Caste, Corruption and Political Competition in India

Voters in India are often perceived as being biased in favor of parties that claim to represent their caste. The caste bias is incorporated into voter preferences and examine its in influence on the distributive policies and corruption practices of the two major political parties in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (U.P.). A simple two-party, two-caste model is taken to show that caste bias causes political parties to diverge in their policy platforms and has ambiguous effects on corruption. We then develop the model to make it correspond more closely to political reality by incorporating class-based redistributive policies. Survey data from U.P. is selected that was collected in 2008-2009. to calibrate voter preferences and other model parameters. We then numerically solve for the model's equilibria, and conduct a counterfactual analysis to esti- mate policies in the absence of caste bias.