(When) Can Politicians Influence Citizens’ Uptake of Government Welfare Programs? Evidence from an Experiment in North India.

Paper Abstract

The successful implementation of government welfare programs often requires the voluntary participation of citizens. Can elected politicians play a useful role in eliciting such participation and, if so, under what conditions? Integrating insights from scholarship on multi-level governance and on partisanship with findings from political psychology, we argue that the influence of elected politicians’ endorsements on citizens’ uptake of government welfare programs should be shaped by politicians’ tier of government, their partisan alignment, and their ethnicity as well as by their perceived degree of elite capture. We examine these arguments and their underlying mechanisms using a randomized experiment in North India that compares the effectiveness of video endorsements associated with elected politicians with different characteristics in eliciting citizens’ willingness to avail of a government health insurance program. The results will advance our understanding of when and how elected representatives’ influence can be harnessed to improve the implementation of key development programs.

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