Who Moved my Welfare Scheme? Federalism and the Politics of Credit Attribution in Rural India

The growing popularity of welfare schemes across several developing countries is crucially predicated on whether incumbent governments can derive consequent electoral benefits. A federal structure like India’s, characterized by overlapping policy design and implementation responsibilities, provides opportunities for diffused credit attribution. Therefore, the question of electoral returns depends on the ability of voters to assign credit for welfare benefits to different levels of government. We investigate voter attribution of credit for welfare policies and their electoral consequences using data from a large sample survey from the 2014 parliamentary elections in India. Our results indicate that welfare delivery and credit attribution mattered to the electorate and was one of the few factors that worked in favour of the incumbent United Progressive Alliance, but it was not decisive enough to yield an overall electoral victory. There are strong political imperatives for the roll-out and expansion of welfare schemes, as well as contestations around credit claims. Our analysis provides empirical support for intense party competition over credit for welfare benefits in a federal structure—which has been widely observed and commented upon in the media but has not been econometrically tested for its electoral significance. We find that welfare schemes are an essential dimension of performance evaluation by the electorate, a problem understudied in the extant literature on ‘performance voting’ and undertheorized in the literature on ‘distributive politics’ and ‘welfare provisions’, particularly in a federal structure.