Just in time: Political policy cycles of land reform
| Author | Andrew Q Philips |
| Published date | 01 May 2020 |
| Date | 01 May 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0263395719859459 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2019
Article
Politics
2020, Vol. 40(2) 207 –226
Just in time: Political policy
© The Author(s) 2019
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cycles of land reform
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395719859459
DOI: 10.1177/0263395719859459
journals.sagepub.com/home/pol
Andrew Q Philips
University of Colorado Boulder, USA
Abstract
While the political budget cycle literature focuses on the manipulation of existing policies, an
analysis of the impact of the passage of redistributive policies themselves remains absent. I contend
that policy passage is a strategically timed signal to voters used before elections to benefit the
incumbent. Using aggregate data on land reforms in India from 1957 to 1992, I find that reforms
are indeed timed before elections. Second, using historical survey data, I show that land issues
remain a strong signal to Indian voters over time, even in states that have already enacted reforms.
These findings provide evidence for political policy cycles.
Keywords
India, land reform, political cycles
Received: 6th September 2018; Revised version received: 15th March 2019; Accepted: 3rd June 2019
For parties in government, elections represent a period of uncertainty. To reduce this
uncertainty, incumbents may create a variety of economic and distributional distortions
around elections in order to remain in office, such as increasing total spending, running
budget deficits, or using targeted forms of distribution to specific voter groups. These are
known broadly as political cycles. With a few exceptions, the extant literature has focused
only on the manipulation of existing policies. While fluctuations in expenditures and
revenues around elections are important, analyses of the strategic passage of new policies
remain understudied in the literature on political cycles.
I argue that political parties, conscious of the need to win support among large seg-
ments of the population, will time the passage of redistributive policies in order to
maximize their support. While they do not consist of incremental changes like budgets,
I find consistent evidence that certain policies are passed just before elections. Moreover,
this process repeats itself over time, suggesting that these policies are an important tool
used to win over voters. By focusing on the timed policy passage of redistributive poli-
cies, I contribute to the growing literature on electoral cycles in non-budgetary areas
Corresponding author:
Andrew Q Philips, Department of Political Science, University of Colorado Boulder, UCB 333, Boulder, CO
80309-0333, USA.
Email: andrew.philips@colorado.edu
208
Politics 40(2)
(Ahlquist, 2010; DeRouen and Heo, 2000; Mechtel and Potrafke, 2013; Tepe and
Vanhuysse, 2014).
This article addresses two related lines of literature: distributive politics and political
cycles. Distributive politics primarily focuses on the distributive consequences of elec-
tions. In contrast, political cycles tend to focus on macro-level manipulation of existing
fiscal policies. Drawing off work emphasizing how governments gain electoral support
through increasing spending to ‘visible’ budgetary categories, I argue it is not necessarily
the actual rewards – but the promise of future rewards – that has been overlooked in the
literature. Policy passage is an ideal form of manipulation since it provides a clear signal
to voters of promised future benefits, while remaining less costly to governments than a
strategy of altering existing policies, particularly so if governments are fiscally con-
strained (Nooruddin and Chhibber, 2008).
To test for political policy cycles, I examine the passage of state-level land reform
legislation in India. Certain groups, primarily the large number of landless and poor
working farmers – a valuable voting bloc in India (Bandyopadhyay, 1986; Banerjee et al.,
2002 Bardhan and Mookherjee, 2010) – clearly benefit more than others. Thus, promises
of expropriation are a signal meant to attract a substantial number of votes from the mid-
dle and lower classes (Banerjee and Iyer, 2005). To support this claim, I use historical
survey data from the Indian National Election Study to examine whether repeated pas-
sage of land reforms still remains salient to voters.
The results suggest that policies such as land reform are passed the year before an elec-
tion. This result remains robust to a variety of econometric specifications as well as the
inclusion of additional control variables, providing support to the theory that policies are
passed strategically in order to win votes. Moreover, the survey results show that voters
view land reform as a salient issue, regardless of previous policy enactments. Taken
together, these results indicate that land reform policy is a signal to voters that politicians
use to their advantage.
The determinants of political budget cycles
As elections near, governments are likely to create budget cycles in order to sway voters by
bending the cyclical line in their favour through fiscal or monetary manipulation (Philips,
2016). A large body of literature focuses on the factors that affect political budget cycles,
such as the flexibility of election timing (Kayser, 2005), or democratic consolidation
(Barberia and Avelino, 2011). Equally important is timing; policies must be implemented at
a time in which the party in government can take credit for it. In order for such implementa-
tion to be effective, policies must be passed close enough to an election that they are still
fresh in the minds of voters. Although the focus of many of these theories has been on tim-
ing, the beneficiaries of particular strategies has been underemphasized in the literature.
While scholars of political cycles have written extensively about the causes of fiscal
changes around elections, scholars of distributive politics have focused on targeted spend-
ing designed to win the support of particular groups. Dixit and Londregan (1996) propose
that instead of providing benefits to core supporters, parties in a two-party system will
compete for swing voters by allocating redistributive policies towards them (c.f., Kwon,
2005). This model contrasts with the core-voter theory (Cox and McCubbins, 1986). In a
compromise between these competing theoretical expectations, Albertus (2012) finds that
governments employ a mix of short-term rewards for their core voters while giving more
permanent funds to swing supporters in order to build clientelistic relationships.
Philips
209
Targeted distribution may also be strategically timed to coincide with elections. For
instance, Cole (2009) finds that agricultural lending to Indian farmers increases between
5% and 10% during an election year. In Columbia, targeted expenditure areas such as
roads and infrastructure significantly increase during election years in order to gain voter
support (Drazen and Eslava, 2006). In other instances, programmatic policies may be
enacted to benefit entire constituency types. For example, Sáez and Sinha (2010) find that
Indian states increase spending on public goods such as education and health prior to an
election. Overall, in a meta-analysis, Philips (2016) finds limited evidence that any par-
ticular category of expenditures is routinely increased before elections.
Party ideology is also an important component of distributive policies, although the
extent to which ideology applies to distributive spending appears to be conditional on
whether parties spend opportunistically or based on partisan considerations. On the one
hand, Sáez and Sinha (2010) hypothesize that supporter composition influences the ideo-
logical spending preferences of Indian political parties. Yet they find almost no significant
ideological effect across parties, evidence that they are opportunistic; parties spend in any
budget category necessary to ensure re-election. In contrast, the investigation of pre-elec-
tion spending in Portuguese municipalities by Veiga and Veiga (2007) suggests that parties
of the left tend to spend more than right-wing parties around elections. Therefore, ideology
may affect not only the type, but also the magnitude of opportunistic spending.
Finally, the intensity of competition between political parties may determine whether
distributive benefits are directed towards core supporters or the population more broadly
(Aidt et al., 2011; Chhibber and Nooruddin, 2004; Cole, 2009). Parties will reward core
supporters in less competitive regions, yet reward swing voters as competition increases,
as long as core supporters remain loyal even without an increase in benefits.
Political ‘policy’ cycles
Despite the substantial literature on both distributive policies and political budget cycles,
there is relatively little research linking the two together. Although existing policies may
change during elections, does the passage of distributive policies become more likely as
well? In other words, is it possible for the government to gain the support of voters
through mechanisms other than fiscal spending before an election? Some scholars have
found that non-budgetary policies can be used as signals to voters. For example, Tepe and
Vanhuysse (2014) find that more artists are hired for public theatres and orchestras in
Germany around elections. DeRouen and Heo (2000) conclude that US defence contracts
are more numerous before elections. Mechtel and Potrafke (2013) find that...
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