Signing on the Dotted Line: How Bureaucrats Run Indian Municipalities

• In Event: Governance and Development at the State and Local Levels in South Asia

Abstract

What shapes urban governance in developing democracies? Politicians and bureaucrats have different career incentives. Politicians in democracies prioritize re-election. Meanwhile, tenured politically neutral bureaucrats attempt to build their reputations as effective administrators over longer time horizons to seek appointment prestigious positions that oversee extensive mandates, large budgets, and have relatively less political oversight. While the career incentives of politicians and bureaucrats are different, these actors share a common strategy to pursue them – claiming credit for providing governance. This begs the question, under what conditions do politicians and bureaucrats claim credit for providing governance? I show that governance is sustainable only when politicians and bureaucrats share credit for governance. However, credit sharing is elusive, especially when parties in power at different levels in a federal system are unaligned. I argue that credit sharing between politicians and bureaucrats occurs when elections are not on the horizon and parties in power at the state and local levels are unaligned. India – the world’s largest democracy – is home to both infamously variable governance and entrenched clientelist networks as well as an extensive bureaucracy. In a democracy, elected representatives should exercise greater authority over the bureaucracy. However, Indian municipalities are the only level of its three-tier federal structure where bureaucrats (municipal commissioners) appointed by the state government exercise greater executive authority than elected representatives (ward corporators). Two regions of India’s richest state – Maharashtra – tell starkly different stories of governance, with Western Maharashtra far surpassing Eastern Maharashtra on a range of important indices. Maharashtra offers an excellent case of variation in regional party dominance, with each of the four major parties having long histories of being in and out of power, which maps with regional variation in governance. If granted, I plan to use the award to study six municipalities in 2024 – three in each region – for my dissertation to understand how the interaction of career incentives and credit claiming opportunities can explain variation in governance outcomes. I will use a mixed methods approach combining elite-level interviews, shadowing, informal archival work, and surveys over a period of year, building on findings from a recently conducted pilot study. My work also seeks to study the political ecosystem of municipalities, where influential local actors such as lower-level municipal bureaucrats and private contractors along with the all-powerful state government shapes credit sharing opportunities between the main actors of interests – commissioners and corporators. As one of the first works to study the implications of the career incentives of public officials in urban governments, my research will contribute to the understanding of the gap between policy and implementation, political patronage, and bureaucratic accountability, with significance for both academic research and public policy to better understand how citizenship practices and democratic participation manifest. Over four billion citizens of the global south live in municipal jurisdictions. Gaining insights into bureaucratic and political career incentives and credit claiming will help to explain disparities in institutional capacity and local governance in the developing world beyond themes of politicization of the bureaucracy, or underinvestment in resources.

Author

• Dyuti Saunik, University of Virginia