Defector Politicians and Economic Growth : Evidence from India

Political defectors refer to politicians who switch parties. This paper uses a close-election regression discontinuity (RD) model to estimate the impact of electing political defectors to Indian state legislatures on economic growth (proxied by night-light growth) in their electoral constituencies. I estimate that the election of a defector from the governing party causes a 0.35-0.44 percentage point (5.5-6.9%) increase in GDP growth in their constituency. Furthermore, I find suggestive evidence that the mechanism for this higher growth is that political parties reward defectors with positions of power like ministerial roles in the state government