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The literature on the electoral legacies of civil war violence offers a puzzle. While one strand of research argues that indiscriminate rebel violence will have no effect on the electoral success of rebel-aligned parties, another argues that such violence will harden anti-rebel political attitudes in the long term. This article reconciles these conflicting predictions by examining post-conflict political attitudes over the short and medium term. We hypothesize that the organizational weaknesses that both underpin and result from indiscriminate rebel violence during civil war will constrain the vote mobilization strategies of rebel-aligned parties in post-civil war elections, eventually leading to a reversal of fortune in the medium term. We assess our hypothesis in the empirical context of the state of West Bengal in India, whose southwestern districts, collectively known as Junglemahal, experienced a spell of Maoist insurgency from 2005–2014. Taking a mixed methods approach, combining surveys across West Bengal and within Junglemahal with ethnographic research, we show that voter assessments of pre-election violence had changed sharply between the 2016 legislative assembly and 2019 parliamentary elections with violence triggering a backlash against the rebel-aligned incumbent party in 2019, but not in 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do perceptions of insecurity from politically motivated violence affect the decision of poor voters to re-elect incumbents in Indian elections? This article examines this question in the empirical context of the Maoist-affected Junglemahal region in the state of West Bengal in eastern India. Exploiting original survey data collected in 38 Maoist-affected villages in Junglemahal prior to the 2019 Lok Sabha election, I show that respondents (a) were able to discriminate between politically motivated violence and other governance-related issues, (b) were more inclined to vote for the incumbent the greater the importance attached to the provision of public goods, but (c) were less inclined to vote for the incumbent the greater the importance attached to politically motivated violence. In auxiliary tests, I find that the effect of the perceived threat from politically motivated violence was mediated by feelings of fear, anger, and worry about the general direction in which the state was going. I also present evidence showing a positive relationship between the level of campaign contact by the opposition party and the level of negative emotions experienced by voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political dynasties, a salient feature of the electoral politics in many electoral democracies, have critical governance implications. However, careful empirical estimates of the dynasty premium in Indian elections and explanation of their constituency-level demand side (voters) and supply side (political parties) determinants are absent. To fill this gap, we analyze the candidate-level (N = 8251) data on the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and find that a dynastic candidate is a significant 13% more likely to win and has a significant 18%–20% higher vote share than a non-dynastic candidate. This result is robust to consideration of an alternative dynasty variable as outcome, usage of alternative indicators of candidate criminality as controls, and a procedure of deducing bias due to selection on unobservables from selection on observables. In the constituency-level analyses, having a dynastic incumbent legislator in fray and dynasts' relative wealth increases the probability of a dynastic winner and a more competitive election given the dynastic incumbent reduces it. Voter dissatisfaction, dynasts' relative wealth, reserved constituency, and given a dynastic incumbent, higher political competition reduce voter preference for dynasts, whereas dynastic entrenchment and dynastic incumbent reduce it. The dynastic incumbent, dynasts' relative wealth, and voter dissatisfaction significantly increase political parties' preferences for dynasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The anxieties of consolidation and concentration have been central to the study of the media business across the world. Debates on media ownership have either pointed at business models and regulatory conditions leading to market concentration or the increasing accumulation of interests by political actors in the media business. This paper delves into the simultaneity of such dynamics in India, as refracted in the business of TV distribution. Once merely a downstream segment of the visible and highly researched broadcasting segment, cable distribution has emerged as the prime commercial locus, technological driver, and regulatory site in India's TV business. Our paper unearths the modes of expansion of leading cable distribution companies across various regions of India. We find the expansion of cable companies rested on a dual engagement with regional ecologies of distribution: first, pursuing commercial growth by capturing, rather than developing, pre-existing regional markets, and second, flexibly engaging with, rather than uniformly steamrolling, incumbent regional actors. To manage these interests, a complex network of subsidiaries, interlocking directorships, and web of employees were created. Such a business-model not only propelled the expansion of what have today become gigantic, cross-regional cable companies but also spawned their peculiar ownership structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well established that a country's institutional features can weaken economic voting because voters find it hard to attribute performance to specific parties. We argue that local-level party system institutionalization similarly moderates the link between the economy and vote choice. We focus on one manifestation of party system institutionalization: the strength of party-candidate linkages in elections, operationalized by manually tracing the rerunning patterns of some 80,000 candidates in Indian state elections between 1986 and 2007. Using