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The paper contributes to the literature on legislative disruptions by introducing a novel explanation for why legislators choose to disrupt legislative business. Disruptions are usually perceived as acts of indiscipline in the legislature, but this study argues counterintuitively that disruptions are made possible through a discipline that legislative party leaders impose on their party legislators. Drawing from the literature on party discipline in the legislature, two hypotheses are advanced: first, that party leaders incentivise disruptive behaviour by rewarding disruptive legislators with priority in the allocation of scarce party resources; and second, that the level of institutionalisation of political parties influences their inclination to incentivise disruptions. These hypotheses are tested by using original data on disruptions that occurred during the 15th parliamentary term of the Indian parliament.

Humanities and Social Sciences

The Journal of Legislative Studies

Party discipline and disruptions of legislative business: evidence from India

The paper brings light to the role that the context of a country plays in influencing the policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that policy-makers take into consideration contextual factors that are specific to their country while making policy choices. Drawing from the argument, we go on to identify nine contextual factors that are likely to influence country responses to COVID-19. These factors are brought together into a policy dashboard, which showcases the cumulative effect of context. Further to this we construct a policy response index, which is a measure of expected policy response given a certain configuration of contextual factors. The index is used to form expectations on how the 30 largest countries are likely to respond to COVID-19. The expectations are compared to observed policy choices made by the countries in the early stages of the pandemic. The correlation is positive but low, and we expect higher convergence of observed policy choices with study expectations once there is stability in country policies.

World University root node

How Context affects Policy Response to COVID-19

Politics and society between elections: Public opinion in India's States

Loan waiver policies are ostensibly political decisions, but surprisingly there have been no political analyses of the policy. The paper presents a political study on the policy through a descriptive analysis of a comprehensive primary data set that comprises all loan waiver announcements in India over the last three decades. The findings bring into light the political, economic and environmental factors that have had a bearing on the politicians&rsquo; choice to introduce waivers. Further, it highlights that politicians choose from a variety of waiver policy designs, and this choice has substantive implications for the size of the waiver programme.

Economic and Political Weekly

The politics of farm loan waivers: a comparative study

The paper brings light to the politics of historical personalities in the Indian political discourse by
an analysis of 53 speeches delivered by the Indian Prime Minister (PM), Narendra Modi, between
October 2014 and February 2019 as part of a new communication intervention (‘Mann ki Baat’
(MkB)). We used the principle of ‘balance’ as a baseline to investigate whether the speeches
reflected an imbalance in the salience given to historical personalities. A preliminary analysis
reveals the following: We find higher salience of historical personalities that are ideological
sympathists of the PM’s party as compared to those that are ideological opponents of the party.
Interestingly, the highest salience was received by the category of ideological ‘targets’, which
comprises personalities that are not connected to the PM’s party but with whom alignment was
sought to be projected. The apparent strategy for aligning targets was by drawing connections
between the personalities and the policies of the government. Further, we find that aggregate
personality mentions rose over time and the increase was driven by mentions to ideological
sympathists. These preliminary findings on the ideological leanings of the speeches are
interesting as MkB had been repeatedly projected as serving an ‘apolitical’ purpose. Thereby the
study brings light to the subtle innovations in communication that politicians can employ for
furthering ideological objectives. 


WORKING PAPER

The Politics of Historical Personalities: Textual Analysis of Speeches by the Indian Prime Minister

Politics in India is viewed largely through the prism of elections. Every policy announcement made by the government and even statements or actions by individual politicians are analysed for their potential electoral impact. This preoccupation with elections is not entirely unusual since the discourse on politics in most democracies is dominated by elections, partially influenced by the seminal theoretical contribution by Downs (1957) that emphasized on the electoral motive behind political actions. But the hegemony of elections in India studies seems more complete than in other parts of the world, with near absence of empirical work on other political processes or institutions1 that do not give pre-eminence to elections. One reason for the skewed focus is because elections, locally regarded as ‘festivals of Indian democracy’, elicit great interest from the people. Political observers, who are unacquainted with the dynamics of Indian democracy, are frequently surprised to learn that electoral turnouts in most parts of India, a country with less than a hundred year legacy of modern democracy, are routinely high across elections to different governing bodies. In many cases, turnout levels surpass those in nations that have more established democratic traditions such as in US and parts of Europe. It is, therefore, natural that the ‘electoral event’ that galvanizes mass participation from people across the socio-economic divides of caste, class and religion would received is proportionate attention from the media and scholarly community alike. Over time the dominance of electoral studies has solidified with the advent of large sample surveys (such as the national election surveys since 1967) that are motivated to interpret the vote preferences of Indian voters. Alongside this, the Election Commission of India has, since the1990s, been proactive in the timely publishing of election results to the national and state assembly elections2. The availability of these high-quality data-sets has stimulated a number of studies that have cumulatively advanced our collective knowledge about the dynamics of elections in India. For instance, the much cited theory of the ‘second democratic upsurge’ by Yogendra Yadav was built on systematic evidence of persistently high electoral turnouts by voters belonging to marginalized communities such as Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST), Other Backward Classes (OBC) and minorities. Their striking finding that the socio-economic plebeians in Indian society vote in higher proportions than the historically dominant social groups differentiates the functioning of democracy in India with its workings in other parts of the world. But in contrast to the wide-ranging analyses on elections, there have been no comparable efforts to gather information on the functioning of other political process and institutions. Wilkinson(2010) highlights the many substantive gaps in our understanding of nonelectoral politics in India. To be fair, in recent times some encouraging beginnings have been made with the publication of two ‘State of Democracy in South Asia’ (SDSA) reports in 2008 and 2017, that have broadened the scope of inquiry to questions on the state of democracy, popular trust in institutions and so on. These are, however, still early explorations into a vast unchartered space, and we need more studies on Indian politics that go beyond the narrow sphere of elections.

Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

Indian politics 'between' elections: studies on the role of institutions

Indian politics' between'elections: studies on the role of institutions

Fulltext

Studies in Indian Politics

Louise Tillin, Rajeshwari Deshpande and KK Kailash (eds), Politics of Welfare: Comparisons across Indian States

Book Review: Louise Tillin, Rajeshwari Deshpande and K.K. Kailash (eds), Politics of Welfare: Comparisons across Indian States

South Asia Research

Book Review: Pawan Agarwal (Ed.), A Half-century of Indian Higher Education: Essays by Philip G. Altbach

IIMB Management Review

A Half-Century of Indian Higher Education: Essays by Philip G. Altbach and Edited by Pawan Agarwal

Indian reservation policy-a study of its effects in IIM Bangalore

The paper examines an unexplored form of legislative obstruction, parliamentary disruptions, in the context of the Indian parliament. We offer a two-fold explanation for why parliamentary disruptions are frequent in India. Firstly, we argue that political and institutional developments after the 1980s have led to very high concentration of power in the hands of the leadership of parliamentary parties. This has empowered party leaders to exert party discipline over legislators for the conduct of disruptions, an act that breaks the norms and rules of parliamentary functioning. Secondly, we empirically show that party discipline is exerted by presenting legislative and electoral incentives to legislators for being active in disruptions: (a) Legislators, who participate visibly in disruptions, are favored with more opportunities to represent the party in parliamentary debates as well as higher likelihood of party re-nomination in the next elections. (b) Among legislators that participate in disruptions, those that incur high private costs, in the act of disruption, are likely to receive higher payoffs and (c) The magnitude of legislator payoffs is contingent on the party's position in parliament. For the empirical analysis, we use primary data on disruptions in the Indian parliament during the five year tenure of the 15th Lok Sabha.