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Money in Elections: The Role of Personal Wealth in Election OutcomesThe Role of Personal Wealth in Election Outcomes
Abstract
This chapter investigates the role of personal wealth and self-financing candidates in Indian elections, namely, why financial capacity of the candidate is an important feature of Indian electoral politics and how it structures the incentives of political parties. Using detailed data on candidates’ assets, this chapter demonstrates that a candidate’s personal wealth, measured in terms of moveable assets, has a significant positive impact on her electoral fortunes. It further shows that wealthy candidates directly filter into competitive parties. But even among these wealthy candidates from competitive parties, the wealthiest candidate has a greater probability of winning the constituency. The empirical results strongly support the view that there are structural and institutional reasons for the outward display of wealth in Indian electoral campaigns.
... In light of their professional and caste backgrounds, it is not surprising that VCK leaders typically lack the capital networks available to most other politicians. In India, it is candidates rather than political parties that bear the brunt of raising campaign funds (Gowda and Sridharan 2012;Sircar 2018). Although the VCK's access to resources has grown over two decades of electoral participation, and it has attracted upwardly mobile Dalits into the party, its candidates remain at a stark financial disadvantage relative to their rivals. ...
Political commentaries on elections highlight the act and outcome of suffrage. Votes are tallied and trends analyzed as pundits distill election results, post facto, into predictable storylines said to reveal the so‐called pulse of the nation, littered with clichés about popular mandates and the people's verdict. Such accounts interpret elections as a straightforward index of a “popular will” without attention to their differentiated experience and how historically disenfranchised groups navigate their complex institutional landscape. Elections are not extraordinary events that transcend the inequalities of everyday life but a time when hierarchies are asserted, contested, and fortified. This occurs through the ballot as well as through the architecture of the institution and tactical use of its routine procedures. The Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK; Liberation Panthers Party), a prominent Dalit‐led (ex‐untouchable) party in India, is a case in point. Combining ethnography from inside a political campaign and interviews with VCK candidates, party leaders, and grassroots activists, this article employs election symbols as a diagnostic to study the architecture of the electoral institution, exploring how its tools and techniques—which are neither neutral nor freely available to all—consolidate structural advantages that privilege well‐resourced players while hindering those historically excluded from political power. [democracy, elections, inequality, India, caste, Dalits]
... During election time, such parties campaign by mobilizing large, extant networks-for instance, groups of voters united by geography or kinship networks and often aligned with local (rather than partisan) brokers or intermediaries-that provide physical, financial, and human capital. Members' homes become de facto campaign offices; personal wealth finances election expenditures (Sircar 2018); and friends, family members, and other associates engage in assorted campaign activities. These "movable" assets are the lifeblood of election campaigns, but only because network members choose to deploy them; they are not resources attached exclusively to the party. ...
In the study of electoral politics and political behavior in the developing world, India is often considered to be an exemplar of the centrality of contingency in distributive politics, the role of ethnicity in shaping political behavior, and the organizational weakness of political parties. Whereas these axioms have some empirical basis, the massive changes in political practices, the vast variation in political patterns, and the burgeoning literature on subnational dynamics in India mean that such generalizations are not tenable. In this article, we consider research on India that compels us to rethink the contention that India neatly fits the prevailing wisdom in the comparative politics literature. Our objective is to elucidate how the many nuanced insights about Indian politics can improve our understanding of electoral behavior both across and within other countries, allowing us to question core assumptions in theories of comparative politics.
... Such candidates do not just finance their own campaigns, but they also have a high "winnability" quotient. 5 This also explains why political parties recruit criminals into their organizational networks and nominate them as candidates. Criminals, especially the so-called "violent political entrepreneurs" who make their fortunes trading in illicit commodities and flushed with large volumes of liquid cash are particularly attractive to political parties. ...
A paucity of understanding of the pathways through which money flows during elections renders all discussion on campaign finance conjectural and unpersuasive. Drawing on qualitative evidence from two assembly constituencies in Gujarat, the paper seeks to understand the “opaque” and “enigmatic” ways in which parties and candidates mobilize campaign finance and the mechanisms through which money and other goodies get channeled into the electoral process. Further, the paper also attempts to compute realistic estimates of campaign expenses under critical campaign heads and highlights the ways in which candidates bypass official spending limits set by the Election Commission. The paper’s findings speak to some of the core themes in the burgeoning scholarship on electoral integrity and political economy of campaign finance in the world’s emerging democracies.
This article analyses the theoretical and methodological challenges of researching candidate selection and party nomination practices in Indian politics using a case study of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India. It focuses on the nature of informal politics and institutions that over-write and complicate the candidate selection process, and on the challenges of identifying the hidden effects of these parallel processes on the competition for official party nominations. The article discusses the complex and protracted nature of internal party negotiations over candidate short-lists and how these layered and unseen strains at the final stages of selection impact the openness and transparency of the process in the BJP. The findings indicate that unofficial lobbying for party tickets is an important but overlooked informal institution that impacts the process in significant ways and deters inclusion in the party selection processes.
It is now common knowledge in India that the politicians who are serious contenders in elections, spend huge amounts of money far exceeding the limits imposed by law. Political observers and governance activists are alarmed that this growing role of money and criminality in elections vitiates the electoral process, undermines the efficacy of the representative institutions and as such erodes democratic accountability. This chapter analyses the electoral process and campaign financing at the ground level.
This article explores the making of a political dynasty in action in a district in western Uttar Pradesh. The founder of the dynasty is a dabang: a self-made violent political entrepreneur. It is argued that the figure of the dabang offers a special ethnographic entry point to contrast forms of power that are achieved versus forms of power that are acquired (inherited) and examines the existing tensions between paternalistic and autonomous models of power. Importantly, such exercise highlights the challenges that dabangs have in cultivating their individual charismatic authority and simultaneously establishing their Parivar Raj (rule of family) by using force and money. On the whole, the presented case study helps us to reflect on the very diverse ways in which dynasties form and work according to the type of authority that is passed through generations.
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