The Cost of Political Representation

We estimate the causal impact of citizen candidates on political representation in India. To do this we exploit exogenous changes in the entry deposit candidates pay for their participation in the political process, changes that disproportionately excluded candidates with no affiliation to established political parties. A one standard deviation increase in the number of citizen candidates increases voter turnout by more than 5 percentage points, as voters who have a favored candidate choose to vote rather than stay home. The vote share of citizen candidates increases by 9 percentage points, as some existing voters switch who they vote for. These results imply citizen candidates improve the representation of voter preferences at the ballot box. We show further that citizen candidates allow winning candidates to win with less vote share, and thus decrease the probability that their constituency's elected candidate is a member of government by about 28 percentage points. This implies that there is a sizeable tradeoff between better preference representation at the ballot box and better constituency representation in government.