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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Assembly elections: Richer, educated candidates fared well in the 5 states -Harry Stevens

Assembly elections: Richer, educated candidates fared well in the 5 states -Harry Stevens

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published Published on Mar 15, 2017   modified Modified on Mar 15, 2017
-Hindustan Times

Wealthier candidates were far more likely to win their constituency than their less wealthy competitors, according to an analysis of election data and candidate affidavits by the Hindustan Times.

Across 689 constituencies in the assembly elections in Goa, Manipur, Punjab, Uttarakhand, and Uttar Pradesh, the wealthiest candidate won 33.5% of the time, compared to just 24.6% for the second wealthiest candidate and 17% for the third wealthiest.

The odds were heavily stacked against poorer candidates. Of the 639 fifth-wealthiest candidates, just 41 — 6.4% — won their constituencies. Only four of 394 tenth-wealthiest candidates won, or just a little more than 1%.

Education, too, contributed to candidates’ chances of winning. Candidates with a doctorate degree, for example, won nearly a fifth of their races, while the poorly educated fared much worse. Of the 102 candidates whose affidavits said they were illiterate, just two – Satya Prakash Agrawal from UP and Yamthong Haokip from Saikul in Manipur – came out on top.

Yet the road to electoral victory is paved with cash, not diplomas.

“To run a decent campaign, you need a lot of money,” said Niranjan Sahoo, a senior fellow with the Observer Research Foundation’s Governance and Politics Initiative. Most of the time, “the main criterion for getting selected to be a candidate is your ability to raise money or whether you already have the money bags with you.”

Voters may also be more attracted to wealthy candidates because they are seen as being better able to grease the wheels of local bureaucracies.

“The job description of an elected representative is not to sit in the assembly,” said Gilles Verniers, a political scientist at Ashoka University, but instead to act as a power broker between constituents and state agencies. “Being wealthy enables to you to meet, to a certain extent, the expectations of voters.”

To be sure, some poorer candidates were able to beat the odds. Of the 689 winning candidates HT analysed, four were in debt, according to their affidavits, while another winning candidate declared no assets at all.

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Hindustan Times, 15 March, 2017, http://www.hindustantimes.com/assembly-elections/assembly-polls-2017-wealthiest-candidates-fared-much-better-than-poorer-ones/story-hXx7k3mVdf9HC3u4h0X3AO.html


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