Democracy and Economic Growth: Do Swing Voters Make a Difference?

Abstract

Using actual voting records of simultaneous elections held for Indian federal and regional assemblies -- where same political parties contest against each other in both type of elections -- we identify swing voters. We find that the representatives supported by swing voters outperform significantly with respect to both constituency level outcomes as well as measures based on individual effort. Having controlled for the impact of observable factors, we follow Imbens (2003); Harada (2012) and conduct generalized sensitivity analysis in order to rule out the influence of unobservable factors. We show that the swing voters strengthen the positive association between democracy and growth.