Kailash, KK (2024), ‘The Politics of Welfare: The BJP and the Discerning Voter’, Studies in Indian Politics, 12 (2) 228-250, 2024, Lokniti, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.
Right from the time of its independence, India has had to contend with extreme inequality and a large population of poor people. While there have been improvements since 1947, the twin challenges of high inequality and widespread indigence remain. This has made social welfare an integral element of electoral politics.
But what is the exact dynamic that determines how welfare initiatives translate into votes, if and when they do? This paper by political scientist K.K. Kailash attempts to answer these questions using voting studies data from the National Election Studies post-poll survey in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
Kailash’s key contention is that voters do not “cast their votes only on whether they received private (welfare) benefits but also consider factors such as their experience and well being while accessing those goods and services.” One cannot assume that those who received the benefits will necessarily vote for their benefactor party. What the paper describes as “individual-level processes” — such as how easy or tough it was to access these benefits, and the overall economic well being of the voter — are also factors that influence voter choices.
Background of welfare politics
The paper starts off with an overview of the scholarship on welfare politics in India, grouping them into two broad streams. One set of studies have focussed on the programmatic elements: the design, implementation, delivery, outcomes, etc. The other set has looked at the influence of welfare policies on two related elements: credit attribution and voting behaviour. While the two sets of studies have bridged the gap between politics and public policy, “they do not necessarily talk to each other.” This paper brings together the two strands to examine if the experience of accessing welfare matters for vote choices, and in the process, nuances long-standing debates on social service delivery and its relation to vote choice.
Before coming to the electoral impact of what has come to be described, sometimes derisively, as ‘revdi politics’, it might be useful consider how welfare politics has evolved in India.
Initially, the imperative to address socio-economic inequality drove the conception of welfare programmes as part of planned economic growth. The state perforce had to play a significant role because “social forces were status quoist and would not let change happen.” This paradigm changed when India switched to a market-led growth strategy. Welfarism, from being a good in itself, began to be seen as “an antidote to the limitations of the market”. Welfare provisioning became an “appendage to the process of economic reforms” — a tool to ensure that reforms remained sustainable in the face of the rising inequalities and insecurities it created.
But with the advent of a dogmatic adherence to fiscal discipline and concomitant budgetary constraints, States struggled to increase investments in welfare understood in its traditional sense of public goods. For instance, investments in public healthcare and education began to stagnate. Apart from resource constraints, there was another reason why welfare policies conceived as capacity-building investments took a backseat — the outcomes “‘do not conveniently materialise with the rhythm of the electoral calendar,’ and made credit-claiming difficult.”
Around this time, welfare witnessed another paradigm shift — to a more ‘responsive’ strategy, where “provisioning had to meet internationally accepted, supposedly more efficient and equitable norms and delivery mechanisms”. In other words, “all government spending had to cope with the demands for market-compatible forms of state intervention”. This paved the way for an extreme reliance on technology, cash subsidies, and direct income transfers — all aimed at making the outputs more tangible. Welfare delivery was reduced to “putting money in people’s hands”, ostensibly to bestow on them the freedom to choose what they want to do with it. Kailash argues that this reorganisation of public welfare as per market principles did two things — one, it recast citizens as ‘consumers’, and two, it turned welfare provisioning into an opportunity for political parties seeking to mobilise voter support.
Not only did this end up degrading welfare as a policy intervention, it also had a negative impact on long-term economic thinking and strategic provisioning of resources for capacity-building.Schemes that offered cash transfers, housing, and gas connections were ‘tangible’ and could easily be connected to a singular benefactor, enabling the “brand identification of parties”. Thus, welfare, having started out as a policy instrument to reduce inequality, provide a safety net and build national capacity for equitable growth, has dwindled into a handy tool to offset the limitations of the market, and today serves as a “key component of the electoral arithmetic of political parties.”
Centralisation, monopolising credit
Though most sectors in which schemes are implemented are in State or Concurrent lists, the paper notes that the incumbent BJP “has gone big” on centrally sponsored schemes. This “centralising thrust”, accompanied by “monopolising credit through branding”, as evident from the nomenclature of various centrally funded schemes, are the other key features of the current welfare regime.
To ascertain whether welfare provisioning helps bring credit and votes to the incumbent, Kailash divides voters into beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries, and further divides the former into those who benefited from one or two schemes, and those who benefited from three or more schemes. Were voters who benefited from more schemes more likely to vote for the incumbent (in the context of this study, the BJP)? Data from 2024 and preceding elections suggest, in general, they do, while non-beneficiaries and those who benefited from fewer schemes preferred the Opposition. A closer examination of the data, however, shows a more complex picture.
Votes don’t always follow credit
In 2024, there was a 30-point increase in the number of people crediting the Centre, compared to 2019, for the five major schemes they were asked about: the public distribution system (PDS), Ujjwala (free gas connection with cylinder), MGNREGA, Ayushman Bharat, and the housing scheme. “Given the branding and the constant reminder through advertisements in multiple spaces that these programmes were personal ‘guarantees’ of the prime minister, this attribution is not surprising,” notes the paper. But did the credit get translated into votes? Not necessarily.
First of all, when welfare becomes the new normal, with every party competing to promise similar schemes, voters’ expectations — especially about the nature of service delivery and quality of services — go up. As a result, voters tend to be more discerning about their expectations from the government. So the incumbent must “not only have a reasonable basket of programmes but also ensure their quality” and easy access for citizens. Without quality and access, claim-making could prove counter-productive. As Kailash argues, “Credit monopolisation and centralisation may not bring imagined electoral rewards if people struggle to access welfare services.”
Kailash also tests the hypothesis that a ‘double engine’ government — the same party in power in the State and Centre — with greater welfare offerings would enable the incumbent to monopolise credit and create more partisan voters. He creates two categories of States: those ruled by the incumbent (the BJP or its allies) and those under the Opposition. The survey reveals that while the central government did get credit for welfare programmes across the country, irrespective of the party government at the State level, the incumbent at the Centre “did not get the votes even in the states ruled by the incumbent”.
However, in States ruled by the Opposition, “when the voter gave credit to the state government for welfare schemes, the vote also followed.” And in States with ‘double-engine’ governments, “the votes were split between the Opposition and the incumbent when the voter credited the state government.” Where voters credited the local government, chances of voting for the Opposition were higher. “The voter acknowledges but is not necessarily beholden to the scheme provider.”
So why does the incumbent at the Centre, which designs and partly funds the welfare schemes, and even gets credit for them, not get the vote also? Well, “it is not the Centre that implements these programmes; the state and local governments do.” When there are last-mile delivery issues, unfair exclusions and access problems, citizens “are more likely to hold those claiming credit responsible for their woes.” As the paper notes, “the discerning voter is more concerned about the nature of the service rather than who provides it.”
The voter’s personal financial condition was another critical factor. When individuals were satisfied with their financial condition, easy access to welfare translated into votes for the incumbent (15-point advantage over the Opposition). But when the individual was unhappy with their financial condition, it did not matter if the access was easy or difficult — the Opposition benefited. Those who were unhappy with their financial condition, and found it tough to access welfare, were most likely to vote for the Opposition.
In conclusion, it would be fair to say there are limits to credit-claiming and welfare branding. As the paper concludes, “welfare beneficiaries are no longer passive recipients but have become discerning consumers.” If welfare provisioning is now an integral element of voter mobilisation, then governments will have to focus more on improving access as well as other dimensions of the economy that impact personal economic well being. A more discerning voter thus creates space for the Opposition by seeking accountability from the credit-claiming incumbent.
Published – January 21, 2025 08:30 am IST
