Abstract
If countries have a ‘unique selling point’ then India’s must surely be that, with over 700 million voters, it is the world’s largest democracy. Allied to this is the enthusiasm with which Indians have embraced the electoral process. The turnout in Indian national elections has been over 62 % in 10 of the last 15 national elections with 66 % of eligible voters voting the 2014 Lok Sabha (Parliamentary) elections; the last time that a US Presidential election came close to matching this was the 60 % turnout in the 1968 election between Nixon and Humphrey.
This paper was presented at the IV International Conference on Political Economy and Institutions (ICOPEAI) at Baiona, Spain, 9–10 December 2015 and we are grateful to the participants for their valuable comments.
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Notes
- 1.
Besley et al. (2012) suggest that, in the context of Indian villages, residents in the Chief Councillor’s village had greater access to public goods than residents in other villages.
- 2.
As a consequence of employing over two million workers during elections, the ECI’s observers are ubiquitous and, since they are drawn from the ranks of those in civilian employment, cannot be easily identified. In addition, the Indian media seizes upon any infractions of the Model Code and affords them considerable publicity.
- 3.
To recapitulate, these were voters who answered whether they had voted in the period covering the (i) current panchayat election (ii) the previous panchayat election, and (iii) the previous to previous panchayat election and the level of election at which they had voted.
- 4.
- 5.
That is, the probability of a randomly chosen response being positive will, with 95 % probability, be between 85.2 and 85.5 %.
- 6.
Autonomy, in general, refers to the control that women have over their lives—the ability of women to obtain information and to use that as the basis for making decisions both about themselves and their intimates (Dyson and Moore 1983). Jeejeebhoy and Sathar (2001) in their discussion of women’s autonomy in India observe that “the cultures of South Asia are gender-stratified characterised by hierarchical relations…in which the patriarch or his relatives have control over family members.” In her ethnographic study of Indian elections, Banerjee (2014) notes that it is “mainly men who conduct public discussions of politic because venues where these discussions occur are traditionally masculine places. These discussions then filtered back into people’s homes as men brought back news of the day [and] women, who were often missing from public discussion of politics, often asked questions of their men requiring them to clarify points” (p. 87–88).
- 7.
The importance of caste as a determinant of electoral outcomes in India cannot be overemphasised: see Chandra (2004).
- 8.
Corruption in Indian public life has emerged as a salient feature of the country’s political debate. In 2012, India ranked 94th out of 176 countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index and, in practical terms, corruption has ramifications for almost every aspect of life in India (Witsoe 2012; Borooah 2012). Consequently, it is likely that a reputation for honesty and fairness might be an important consideration in evaluating candidates. Indeed, the desire on the part of Indian voters to address corruption in Indian public life has spawned an entirely new party—the Aam Aadmi Party—which came to power in the state of Delhi and also won a number of seats in the 2014 Indian parliamentary elections.
- 9.
The estimated coefficients from this, and the subsequent, models are not shown but may be obtained on request.
- 10.
In the Palestinian territories, clans (locally called hamulas) have become a focus of political activity and major hubs of local power.
- 11.
For example, the AIDMK-CPM and the DMK-Congress alliances in Tamil Nadu meant that traditional AIDMK supporters had to support CPM candidates and traditional DMK supporters had to support Congress candidates.
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Borooah, V.K., Tagat, A. (2017). Political Participation in Rural India: A Village Level Study. In: Schofield, N., Caballero, G. (eds) State, Institutions and Democracy. Studies in Political Economy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44582-3_7
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