A straightforward proposition at the heart of public economics is that in an electoral democracy, citizen preferences should influence the nature and quality of public good provision. Politicians seek votes; voters care about outcomes; governments therefore have an incentive to respond. Governments need not be benevolent for democracy to work. They merely need to find it costly to ignore sufficiently large numbers of voters. That is the theory. The more difficult question is whether and how this transmission mechanism works in practice.Consider the quality of the school a child attends, whether a competitive examination such as NEET is conducted fairly, whether water comes through the tap, whether electricity is available, whether the local road remains functional or whether the air outside is fit to breathe. These affect welfare directly and yet they have largely remained surprisingly weak electoral issues in India.AdvertisementGovernments lose elections, yes, but it is hard to tell if they have been defeated because the local school taught badly, or if buses were persistently unreliable, or the groundwater was contaminated, or urban air had crossed safe levels.Why does an intensely felt private grievance so often fail to become a political demand? Albert Hirschman, an economist, provided one part of the answer: Exit and voice. When a service deteriorates, users can demand that it improve, which is voice. Or they can abandon it for an alternative, which is exit. India has developed an extraordinary capacity for private exit from public failure. Unreliable electricity produces the inverter or generator; uncertain water supply produces the borewell, tanker and purifier; weak public transport produces the scooter and car; poor government schooling produces private schooling; inadequate public healthcare produces the private clinic; weak security produces the guard and gated colony. Each decision is individually rational. Together, they reflect a political equilibrium in which public failure becomes easier to tolerate because those with the resources and influence to demand reform have partly insulated themselves from it.Where richer and politically effective users remain dependent on public provision, pressure for reform is stronger. Where they exit, accountability weakens. Take passport services, railway reservations and rural elementary education as a contrast. Passport and railway services, which are heavily used by the middle classes, have experienced much stronger anti-corruption reform. Elementary schooling, from which better-off households exited, did not experience comparable pressure. The exit of richer citizens reduced pressure for reform, leaving poorer users to cope with weaker public systems.AdvertisementA public service may matter enormously to welfare and still have little electoral salience. The more recent politics of welfare suggests that governments appear to receive clearer electoral returns when benefits are visible, attributable and delivered directly to households. Piped water, LPG connections, electricity connections, toilets, food transfers and cash benefits differ from school quality or clean air in an important respect. The beneficiary can usually identify both the benefit and its political source. Ahead of the 2024 general election, many women voters directly linked their support for the government to visible improvements in piped water, cooking gas, more reliable electricity and cash transfers. This helps explain the rise of competitive welfarism. Governments increasingly prefer benefits that people can see, use and clearly associate with who delivered them.This may explain, at least in part, why poor public services can coexist with vigorous electoral democracy. Dissatisfaction is not enough. Citizens need information about the failure; they need some agreement about who is responsible; the problem must become sufficiently salient to outweigh competing electoral concerns, and political parties must offer a meaningful alternative. A bad government school may be deeply important to a parent and still fail to determine her vote if employment, inflation, caste, religion, welfare benefits or the identity of the candidate appear more pressing during voting. The weakness is, therefore, not that voters fail to care about public goods. It is that preferences must pass through several stages before they become electoral pressure.There is an additional difficulty. Political competition is partly also about the supply of choices, not simply the demand expressed by voters. If competing parties offer no meaningful difference on school quality or air pollution, voters can’t readily use the ballot to express a preference on those dimensions. A constituency can contain thousands of parents unhappy with its schools without education becoming electorally decisive if no serious candidate chooses to compete on school performance. The existence of a grievance does not automatically create a political market for its solution.This is where the recent agitation associated with the Cockroach Janta Party becomes interesting. Its initial focus on competitive examinations and paper leaks is not as narrow as it may appear. Examinations sit at an unusually sensitive point in contemporary India. Families invest enormous amounts of money and time in preparation for scarce university places and public employment. The examination system offers one basic assurance: Whatever the inequalities before the examination, the rules governing selection will at least be fair. A paper leak or compromised selection process creates a grievance that is hard to rationalise away as an ordinary administrative failure.School failure in India has traditionally been dispersed: An absent teacher in one village, a broken toilet in another school, a leaking roof somewhere else. Pratham has documented poor learning outcomes for decades, but these findings have rarely translated into sustained electoral pressure. The paper -leak controversy may be changing that. It has created a wider constituency around questions of fairness, competence and the quality of public education.you may likeSocial media has accelerated the process. It has reduced the cost of collecting and circulating evidence. What were isolated complaints are beginning to appear as parts of the same pattern. Millions of photographs, videos and testimonies are turning scattered experience into a collective political fact.Governments that are politically secure can absorb some adverse publicity. What matters is whether reputational damage becomes electoral cost. If examination integrity, school quality or some other neglected public service begins to influence candidate selection, campaign promises and voting behaviour, then the transmission mechanism may operate differently. The significant development would be that governments began to believe poor provision could cost votes.Kathuria is pro v-c and dean, School of Humanities and Social Sciences and professor of Economics, Shiv Nadar University. Views are personal