Illicit gains and state capture: Political party extortion in India and Pakistan

Political parties engage in extortion across the developing world. However, discussion of this phenomenon is largely absent from existing research. Drawing upon hundreds of in-depth interviews with local political party leaders, bureaucrats, journalists, and the police in regions of India and Pakistan, we articulate political parties’ economic and political objectives for extracting rents through extortion. We argue that party institutionalization plays an important role in how parties choose to extort and whether they ally with non-state or state actors. We also introduce an orders of political party extortion typology which explains how variation in competition with other armed actors over informal rights to extort a population has distinct downstream effects. Our study yields two key implications. First, extortion constitutes an entrenched coercive tie between political parties and voters in many developing democracies. Second and relatedly, it violates the rule of law, subverting democratic institutions in the process.