1. New Rules for Indian Politics?
June 17, 2015
INSTITUTE
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Dr. Milan Vaishnav,
Associate, South Asia Program,
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
www.idfcinstitute.org
2. New Rules for Indian Politics?
Milan Vaishnav | June 17, 2015
18. A cautionary tale?
“India has not reached a stage where the people would prefer a
CEO to a politician to run the government.”
-- K.C. Suri (2004)
19. Good economics ≠ good politics
Source: Vaishnav and Swanson (2015)
20. Are things changing?
“Since independence, many Indian voters have
reflexively ejected politicians from office even
when they had compiled decent records in
power…Recently, though, Indian voters have
started to reward good performance, especially
in state-level politics.”
- Arvind Subramanian (2009)
21. 2009 Lok Sabha elections
Source: Gupta and Panagariya (2014)
22. Good economics ≠ good politics
Source: Vaishnav and Swanson (2013)
24. Most important issue in 2014?
0
0.05
0.1
0.15
0.2
0.25
0.3
Economic
Growth
Corruption Inflation Personal
Income
Law and
Order
Access
Govt
Benefits
Strong
Leadership
Identity
Share
or
respondents
rural urban
Source: Lok Foundation (2014)
27. Social biases: positive & negative
46%
36%
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
35%
40%
45%
50%
Co-ethnic affinity Ethnic bias
%
of
respondents
demonstrating
“bias”
Source: Authors’ calculations based on Lok Foundation data
28. 2014 BJP performance in north India
65
48
34
55
11
45
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
Upper Caste OBC SC ST Muslims Others
BJP
vote
share
(%)
Social Group
Source: CSDS (2014)
29. “Rainbow coalitions” (Bihar 2010)
Social group % vote for NDA
Brahmin 64
Bhumihar 48
Rajput 68
Other Upper Caste 89
Yadav 18
Kurmi-Koeri 70
Other OBC 63
Chamars 41
Pasi 25
Other SC 52
Muslim 27
Others 47
Source: CSDS (2010)
Upper
Caste
OBC
SC
Minorities
30. Degree of co-ethnic voting
14.2%
39.2%
85.9%
60.8%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
Coethnic Group co-ethnic
Yes
No
Source: Vaishnav (2014)
37. Hereditary MPs (by age)
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
Under 30 30-39 40-49 50-59 60-69 70-79 80 and up
Percent
Age cohort
Source: The Hindu (2014); French (2010)
42. Conclusion
• Regionalization has stalled; BJP has become
“central pole”
– Blessing and a curse
• Aspirations of voters have changed, yet
quality of candidates on offer has not
• Social biases remain entrenched even though
their expression might be changing
43. Our next discussion….
INSTITUTE
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Fundamental reform in Indian finance
Dr. Ajay Shah
Head of the Macro/Finance Group at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy
July 6, 2015
www.idfcinstitute.org
Editor's Notes
It is a great honor and privilege to be here today at Brown-Harvard-MIT joint seminar, the home to so much excellent scholarship on South Asia. As is the custom in India, one begins a talk by thanking their gurus. There are too many here for me to thank!
I want to thank them for inviting me, and you for coming – allowing an impostor rather than a real academic in your midst.
Rather than present a book manuscript or a well-thought out paper, which is the sensible thing for a researcher to do, I am going to instead focus on a set of puzzles in the hopes of provoking your thoughts and the conversation. I’ll confess that I come armed with questions, more than answers.
The 2014 Indian general election was an historic event on multiple counts.
It was exceptional, first and foremost, by virtue of its size.
The election was also historic due to the outcome it produced.
That the opposition BJP emerged victorious surprised few analysts, yet the magnitude of the rout and the defeat endured by the incumbent Congress caught even longtime India watchers off guard
First SPM in 3 decades
First non-Congress SPM
Highest turnout ever
Of course, the election also garnered significant attention in no small measure thanks to the identity of BJP leader NarendraModi
Although it is hard to imagine now, just two percent of survey respondents preferred Modi as their choice for the next prime minister when polled after the 2009 general election
But if one retreats from the immediate political context of the BJP victory, it is clear that India’s 2014 general election captured widespread attention for an even more fundamental reason
Many observers regard the 2014 verdict as historic because they believe that the results represent an important watershed in the behavior and attitudes of the Indian voter, the main protagonist in India’s diverse democracy.
