Murphy Seminar in Political Science: "The Politics of Unspent Funds in India’s Municipal Governments" with Tariq Thachil
Professor, Madan Lal Sobti Chair for the Study of Contemporary India and Director of the Center for Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvanial (UPenn)
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Each semester The Murphy Institute sponsors a series of seminars organized by the Tulane Department of Political Science that provides an opportunity for faculty, researchers, and practitioners to present their latest research and pressing issues related to topics in political economy. Research presented covers all aspects of contemporary politics science, including comparative politics, public policy, international relations, American politics, and normative theory. For more information, contact the Department of Political Science at polisci@tulane.edu.
Professor Thachil is a Professor of Political Science, Madan Lal Sobti Chair for the Study of Contemporary India, and Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India. Thachil is a scholar of comparative politics, focusing on political parties and political behavior, identity politics, urbanization and migration, with a regional focus on India. His first book examines how elite parties can use social services to win mass support, through a study of Hindu nationalism in India, and was published by Cambridge University Press (Studies in Comparative Politics) in 2014. This project won the 2015 Gregory Luebbert Award for best book in comparative politics, and the 2015 Leon Epstein Award for best book on political parties, from the American Political Science Association.
Thachil's current research focuses on governance challenges within India’s small towns, dramatically understudied spaces that house nearly half of the country’s urban population. A second stream of research focuses on understanding the politics and policymaking around environmental crises, focusing on air pollution in India.
His articles have appeared in American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics, World Politics, and other outlets, and have won the 2018 Heinz Eulau Prize for best article published in the American Political Science Review, and 2020 American Journal of Political Science Best Article Award.
RSVP: https://tulane.campuslabs.com/engage/event/11069145
ABSTRACT:
We study a unique form of fiscal dysfunction — persistent budgetary underspending and the accumulation of unspent funds. This problem has been fleetingly noted across several low-and-middle income countries (LMICs), but rarely studied, and is unanticipated by theories of corruption or clientelism. We first document pervasive and growing unspent funds across 130 north Indian small towns over a thirteen year period (2008 to 2020), using hand-coded information from rarely accessed budget documents. Next, we draw on qualitative fieldwork to illustrate low awareness of this pervasive problem among not only citizens, but elected town officials. These finding motivate an information experiment, fielded on 4076 citizens and 3362 politicians. We find informing citizens increases their willingness to sanction their government along several fronts. We find directionally similar, albeit weaker effects among elected representatives. More broadly, our study suggests the need to pay greater attention to the distinct challenge posed by local government underspending in LMICs like India.
