What are MPs for?

Begin at the basic unit of accountability in a parliamentary system: the constituency. Voters are called on to choose between different individuals under serious information constraints. Most voters, including our most educated, cannot even identify significant legislation passed in any given five year period. If legislation could be identified, the roles of individual MPs in contributing to debates over legislation, are almost impossible to communicate. Most of them are remote from the process of drafting legislation. When they do have a role, as in committees, this role cannot be leveraged into yielding public dividends.

We lament the fact that there is no debate in Parliament. But meaningful debate requires three background conditions: first, that there is a genuine difference of opinion between parties. Except on a small set of ideologically charged issues like secularism or who is more corrupt, our parties do not differ on principle. Second, there must be some sense that debates are consequential. But in a parliamentary system, especially with a fragmented party system, voting against your party line is almost impossible. Third, there must be some sense that debate can be leveraged for reputational gains. There is almost no evidence that this happens. Why would an MP take Parliament seriously? The business of legislation does not pay political dividends.

But return to the voters. How do we make individual abilities of MPs matter? We vote for or against parties, for or against policies, but cannot judge the individual performance of MPs. It is precisely because there are no mechanisms of signaling individual distinguishing qualities of candidates that other considerations, like family, caste, ability to direct patronage, matter. Moreover, most constituents do not engage with MPs on legislative issues. Rather, MPs are routinely called upon to intercede on behalf of their constituents’ individual or particular interests: getting particular favors done, transfers, appointments, contracts etc. Indeed, most surveys show that MPs spend more of their time attending to their constituents’ individual needs than to policy matters; they are judged by their ability to stitch coalitions through patronage. Neither the voters nor MPs internalise the norm that they are primarily law makers, not dispensers of individual favors. If we think that MPs are primarily dispensers of patronage, that they are instruments for the social mobility of particular individuals or groups, it is but a short step for MPs to think that politics is an instrument for their economic and social mobility. A politics structured around seeing access to state power as a means of social mobility has had the corrosive impact of making everything instrumental to individual gain. Legislators will not be dignified if voters do not dignify legislation.

Think of the dilemma an individual MP faces. High level legislation reaps no political dividends for individual MPs. On the other hand, most MPs have no real power over constituency matters. Indeed, the MPLAD scheme was introduced as a blunt palliative precisely because MPs were being judged at a constituency level, but they had no power or role in matters shaping that constituency. This disjuncture between the MPs’ role and what they are judged on will corrupt any system. In India the probability of a sitting MP getting re-elected is less than 0.5. This signals not only that voters are dissatisfied with politicians, it also suggests that voters have little informational bases for judging between them, and therefore do not think that the cost of switching is high. But cumulatively it also sends a message that what individual MPs do does not matter.

In most other democracies, this disjuncture is overcome through another mechanism: rewards and incentives within political parties. If political parties valued serious legislators, the incentives of politicians would change considerably. But when was parliamentary performance, or the ability to defend ideas, a measure of an MP’s political prospects within a party? When party structures are closed oligopolistic hierarchies that do not value ideas or performance, where loyalty is rewarded more than ability, deal brokering more than principle, what kinds of norms will MPs internalise?

It is time we stopped pretending that corruption is simply a matter of individual failing or getting a better system of punishment in place. Most corruption begins when there is a fundamental confusion over the principle underlying an institution. We do not have minimal clarity over what state and Parliament are supposed to be about. How will we generate norms governing their conduct? In the final analysis there are only two sites of accountability that can produce different MPs: the constituency and the political party. When both of them fail to send a signal about what is it that they value, is it any wonder MPs will waste themselves in veniality?

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. The views expressed are his own