The overwhelming victory of Modi and the BJP offer the possibility that certain propositions commonly bandied about regarding the Indian voter may, in fact, no longer be true.
The purpose of the present study is to consider several generally accepted truths about the Indian voter and ask whether, in light of the 2014 general election, they are in need of re-examination
Despite claims about the expanding footprint of regional parties, the data tell a different story.
Indeed, over the past several election cycles, the overall balance of power between national and regional parties remains largely unchanged.
Generally speaking, the ratio of votes going to Congress and the BJP versus all others has been somewhat stable since 1996, on the order of 50:50
What changed significantly in 2014 is not the distribution of votes between national and regional parties, but the distribution of the “national party” vote
Essentially, without changing their aggregate vote share, the Congress and BJP have switched places in the five years between 2009 and 2014
Quite literally, the BJP victory appears to have redrawn the political map of India.
In 2009, the BJP’s presence was limited to very select pockets of the country.
This smattering of seats grew by leaps and bounds in 2014 into a sea of saffron, literally touching all four corners of the country.
In most democracies, the proposition that politicians rise or fall on the backs of how the economy performed under their watch is considered received wisdom (Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier 2000).
That famous phrase that grew out of U.S. president Bill Clinton’s 1992 U.S. presidential campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid,” has since been copied the world over.
But in India, years of scholarship and popular commentary have argued that good economics need not make for good politics as voters there prioritize factors other than economic performance when evaluating incumbent governments.
Namely, Indian voters are said to put more stock in patronage, populism, or parochialism when selecting their representatives.
The result of this is that even governments that observers generally agree have performed in objective terms well often get the boot at the ballot box.
This description is slightly unfair insofar as it assumes Indians are irrationally unconcerned with their material well-being. Perhaps a more fair characterization is that Indians have traditionally cared more about their own personal well-being rather than the broader health of the macro-economy. This can then be linked to the distinction between “egotropic” (pocketbook) and “sociotropic” (national, or macro-economic) voting in the economic voting literature (Anderson 2007).
The quintessential example of the conundrum that good economics does little to help, and may even harm, an elected state or national leader’s future prospects is the demise of former Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu.
Ruling the populous southern Indian state for nearly a decade starting in the mid-1990s, Naidu was the darling of the international donor community. Business leaders revered him and hailed him as a visionary for his sound economic management and pro-growth policies.
Naidu even took the unusual step of hiring Western consulting giant McKinsey to develop reform ideas, encapsulated in a manifesto entitled “Vision 2020.”
For all of his efforts, however, Naidu was unceremoniously dismissed by his state’s voters. The reasons behind Naidu’s loss are complex; they have to do as much with alliance logic, caste arithmetic, and pure bad luck as with popular disquiet over his perceived pro-rich bias. Yet observers have elevated Naidu’s downfall to a kind of generalizable cautionary tale about Indian politics
On the surface, Suri’s quip appears to have considerable empirical backing (Vaishnav and Swanson, in progress). Looking back at more than 120 state-level elections across eighteen major states over the past three decades, it appears that Naidu’s misfortune is not unique.
Between 1980 and 2012, there was almost zero correlation between average per capita economic growth during a state government’s tenure in office and conventional metrics of electoral success.
This is true whether success is gauged by the change in the percentage of seats, votes the incumbent won, or simply by whether the incumbent was reelected.
Notwithstanding this null association, there is an emerging belief among some observers of Indian politics that the ground is shifting beneath politicians’ feet.
While in the past voters may not have been attentive to issues of the economy, with the passage of time—these observers argue—good economics has increasingly made for good politics.
According to this view, India’s political economy has undergone a structural break in the last decade.
Politicians too seem to have picked up on this supposed shift. When NarendraModi won his third mandate as chief minister of Gujarat in December 2012, he proclaimed the end of the traditional narrative that economic growth and re-election do not proceed hand in hand. In Gujarat, he said, “people have shown that [they support] good economics and good governance.”
Advocates of this view cite several pieces of evidence in support of their optimistic assessments of the growing meritocratic nature of Indian elections.
Beyond anecdotes, there is also hard evidence to support the notion that voters in India are now rewarding parties that deliver better economic outcomes as well.
