Criminals have long been involved in the ugly aspects of election violence and political competition in some developing democracies. In recent years however, they have moved to center stage in many countries—running for political office themselves. Nowhere does this trend seem more perplexing than in India, one of the few stable democracies in the developing world. Despite the fact that India began its modern political life with a distinguished and experienced set of political leaders in 1947, its politics at every level seems increasingly penetrated by criminals today. While this phenomenon has been widely noted, it has rarely been studied systematically. When Crime Pays is one of the first empirical studies to address this phenomenon.

Milan Vaishnav tackles this puzzle by asking three questions that address the entire chain of the criminalization of politics: Why did criminals decide to move from lending their muscle in support of other politicians to becoming politicians themselves? Why do political parties choose to give such criminals their valuable nominations? Finally, why do voters choose to support individuals known to be criminals by voting them into office? The book is divided into three parts. Part I sets the stage by providing context for the Indian case, Part II directly addresses the three questions posed by Vaishnav, and Part III discusses the implications of the empirical findings of the book for policy reform and offers some policy prescriptions.

Vaishnav first sets the context for the reader by tracing the history of criminal entry into, and participation in, Indian politics from existing sources. He defines a criminal politician as a one who has “been named in ongoing criminal cases, even if a court of law has not conclusively established their guilt” (p. x). In 2003, the Supreme Court issued a decision requiring all candidates for national and state assemblies to file affidavits detailing their financial and criminal backgrounds. Vaishnav uses such affidavits filed by 46,739 candidates for 35 state assembly elections and 21,697 candidates for the national parliament for the elections of 2004, 2009, and 2014 in order to create a data set recording various criminal and party characteristics of these candidates. He then demonstrates the value of his new affidavit-derived data set by documenting the steep rise in the share of elected members of parliament (MPs) with criminal backgrounds from 24% in 2004 to 34% in 2014, their presence in every part of the country, the parallel trend of rising criminality in state assemblies, the severity of the charges themselves (including, for example, 4,357 murder-related charges) and, finally, the superior win rates of criminal politicians compared to noncriminal politicians.

In Part II Vaishnav presents his own theories and tests them alongside existing explanations for the rise and success of criminal politicians. He begins by explaining the decision by criminals to run for office in Chapter 3. The key trigger, he argues, was the decline of Indian National Congress Party hegemony in 1977 and the emergence of electoral uncertainty as a constant feature of Indian politics. In this new environment of high political uncertainty, criminals realized that elected politicians could no longer reliably protect them or deliver on favors promised in exchange for the use of criminals’ muscle during and after elections. Additionally, acting as supporting muscle to politicians had taught criminals the value of holding office and the social status it brought to such individuals. These factors led criminals to change tactics from outsourcing political protection to doing it “in-house” by becoming politicians themselves. In Chapter 4, Vaishnav explains why political parties became more willing to give their valuable tickets to criminals. In a context of rising costs of elections, low party membership, and a ban on corporate donations, he argues, financially squeezed parties found the ability of criminals to finance their own campaigns and donate toward a party’s general war chest very valuable (pp. 121–22), more valuable than their muscle power; consequently, these parties nominated them as candidates. The author’s statistical analysis then shows that the wealth of candidates positively influenced the likelihood of their victory, and that wealth rather than the muscle of criminal politicians led to their electoral success.

Chapter 5 presents perhaps the most insightful and interesting contribution of the book. Existing studies argue that criminal politicians win because voters lack information about their criminality. In contrast, Vaishnav argues that their criminality is what attracts voters to criminal politicians. He posits that the extensive presence of bureaucratic obstacles, pervasive social difficulties, and weak rule of law in India create high demand for mediators, patrons, and welfare provision among citizens, and that governments and parties have failed to meet these needs. The author then argues that criminal politicians use their criminal backgrounds to credibly signal their capacity and willingness to use their resources and their muscle in legal and illegal ways to meet these voter needs. Voters interpret the criminality of these politicians as the capacity to serve in these roles, and choose to support them. He tests this hypothesis in the state of Bihar, which is notorious for the use of muscle in politics. Analyzing data from a survey of 2,000 voters fielded during the 2014 assembly elections, and using insights obtained from observing multiple election campaigns alongside candidates, he finds that the more informed voters are about the criminal backgrounds of candidates, the more likely they are to vote for them.

