Public Sector Employment as a Pathway to Electoral Politics? Evidence from India

The nature of political selection fundamentally influences how well democracies perform. Recent work has noted that belonging to certain professions may increase the likelihood of political entry. I study whether a highly coveted occupation in developing countries – public sector employment – is a pathway to electoral politics. Theoretically, I use qualitative insights to recast political entry as a household-level phenomenon: I argue that any member of a household acquiring public sector employment influences the entire household’s likelihood of entering politics. Empirically, I show this to be the case using a nationally representative panel dataset of 40,000 households, employing a difference-in-differences framework. Next, I use conjoint experiments embedded in an original survey of 1100 citizens to show government jobs increase perceptions of candidate winnability. Finally, I show that not all public sector job households are perceived equally by voters with respect to their winnability: those that are associated with larger improvements in mechanisms are more likely to spur entry.