Getting Rich Too Fast? Experimental Evidence on Voters' Reactions to Politicians' Wealth Accumulation in India
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Asset declarations requiring politicians to disclose their financial information are becoming increasingly common across the world. The information contained in these disclosures frequently reveals that politicians rapidly accumulate wealth while in office, a fact that may raise suspicion among voters. However, little is known about the ways in which such information may affect voter behavior. To address this gap, we use original experimental and survey data from India to explore voters’ reactions to information about wealth and wealth accumulation. Results suggest that voters strongly disapprove of wealth accumulation in office and associate it with corruption and political violence. Further analyses suggest several mechanisms that may partly explain why many “wealth accumulators” win elections in India despite these negative reactions. Voters generally lack information about disclosures and many weigh wealth accumulation less than some other prominent concerns, such as performance in office or caste-based appeals.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".