Clients and Constituents

"Existing work suggests that legislators in countries like India should spend little time engaging with individual citizens and, if they do, should focus their attention on co-partisans. Yet, there is anecdotal evidence that these politicians actually spend substantial time assisting individual citizens with access to basic state services. In this book, I show that helping individual voters is a key part of these representatives' activities and that, in contrast with existing expectations, they do not generally discriminate against their non-copartisans in providing assistance. Yet, this constituency service differs from that observed in Western democracies, as it arises from the partisan nature of distribution at the local level. Thus, Indian politicians are more accountable to citizens than we previously expected, but this accountability is linked to, and constrained by, the character of patronage-based politics"--