Bold researchers are drawn to big questions, and few questions are larger than that of societal transformation. Shikhar Singh is embracing the challenge.
Singh’s research focuses on democratic accountability in rapidly developing countries of the Global South. Specifically, how transformational changes in India’s welfare state affect voting behavior; why municipal governments are not as responsive to voters; and why voters fail to hold elected officials accountable during public health crises.
As countries adopt technological advancements to improve governance, how have changes to welfare programs affected voter behavior? Do voters care about how welfare benefits are delivered or just about receiving them? Do changes in welfare delivery affect identity-based voting? What drives voters to selectively praise or blame elected officials in the wake of public health crises like the COVID-19 pandemic or in response to city air pollution?
A single topic underlies all of these questions: democratic accountability and the politics of development.
We asked Singh, who joined Duke’s Department of Political Science as an assistant professor this fall, about these research questions, as well as about his career and his future steps. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
How have politics informed and motivated your research interests?
My interests have been shaped by my life in India. Some of my earliest childhood memories were watching Indian parliamentary proceedings. In high school I remember persuading teachers to give me time to go check election results and post results for classmates to see. I participated in family political debates, and I remember talking to my grandfather, who was a politician, about his political journey.
I later worked in a “war room” for a political party where I could see how election strategy and campaign messaging came together. During my dissertation research, I closely observed how political parties function, how voters approached elections and how politicians campaigned and canvassed voters.
My move toward political science was informed by the encouragement of my parents to do something I would enjoy every day of my life. Watching election coverage and observing election results is consistently thrilling to me. There is a kind of majesty in the way collective decision-making reveals itself in a democracy. I wish to study and better understand it.
Your research examines reforms in governance like technology-enabled improvements in welfare delivery and the politics of development in South Asia. Why are these issues important and can they help us understand politics across the globe?
Over the past decade, international institutions like the World Bank and world leaders at the G20 have been interested in digital public infrastructure (DPI). When talking about DPI, these leaders typically refer to technological advancements such as the proliferation of smartphones, accessible banking and biometric authentication platforms. They refer to how governments can harness these technologies to better deliver welfare benefits, subsidies or other public goods.
But the political consequences of this technology have not been studied in great detail.
India is a particularly valuable case study because it is a multi-ethnic society on the forefront of digital public infrastructure implementation, with hundreds of welfare programs and nearly a billion beneficiaries. Lessons from India will be of interest to policymakers in other developing democracies, and India’s success will be central to the global fight against poverty.
Can you outline the work you are doing on the impact governments have when they introduce digital public infrastructure, such as technology that improves welfare delivery?
I am currently working on a book project focusing on how transformative changes in India’s welfare state have affected voting behavior. Digital public infrastructure is transforming the welfare state by reducing favoritism, rent-seeking or corruption, and increasing the range of welfare benefits provided. Four questions have emerged from this.
In systems with entrenched identity politics, do voters even care about the performance of politicians? If they do, do voters actually care about the way these programs are implemented, or solely about who receives a welfare benefit? What happens to the identity-based group dynamics of voting when welfare programs reach across ethnic boundaries, largely based on objective socioeconomic rules? As governments save money through effective implementation and the use of digital public infrastructure, how should they allocate money on different types of welfare? Some are more expensive benefits than others. Do voters reward expensive benefits more than inexpensive ones?
I argue that voters do care about performance and reward welfare delivery. However, they care about the outcomes delivered more than the process of efficient implementation. Ethnic voting persists and is especially salient in local and state-level politics. And counterintuitively, cheaper welfare benefits are just as impactful as more expensive ones.
In contrast to the scale of big digital public infrastructure, you are also doing research on small towns in India. What have you discovered about small-town governance?
Much of the future growth of global populations, particularly urban population, is going to happen in small towns. Yet most of our research, particularly when it comes to governance and politics, is on the megacities and their governance challenges. While rapid urbanization is playing out in smaller towns, governments are decentralizing political power to municipal level governments. They are given more money and are expected to deal with local problems.
However, if you visit smaller towns, you see a governance crisis. Local taxation is limited and public services are of poor quality.
One question emerges: Why have decentralization efforts to strengthen municipal governments failed to deliver expected improvements in local public services and the responsiveness of government?
Our new findings reveal that locally elected municipal politicians hold strikingly low levels of procedural knowledge about their own job roles and responsibilities. We are also finding a growing and pervasive problem: municipal governments fail to spend non-trivial amounts of money in their budgets.
So, what happens if we share this information with voters? We find that voters engage in a kind of “voice and exit”— they evaluate elected officials’ performance less favorably and seek greater financial accountability, but also report lower trust in local government, lower support for further decentralization and a decrease in willingness to pay local taxes.
In another line of inquiry, you are investigating a connection between city air pollution and democratic accountability. How are Indians navigating climate change politics?
I am from Delhi and some of us in the area or from other cities in South Asia are struck by how staggeringly intense — or lethal — the problem is, and how little it is reflected in our politics. According to estimates we cite in our paper, 6.7 to 9 million people die prematurely because of air pollution every year and 90% of those deaths are in low- or middle-income countries. It is, by some estimates, taking off almost a decade in life expectancy.
And look at where this is happening: of the 50 most polluted cities in the world, 39 are in South Asia and 10 of these are around India's capital. Delhi is arguably the epicenter of the air pollution crisis. So, is that mobilizing voters?
No. Surveys show fewer than 2% of citizens rate environmental issues such as air pollution important for them in elections. In an analysis of 7.9 million news articles from India, there is barely any instance of citizen mobilization on air pollution. Why don’t citizens and politicians politicize it?
In our research, we are able to rule out a few popular explanations. Delhi citizens have a high degree of awareness that air pollution causes them harm – lack of education or informational awareness does not seem to be as big of a concern. They also are aware that politicians and government policies are responsible for providing clean air. They are also not prioritizing developmental issues over environmental ones, something often attributed to voters in developing countries.
The first problem is political polarization. Partisan polarization, which exists in contexts outside of the U.S. including in developing countries like India, leads to selective blaming of politicians. The second problem is even though voters express a preference for cleaner air, these preferences are sensitive to costs, that is, whether voters would bear any personal cost. This high degree of personal cost sensitivity combined with the selective attribution of blame blunts the democratic accountability story in contexts like Delhi.
Whether it is the climate crisis, rapid urbanization, or technological changes and the use of digital public infrastructure, what I’m doing is studying the political accountability mechanisms at work in a democracy and how they are affected by rapid change and development.
Political Science