IDEOLOGY VS. COMPETITION IN REDISTRIBUTIVE POLITICS: An Analysis of Land Reforms in West Bengal1

We investigate the roles of political ideology and electoral competition as determinants of land reform implementation in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal. Using a twenty five year panel dataset for a sample of 89 villages, we find evidence against the hypothesis that political ideology alone matters, and find evidence supporting the role of electoral competition. However, the pure Downsian model is rejected, against a hybrid competition-cum-moral hazard model in which more contested elections raise the incentive among elected officials to implement land reforms. An earlier version of this paper has been previously circulated under the title ‘Political Economy of Land Reform in West Bengal 1978–98’. We thank the MacArthur Foundation Inequality Network for funding the data collection. We are grateful to various officials of the West Bengal government for giving us access to the data; to Sankar Bhaumik and Sukanta Bhattacharya of the Department of Economics, Calcutta University who led the village survey teams, and Indrajit Mallick for helping us collect the election data. For useful comments and discussions we thank Debu Bandyopadhyay, Abhijit Banerjee, Partha Chatterjee, Esther Duflo, Andy Foster, Michael Kremer, Kevin Lang and Kaivan Munshi. Alfredo Cuecuecha, Monica Parra Torrado, Nobuo Yoshida, Amaresh Tiwari and Satadru Bhattacharya provided excellent research assistance. Mookherjee thanks the John Henry Simon Guggenheim Foundation for funding a sabbatical year when part of this research was conducted. The paper has benefited from the comments of seminar participants at Jadavpur, MIT, PennState, Stanford, Toulouse, World Bank, MacArthur Inequality network, and the Center for Studies in Social Science, Calcutta. Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley Department of Economics, Boston University