Over the past few decades, many developing countries have substantially increased the number of sub-national administrative units. The political motivation to create new districts has been theorized to be the need to signal commitment to voters (Gottlieb et al. 2019), patronage to local supporters (Hassan 2016), negotiations with local elites in peripheral areas (Grossman and Lewis 2014), and managing legislative compliance and controlling defections (Hassan and Sheely 2017). Some of these mechanisms predict an increased electoral support for the government that is creating new districts in the subsequent elections, while others predict improved party discipline and fewer defections. Using granular booth level voting data from India and a geographic regression discontinuity research design, we investigate the electoral response to administrative proliferation. We identify a subset of new districts that bisected existing electoral units (or assembly constituencies). These electoral units therefore straddle two districts—one new and the other old—while they continue to share the same elected representative and allow us to test the electoral response to administrative proliferation. Contrary to previous empirical findings, mostly from Africa, our results show that there is no significant electoral advantage to the incumbent in creating a new administrative unit. These findings suggest that administrative proliferation is a policy metric aimed at local party elites to enhance party discipline rather than as a direct appeal to voters. Using constituency-level data from across Indian states, we also test the mechanism of party discipline and avoiding defections as driving the observed administrative proliferation.