POLITICAL FINANCE
quickly move large sums of wealth from one place to the next.
Because competitive political parties require the most expensive electoral campaigns, these are the parties that should select the wealthiest candidates. The data bears this out.
Candidates from competitive parties (defined as a party that was one of the top two finishers in a constituency) selected candidates who were approximately 20 times richer than candidates from noncompetitive parties. This implies that candidates with any chance of winning an election are much richer than the overall candidate pool.
At the same time, if wealthier candidates were no better at winning elections, then an analysis of candidate wealth would be no more than academic curiosity. In order to determine the relationship between wealth and winning elections, the analysis was restricted to candidates from competitive parties and a statistical model was fit to the data.
Even when restricting attention to the top two candidates, the richer candidate reported moveable asset wealth about four times greater on average than the poorer candidate.
As the wealth gap grows between the top two candidates in a constituency, the richer candidate has a higher probability of winning (see graphic). In the median case, the wealthier candidate is about 10 percentage points more likely to win than the poorer candidate.
Taken together, these analyses pro- vide statistical evidence that competitive parties are more likely to field wealthier candidates, and, even when focusing only on those candidates that have some chance of winning, wealth is strongly correlated to electoral success.
This result is consistent with growing incentives parties face to select wealthy candidates to self-finance increasingly expensive campaigns.
Self-financing candidates, in addition to covering their own campaign costs, can bring in funds for the party and subsidise poorer candidates.
The root cause of the rise of wealthy candidates is the weak representative role of India’s elected politicians. The rules governing the system are such that, even after winning election, legislators have little power in policymaking— which is controlled by a small set of party elites. In short, India’s politicians have little incentive to invest in actually becoming good representatives, and they are more likely to see the election as an economic investment in the future. It all adds up to a compromised democratic system in which the candidates for whom we vote need not represent our interests.