The authors find that 85 percent of the incumbent party’s candidates in “high-growth” states won re-election.
In contrast, on average, those in “medium-growth” and “low-growth” states won only 52% and 40% of the seats they contested, respectively.
These arguments, though compelling, still stand in marked contrast to this figure, which shows no association between growth and electoral performance at the state-level over the past several decades.
One way of reconciling this puzzle is to disaggregate the relationship between politics and economics to see if there is any evidence of increasing positive electoral returns to growth over time
After all, if the contention is that economic voting has become more prominent over time, one needs to pursue a more dynamic analysis
Statistical analyses, after controlling for a range of potentially confounding factors, reveal that:
a 1 percentage point improvement in a state’s growth rate in the 2000s is linked to a greater than 9 percent increase in the likelihood that the incumbent will be reelected,
a 4 percentage point gain in seat share,
and a 1.3 percentage point rise in vote share
These effects are unique to the most recent decade, as growth failed to deliver positive electoral returns in either the 1980s or 1990s.
Coming to the present, the victory of the BJP in the 2014 general elections was widely interpreted as conclusive evidence in support of the notion that good economics and good politics can proceed hand in hand.
On the hustings, Modi’s campaign speeches were littered with a litany of pro-development catch phrases such as “sab ka saath, sab ka vikas” (Together with all, Development for all) and “maximum governance, minimum government.”
A July 2013 all-India preelection survey conducted by the Lok Foundation found that, of voters who expressed a preference, the economy and development were among the most important determinants of their vote choice.
What is intriguing about this finding is the surprising consistency in responses across both rural and urban areas
Voters’ preoccupation with the economy is further demonstrated by a second survey this one carried out after voting had been completed
Thus, the 2014 results are supportive of the notion that Indian voters are prioritizing macroeconomic fundamentals to a greater extent than before, although the evidence from state election results indicates that 2014 is an exclamation point on an existing trend rather than the start of something entirely novel
On the one hand, the survey data on negative ethnic bias from the previous section demonstrates that the salience of identity politics remains high in India.
In addition to providing evidence of “negative” ethnic bias, the answers to a related question from the Lok survey also uncovered high levels of “positive” ethnic bias—that is the extent to which voters affirmatively prefer a candidate from their own caste community
In response to the question, “Is it important to you that a [Upper Caste/OBC/SC] candidate wins the election in your constituency?” (In this case, surveyed individuals were shown a prompt corresponding to their own community), 46 percent of respondents answered in the affirmative.
Considering these two data points together (as in Figure 6.1), it is hard to conclude that the conventional understanding of caste is off-base. But the question is whether the dynamics of caste, when it comes to shaping electoral behavior, are changing or perhaps growing more nuanced than is commonly recognized.
While this is a distinct possibility to be considered, it also appears as if the ethnic brand of many parties is being diluted in the current era of Indian politics.
In the 2014 general election, analyses of the BJP’s performance in north India suggests that it too cobbled together disparate sources of support across the social spectrum—the glaring exception being Muslims.
One obvious driver of these results is a polarization of Hindu-Muslim votes due to the BJP and SanghParivar’scommunaly-inspired mobilization tactics
But even assuming religious polarization was an important driver of Hindu vote consolidation, the dilution of clear caste-based voting is still striking given that the Hindi heartland is the region of the country where scholars believe caste calculations are most salient.
First, India has increasingly seen ruling parties come to power at the state level that represent “rainbow coalitions” of disparate caste and religious communities, indicative of broad-based, rather than purely sectarian, electoral support.
The role of caste has not disappeared, but in many states it has been married to a discourse about development and the economy.
One difficulty with the simple “vote your caste” logic is that it is not clear that voters do regularly vote their caste.
Survey evidence from Bihar (collected by the author), for instance, found that only 14 percent of more than 2,000 voters surveyed after the 2010 state election voted for a candidate who was from the same jati
Jati is a pretty restrictive category, but even if one looks at the rate at which voters select candidates from their own umbrella caste group (Upper Caste, OBC, SC, etc.), just under 40 percent of voters fall into this category.
This finding is especially surprising in a state like Bihar, where caste conflict and identity-based mobilization is engrained in its history of electoral politics.
Now, one could argue that caste voting can operate in lots of different ways.
