Do Citizens Enforce Accountability for Public Goods Provision? Evidence from India’s Rural Roads Program

66 Pages Posted: 13 Jun 2019 Last revised: 22 Jan 2023

See all articles by Tanushree Goyal

Tanushree Goyal

Princeton University - Department of Political Science

Date Written: April 26, 2019

Abstract

This paper investigates voter responsiveness to the world's largest rural roads program, a highly visible development program that improved connectivity for one-third of humanity that previously lacked road access. Investigating 180,000 roads provided across half a million Indian villages aggregated across multiple elections over the last 20 years, the paper finds that road provision fails to boost electoral support for the ruling party. Exploiting population-based implementation rules that partly determine road allocation, instrumental variable regressions show that voters remain unresponsive to exogenous road provision. Exploiting subnational variation in implementation and political alignment, analysis shows that factors that breakdown the accountability chain, such as quality, salience, myopia, corruption, or attribution concerns, do not explain these results. The findings suggest that weak accountability presents a more enduring challenge to democracy than assumed in theoretical models and policy interventions.

Keywords: Roads, Rural India, Accountability, Governance

JEL Classification: D72, D80, D83, Z18, R28

Suggested Citation

Goyal, Tanushree, Do Citizens Enforce Accountability for Public Goods Provision? Evidence from India’s Rural Roads Program (April 26, 2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3378451 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3378451

Tanushree Goyal (Contact Author)

Princeton University - Department of Political Science ( email )

Robertson Hall
Princeton, NJ 08544-1013
United States

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics

Downloads
209
Abstract Views
1,795
Rank
232,932
PlumX Metrics