More than Proxy Power: The Determinants of Decision-making Influence Among India’s Local-level Representatives

Our work is the first large scale, empirically-minded attempt to name, theorize, measure, and experimentally identify the determinants of a phenomenon claimed to be rampant throughout the world’s largest democracy - proxy politics. In order to empirically evaluate the degree of “proxiness” of elected officials from various groups, we deploy throughout this study the concept of “institutional centrality:” an elected official’s degree of centrality in the decision-making processes delineated by a given set of institutional rules, rather than a number of possible alternatives such as power, influence, or agency. Our site of interest is rural India, where the world’s largest democratic system co-exists with high levels of social heterogeneity and extreme economic and political inequality, which represents one of the greatest challenges for effective, substantive representation via democratic politics.