Political Connections and Elite Capture in a Poverty Alleviation Programme in India

Political elite capture in public welfare programmes is rife in the low-income countries. Analysing a nationally-representative Indian household survey dataset, we examine the political connections hypothesis and find that a household connected to a local political executive (somebody close or as a family member) vis-a-vis not connected significantly increases the probability of its obtaining an important poverty-alleviating entitlement; that is, a below-poverty-line ration card in all three contexts: national, rural, and urban. This ubiquity of political elite capture at the local government level has guiding policy implications for the beneficiary identification process in the future.