One reason the rates of co-ethnic voting are so low could be the fact that voters often do not have the opportunity to vote for a co-ethnic because one is not on the ballot. For instance, ethnicity could still be a salient consideration if voters engage in negative voting, or voting against a specific group
Maybe what voters are after is not the caste of the candidate per se, but the caste bona fides of the party the candidate represents.
The Bihar survey also asked respondents whether they could identify the caste (jati) identities of the very MLA candidates they voted for just a few days prior (Vaishnav 2014).
But, the data reveal considerable structure to the errors. For instance, voters who are co-ethnics (i.e. share the same jati as the candidate) do markedly better, while educational attainment is actually negatively associated with accurate identification.
Curiously, Muslims are an outlier when it comes to identifiability. Based on the results, Muslims are both better at identifying, as well as being identified, than individuals belonging to other ethnic categories. This is the true even though Muslims vote for fellow Muslims in only a minority of instances.
What these results suggest, therefore, is that the ethnic or caste signal is far noisier than what we have come to expect.
One of the most interesting developments in India’s domestic politics in recent memory is the large number of politicians seeking (and winning) elected office who are under criminal scrutiny
Since 2003, the details of candidates’ criminal records have been made publicly available, thanks to the intervention of the Supreme Court and the oversight of the Election Commission of India (ECI). One of the underlying premises motivating this shift is the belief that voters, once exposed to credible information about the attributes of political candidates, might withdraw popular support from “tainted” candidates.
In the eyes of many observers, the 2014 electoral verdict—in which the Congress suffered a devastating blow at the hands of the BJP, led by the self-made NarendraModi—was interpreted as a repudiation of dynastic politics.
Modi’s rhetoric aside, the reality is far more complicated. The 2014 elections certainly delivered a blow to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty writ large (although both currently serving “dynasts”, Rahul and Sonia Gandhi, won their seats in Parliament), but the underlying tendency toward dynastic politicians does not show clear signs of easing.
Furthermore, the practice of dynastic politics is hardly the monopoly of the Congress Party
At the top of the list is the Samajwadi Party; all of its 5 MPs are members of the same family
The Congress actually is located in the middle of the pack; roughly 40 percent of its MPs are dynasts.
The BJP, on the other hand, is near the other end of the spectrum with 16 percent of its delegation from political families.
Stepping back from counting individual MPs who hail from political families, many parties themselves remain the province of a single political family. This pattern is discernible in many states representing a wide diversity of parties, from the Abdullahs (NC, Jammu and Kashmir), Badals (SAD, Punjab), Thackerays (ShivSena, Maharashtra), Pawars (NCP, Maharashtra), Karunanidhis (DMK, Tamil Nadu), Paswans (LJP, Bihar), and Yadavs (RJD, Bihar).
Thus, it appears that dynastic politics is alive and well, rhetoric notwithstanding. But what accounts for the continued political support for hereditary politicians?
There seems to be something of a paradox: the conventional wisdom is that dynastic politics is unpopular, yet individual dynastic politicians are clearly popular enough to get elected and re-elected.
This finding provides some intuition for the fact that dynasticism is especially prevalent among younger MPs
81 percent of MPs aged 30 or below and half of lawmakers between 30 and 39 were dynasts.
Notwithstanding this fact, a record number of candidates with criminal cases—including those facing cases of a “serious” nature—won election to the LokSabha.
The remarkable staying power of criminality in politics, not to mention the phenomenon’s growth over time, raises the question: with information about the biographical profiles of all MPs—indeed, all candidates—standing for election readily available for the past decade, why has the number of criminally suspect legislators gone up rather than down?
Since the dawn of Indian independence in 1947, there has been a large body of scholarship on what makes the Indian voter tick.
In the intervening years, our collective understanding has been shaped and reshaped and, although consensus is fleeting when it comes to the study of any country as large and complex as India, in recent years several stylized facts about the voting behavior of Indians have emerged.
A partial list of these stylized facts is as follows:
These five propositions represent a significant portion of “what we think we know” about how Indian voters behave.
Of course, they are somewhat arbitrarily chosen; undoubtedly there are many more nuggets of received wisdom worth highlighting.
However, this talk focuses on five issues which are both highly salient and where there is reasonably high quality data to bring to bear.
