International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research

E-ISSN: 2582-2160   •   Impact Factor: 9.24

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Volume 8 Issue 5
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Economic Inequality and the Distribution of Political Power in India

Author(s) Mr. Shivendra Pratap Chaudhary
Country India
Abstract India combines near-universal and socially levelled electoral participation with one of the highest concentrations of income and wealth recorded anywhere. This paper asks how economic inequality shapes the distribution and exercise of political power in India, and how political power in turn reproduces or transforms economic inequality. Rejecting the assumption that wealth converts automatically into influence, it identifies five institutionally specific conversion channels - candidate selection, party finance, regulatory rents, structural investment dependence, and agenda control - and traces their operation through Indian evidence on candidate assets, corporate political funding before and after the 2024 electoral bonds judgment, taxation, welfare design, and labour regulation. The central argument is that conversion in India is domain-asymmetric. Economic elites exercise disproportionate power over the rules governing accumulation, while mass electoral pressure retains genuine purchase over the distributive form of state action, principally targeted transfers and categorical recognition. This split-level pattern of political inequality explains an otherwise puzzling empirical divergence: falling consumption inequality alongside historically unprecedented wealth concentration. Countervailing institutions - federal variation, judicial intervention, electoral administration, reservation politics and claim-making from below - constrain particular channels without altering the underlying asymmetry.
Keywords economic inequality; political power; India; political economy; electoral finance; democratic responsiveness
Published In Volume 8, Issue 5, September-October 2026
Published On 2026-09-12
DOI https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i05.87347
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CrossRef DOI prefix of IJFMR is 10.36948/ijfmr

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