This paper seeks to understand how state level legislators in India, members of legislative assembly (MLAs), impact electoral choices at the national level. MLAs in India are rarely impactful in policymaking given the highly centralized and personalized nature of policymaking by the Prime Minister and chief ministers. However, they wield significant power in controlling local infrastructure and local police, affecting everything from electoral fairness at the polling booth to the treatment of various religious and caste groups. Many scholars have noted the increased use of police and surveillance to intimidate political opposition alongside growing concerns about unfair treatment of religious minorities, leading to concerns of democratic backsliding in India since the government led by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its governing coalition, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), has come to power.

In this context, we posit that citizens with MLAs aligned with the incumbent governing coalition are more likely to have experienced and be concerned about the misuse of political power. We employ a close election regression discontinuity design with data from the Indian Election Survey 2024 (IES 2024), a large, representative post poll around the 2024 Indian national election, to test these assertions. We find that the projected vote share of the incumbent NDA coalition drops by 5 percentage points in the national election when the MLA is from the incumbent NDA coalition. Further analyses confirm that citizens with MLAs from the NDA are more concerned about democratic legitimacy and the mistreatment of Muslim minorities in India.