Welfare Schemes And Electoral Politics

Abstract

Welfare schemes are arguably one of the most embattled sites in Indian electoral politics both as a means of 
genuine redistribution and as a strategic tool for mobilizing coalitions. This paper provides an empirical testing 
of the association between state level welfare spending, scheme design and extent of beneficiary coverage with 
incumbent electoral performance in 10 major Indian states (2018–2024). Using official electoral data, budgetary 
records, survey responses from 1,840 voters across six states, and regression modelling we find that welfare spend 
as a share of Gross State Domestic Product has a statistically significant positive association with ruling-party 
vote share (β = 0.847,p < 0.001). Women-targeted direct benefit transfer schemes give the largest electoral gain 
(as much as 18.6 percentage points in some cases). Most importantly, these effects are moderated in a non-linear 
fashion by scheme-launch proximity to elections: schemes launched less than four months prior to polling yield 
weaker electoral returns than schemes with a six- to twelve-month gestation period, pointing towards voters 
responding to an impression of quality delivery rather than announcement alone. The paper informs the empirical 
studies of populism, clientelism and democratic accountability by showing that welfare politics in India cannot 
truly be understood as programmatic or clientelistic, but operates through a context specific logic where material 
distribution is not unrelated to caste mobilization and federalism, even when that distribution is rendered media 
visible.