audit of their expenditures, including funds that had been granted to them by the central government. Local governments in Brazil are notoriously corrupt and the audits were designed to make their dirty laundry public in the hope that voters would act on the new information. While all of these local audits were made public and widely disseminated through the media, by pure luck some of the audit disclosures were made before municipal elections held in 2004 and some after.
An ingenious study exploited this unintended feature of the program to explore whether audits released before elections had any impact on political outcomes, compared to municipalities whose audits had not yet been released (but which experienced similar levels of reported corruption).21 It turns out that incumbent politicians from towns where pre-election audits had uncovered acts of corruption fared significantly worse than their counterparts who had not yet been exposed. In line with the research cited above, this effect was more pronounced where local radio stations were more prevalent (which presumably could relay news of the audit findings).
Similar findings have also emerged from the other side of the Atlantic. Voters in postwar Italy had long elected (and reelected) deputies in parliament whom their own government suspected of engaging in all manner of malfeasance. However, things began to change in the 1990s. From then on out, voters began punishing allegedly corrupt deputies by voting them out of office. The authors of one widely cited study believe that voters changed their tune thanks to increased media scrutiny and the resulting widespread availability of information about deputies’ corrupt dealings following a sweeping series of nationwide anticorruption investigations. Their story, like the others’ above, fits nicely with the ignorant voter hypothesis.22
The Ignorant Voter Hypothesis in India
Based on this influential body of work, scholars who have studied the sources of electoral support for tainted politicians typically make two assumptions. The first is that if voters possess information about the quality of candidates, this information will influence their voting behavior and reduce support for corrupt or criminal candidates. If voters lack information about candidate quality, they cannot punish wayward officials at the ballot box. The second assumption is that the election of a significant number of tainted politicians represents a breakdown in the democracy-accountability link.
There is no reason to doubt the studies on Italian deputies, Brazilian local councilors, or related research that have found merit in the idea that once ignorant voters are no longer uninformed, the quality of politicians takes a turn for the better. The real question is whether this claim is generalizable and, hence, applicable to the case of India.
On first glance, the ignorant voter hypothesis would seem to travel to the Indian context quite seamlessly. For starters, according to the 2011 census, one-quarter of India’s population above the age of six is illiterate, which suggests that there is a significant pool of voters vulnerable to making uniformed voting decisions.
Second, although India is home to a vibrant independent media, the lack of access many individuals have to mainstream media resources severely limits its influence. According to the 2014 National Election Study conducted by CSDS, 40 percent of respondents report never reading the newspaper. Of those polled, 59 percent and 15 percent, respectively, report never listening to the news on the radio or watching the news on television, and 72 percent claimed they never even once consulted the Internet to access election-related information.23
Third, although credible information on candidates’ criminal records does exist in India, these disclosures have only been available publicly since 2003. Since then, groups affiliated with India’s RTI movement have regularly urged voters to punish tainted candidates by publicizing personal information extracted from their electoral affidavits. Even so, the availability of this information is questionable, given the above constraints and the uneven attempts by the government and civil society organizations to disseminate it widely. The ECI, for its part, merely scans and posts images of candidates’ affidavits on their homepage.24
Are Voters in India Truly Ignorant?
Notwithstanding the intuitive appeal of applying the ignorant voter hypothesis to India, closer inspection suggests there are several reasons to be skeptical. First, an existing body of research—discussed in greater detail below—highlights the fact that candidates with criminal records often openly embrace their outlaw reputations. Candidates who have been charged with perpetrating serious criminal acts often do not hide their supposed transgressions; they do the opposite: they actually burnish them.
This leads to a second important point: voters in poor democracies can be quite well informed about the nature of local leadership and governance despite their illiteracy, lack of education, and irregular access to news media.25 Community life, especially in predominantly rural, agrarian societies, can actually be a conducive environment for informal information flows. Interpersonal communication, contact with one’s neighbors, and the pace of village life all facilitate the spread of information about local-level politics.26
Third, if a lack of information explained the appeal of candidates facing criminal cases, one might expect the success rate of such candidates to decline over time as the level of political awareness increases and voters correspondingly adjust their behavior. In fact, the opposite appears to be true: there has been no clear decrease in the share of elected legislators who face serious criminal cases. As I pointed out in Chapter 1, the percentage of elected MPs with criminal cases has actually increased with every successful election since 2004. Insofar as state elections are concerned, 17 states have seen rates of suspected criminality increase over the prior election, 4 states have seen no change, and 9 states have seen at least some decline (figure 5.1).
Finally, the only study to have rigorously evaluated the impact of informing voters of their candidates’ criminal records found that such information had no impact on voter behavior at the ballot box. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Poverty Action Lab created “report cards” on the performance of municipal councilors in New Delhi and distributed them to a random set of slum households just before local elections. When the researchers interviewed these households after the election, they found those that received information on candidate criminality did not modify their voting behavior in any statistically discernible way from those who had not gotten this information. This is in contrast to other performance measures the researchers disseminated to households (such as attendance in the legislature), which did incentivize voters to change their behavior.27 One possible conclusion emerged: by informing households about candidates’ alleged criminality, researchers were not telling voters anything they did not already know.
Figure 5.1. Trends in share of MLAs with pending serious criminal cases, as of December 2015. Each bar represents the change in the share of MLAs with at least one serious case over the two most recent state assembly elections. (Author’s calculations based on data from the Association for Democratic Reforms)
AN AFFIRMATIVE LOGIC
If voter ignorance does not provide a compelling explanation for why voters in India support politicians with criminal records, what is motivating Indian voters to behave in such seemingly strange ways? It seems odd that voters would knowingly support candidates with dubious credentials.
Although it may seem counterintuitive, well-informed voters can have an underlying strategic logic for supporting criminal candidates when two conditions are present. First, social divisions, typically (though not exclusively) manifest by ethnic differences, must be politically salient. The very fact of ethnic differences does not necessarily mean that these cleavages are politically activated; politicians “turn them on” when they are perceived to have electoral benefits. One instance in which they might be deemed beneficial is when there is an intense contest over local dominance. Second, the rule of law must be weakly or inconsistently applied. This both
creates a vacuum for a savvy political entrepreneur to present himself as a “savior” and increases the probability that he can manipulate the allocation or distribution of state resources.
In settings where both conditions are operative—salient social divisions and weak rule of law—voters often have an incentive to reward politicians whose criminal bona fides serves as a signal of their enhanced capacity and willingness to do whatever it takes to protect their supporters’ interests (figure 5.2). These interests are often cast in terms of preserving the status of the ethnic community (or communities) in question, which further allows a candidate to spin his criminal reputation as doing whatever is necessary to “defend” his followers. However, such politicians have an incentive to ensure that the solutions they invest in are not systematic, lest they put themselves out of business as fixers. Thus, their enforcement of the rule of law is likely to be highly selective. According to this logic, information about a candidate’s criminality is not only well known to many voters, but it is intrinsic to their voting behavior.
Figure 5.2. From social divisions and weak rule of law to criminality in politics.
When Crime Pays Page 20