In Chapter 6, Vaishnav extends his analysis in two insightful ways. First, he exploits the indirect elections to the upper chamber to show that parties are less likely to support criminals when they do not need money or muscle to win. Second, he uses changes in the designation of districts, from being reserved for specific ethnic groups to not (or vice versa) to show that concerns about ethnic discrimination have a significant influence on voter support for criminals. He finds that support for criminal politicians increases among voters whose districts are stripped of their reserved designation and decreases among voters in districts that are designated as reserved. On the basis of these results, Part III then offers some interesting policy prescriptions to address the criminalization of Indian politics. For example, Vaishnav argues that reforms aimed at increasing transparency about the criminal and financial backgrounds of candidates will not help to improve matters.

As with all research, readers are left with some concerns that are not adequately addressed in the book. Some elements in the research design, data, and analysis required more attention than they received and raise questions about some of the findings. While acknowledging that the unverified nature of the self-disclosed information reported in the affidavits invites caution (p. 150), the book does not attempt any such validation itself. It would have been valuable to find the share of candidates with no criminal charges pending against them who were nevertheless widely known to be criminals. If this share is even moderate, it requires a reevaluation of the results, since the noncriminal pool of candidates would then be mixing two very different types of candidates—the noncriminal and the highly criminal. Furthermore, social context, such as which ethnic group dominates in a particular district or state, may influence the likelihood that criminal charges are actually filed successfully against certain candidates in the first place. It would have been very useful to see some effort at verifying the veracity of these reports of criminality and innocence among candidates. Given the daunting complexity of languages, this could have been done by collecting information through media sources and interviews for a limited number of districts selected either completely at random or by using a crafted, comparative case study design.

While the analysis of Bihar is fascinating, it is not embedded in a systematic case selection strategy. This leaves the reader to wonder what the scope of its findings are and its precise role is in the larger theoretical analysis. Vaishnav’s analyses also do not differentiate between independent candidates and party candidates and the prevalence of criminals in the two categories. This matters because while independents make up only 1.4% of elected MPs (82 out of 43,300 MPs in his sample), they make up almost 56% of the candidates in his sample. This raises a number of questions: To what extent is the success of criminals in politics due to the fact that they are running as party candidates rather than as independents? Once we account for the fact that criminality makes criminals more attractive to parties as candidates, that is, it influences their selection as party candidates, does a criminal background still have any effect on a politician’s ability to win? Are criminals more successful when we compare them not to all noncriminals but only to noncriminal partisan candidates?

Notwithstanding these concerns, When Crime Pays provides a welcome contribution to the field of Indian politics specifically and clientalism and party politics generally. It addresses an important dimension of Indian politics that has been acknowledged widely but has received little systematic attention. The resulting analysis potentially has implications for other countries experiencing increased criminalization of their politics as well. Furthermore, its use of qualitative evidence gleaned from substantial fieldwork to inform, contextualize, and substantiate the results of the large-N statistical analyses is laudable and directly demonstrates the value of combining qualitative and quantitative analysis. The candidate data set it uses will be a valuable resource for India scholars and comparativists more generally once its validity has been strengthened.

The novel insights from Vaishnav’s analyses allow us to pose new questions that can push this agenda forward in many productive directions. For example, parties field candidates from districts that are party strongholds and districts that are not. How do parties choose the types of districts from which to field criminals? Are the assets that criminals bring to the party—money, muscle, and their Robin Hood reputation in some cases—more valuable for elections in secure or swing districts? Answering such questions would allow us to better understand how weakly institutionalized parties attempt to secure their political support, and how their tactics affect democratic quality in turn in India and in other countries.