Given the size of and diversity within India, it is of considerable interest to know if the political alignment of local representatives with state governments affects public security. Does the answer depend on the region that is being studied? And if so, how?
A new research by Ashani Amarasinghe, Pushkar Maitra, and Yuchen Zhong sheds light on these issues. The researchers focus on India’s Naxalite insurgency, using constituency-level electoral and conflict data to explore whether electing a legislator from the same party or coalition as the state government causally diminishes insurgency-related violence. Their principal finding is that political alignment significantly reduces violence, but this effect varies considerably with the geographic relationship between constituencies and areas containing valuable mineral resources.
This research was motivated by substantial literature on distributive politics, which contends that governments may favour politically aligned jurisdictions when allocating transfers, public investments, and other government resources. The researchers extend this argument from economic resources to security as a public good. In India, state governments have primary responsibility for police, public order, and law enforcement. Members of state legislative assemblies (MLAs) serve as intermediaries between citizens and the state government and can recommend projects and advocate for their constituencies. Since recommendations from members belonging to the ruling party are more likely to receive government support, political alignment may facilitate the provision of security resources.
The empirical setting is the Naxalite insurgency, which has historically affected some of India’s poorest and most marginalised regions. Naxalite organisations compete with the government for civilian support and finance their activities partly through levies on local economic activity and, importantly, through mineral resources. This makes the relationship between insurgency, government actors, and mining particularly salient for the analysis.
The researchers assemble several datasets covering state elections from 2004 to 2019 in eight major “Red Corridor” states: Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Odisha, Telangana, and West Bengal. Election data from the Election Commission of India provide information on candidates, parties, vote shares, and margins of victory. These data are matched with geocoded insurgency incidents from the Uppsala Conflict Data Programme. The main estimation sample contains 3,024 violent incidents resulting in at least one death, including 1,395 Naxalite-initiated and 1,629 government-initiated incidents. The researchers also use geo-coded mining data to identify constituencies containing mines and constituencies located at different distances from mining areas.
The baseline results are striking. Constituencies that elect an aligned candidate experience approximately 0.37 fewer insurgency-related violent incidents over the electoral term than constituencies that elect a non-aligned candidate. The reduction applies to both Naxalite- and government-initiated violence. The researchers interpret this as evidence that political alignment improves the delivery of security. Importantly, their analysis suggests that the overall decline is driven primarily by a reduction in Naxalite-initiated violence, while government violence appears to be largely retaliatory. Thus, enhanced government capacity or willingness to provide security may deter insurgent attacks and interrupt cycles of retaliatory violence.
This research also examines whether political alignment generates spatial spillovers. Simply having an aligned neighboring constituency does not significantly alter violence in a particular constituency. However, alignment becomes substantially more effective when neighboring constituencies are themselves politically aligned. In constituencies where both the local representative and the nearest neighboring representative are aligned, violence falls by about 0.52 incidents, compared with 0.37 in the baseline case. When an aligned constituency is surrounded by non-aligned neighbors, its pacifying effect largely disappears. This suggests that coordinated political alignment, rather than isolated alignment, may be particularly important for security provision.
The most distinctive part of this research concerns mining and natural resources. The researchers find that the reduction in violence is concentrated in non-mining constituencies located near mining areas, particularly constituencies within 100 kilometers of a mining constituency. In these “near-neighbor” constituencies, alignment greatly reduces total violence as well as both Naxalite- and government-initiated incidents. By contrast, there is no statistically significant effect in mining constituencies themselves or in more distant constituencies located 100–200 kilometers from mines. The researchers interpret these heterogeneous effects through a possible three-way relationship among mining companies, Naxalites, and government actors.
Overall, this research makes three salient contributions. First, it expands research on political alignment by demonstrating that alignment affects not only fiscal transfers and economic outcomes but also the provision of security. Second, it contributes to research on violence and elections by showing that, in an existing civil conflict, electing an aligned representative can reduce rather than intensify violence. Third, it adds to the literature on natural resources and conflict by demonstrating that political alignment has different effects in resource-rich, resource-adjacent, and resource-distant locations. Hence, this research presents political alignment as an important determinant of security provision, while emphasising that its efficacy depends strongly on local economic interests, spatial relationships, and the strategic incentives of political and non-political actors.
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