ALIGNING WITH ONE’S OWN: Private Voting and Public Outcomes in Elections in Rural India

This paper has the objective of showing that identity based voting will lead to improvements
in household welfare through increased access to welfare programs. Using newly available
data from rural India, we establish that identity based voting will lead to enhanced
participation in welfare programs and increased consumption growth. We also show that
consumption growth is retarded if households do not engage in identity based voting. Using
3 stage least squares, we are able to show that identity based voting results from the
externalities derived from membership in social and information networks, and such voting
by enhancing participation in welfare programs leads to significant increases in household
consumption growth.