rerunning patterns to measure party-candidate linkages and rainfall data to measure the state of the economy, we show that voters were more likely to reward incumbent parties for economic performance when parties and candidates were aligned in consecutive elections. We address concerns of endogeneity in rerunning patterns, by showing that the results are robust to alternate measures of local-level party system institutionalization. They are also robust to alternative measures of the state of the economy and to using individual-level survey data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Politicians winning elections with large margins of victory, beyond what is necessary to win electoral contests,what we term "winning big", is a common, yet under-studied phenomenon across the world. Political economy models suggest that winning big is not an optimal allocation of scarce campaign resources in a SMP/FPTP electoral system. Inductive inquiry shows that incumbent politicians likely to win nevertheless campaign hard, often devoting considerable effort and resources, for reasons that remain unexamined. Focusing on India, this article explores a range of reasons that can help explain this phenomenon through an innovative research design that combines quantitative analysis with in-depth elite interviews with incumbent MPs from 10 states. We distinguish the phenomenon of "winning big" from that of "safe" seats,identify and probe factors that can contribute to large margins, including candidate strategy, party popularity, mobilizers, electoral uncertainty, and party control. Our findings suggest that while political parties in India, as elsewhere, do not spend more money on electoral contests that they likely to win comfortably, winning big can be the result, among other factors, of a party strategy to establish a reputation for invincibility, and/or individual efforts, stemming from a sense of political vulnerability felt by politicians, underestimated in the literature on safe seats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the empirical uncertainty regarding whether gender quotas establish a foundation of political representation and experience that encourages female candidates to compete against men. It updates and expands existing empirical research by contributing an analysis of the most recent electoral data across four municipal corporations in India over two election cycles. Critical questions on the theoretical expectation that gender quotas should encourage and enable women politicians to compete in open-gender contests over time are considered. The Indian quota system has not encouraged women to broadly compete outside the quota at the local level but has made some wards more likely to elect women. Parties also continue to resist nominating women outside the quota but are more likely to do so in wards previously represented by a woman. Finally, the unique overlap of gender and community quotas can discourage incumbency by essentially blocking incumbents from running again in their ward due to shifting community requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joint Doctrine of Indian Armed Forces, unveiled in 2017, is the all-encompassing strategic design that outlines the core philosophy, concepts, principles, and ideals that are being pursued by the Indian Armed Forces for the attainment of India's strategic objectives. This paper employs a constructivist theoretical approach to assess the Joint Doctrine of Indian Armed Forces' connection with Hindutva beliefs and ideals as well as its reflection of India's incumbent government's strategic objectives of Hindu revivalism and expansionist ambitions, while formally shedding off its decades-old garb of so-called secularism. Through the analysis of Joint Doctrine of Indian Armed Forces' core ideas and concepts, this paper examines the Indian Armed Forces' institutional choice of this doctrine to pursue Hindutva ideals coupled with its likely implications in terms of regional instability and insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses a critical aspect of the internal functioning of five major Indian political parties, namely the nomination of candidates for parliamentary elections, focusing on the pattern of renomination of former candidates and incumbents. The data are analysed against the literature on the structure and functioning of Indian parties, and interview material on the process of nomination in the 2009 and 2004 elections. From the perspective of a six-fold typology of centralisation of nomination processes drawn from the comparative literature, it is found that all the parties analysed are in either the second-most centralised, or even most centralised categories, and that for the three major national parties, Congress, Bharatiya Janata Party and Communist Party of India (Marxist), past performance plays a role in nominations, the majority of incumbents being renominated in the post-1989 period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

India is often said to be going through an "age of intolerance" manifest in extensive demands for censorship in the wake of cultural offense. This study uses an analysis of a case of sub-national variation in the demand for and supply of censorship to suggest that, rather than merely being a manifestation of intolerance or extremism, "seeking offense" may also be used as a political strategy in ethnic politics. Moreover, this strategy may achieve a special potency in contexts in which the "offended" group can make a credible claim of being neglected by incumbents. The findings suggest that censorship in India may be a medium through which demands for equal treatment and substantive inclusion play out politically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to account for voter choice in the 2011 Assembly Election of West Bengal. Voter choice in this study is a function of economic perceptions, spatial issues and anti-incumbency factor. A multinomial probit model has been used to analyze the voting behaviour based the aggregate Election data The analysis shows that, firstly, the anti-incumbency factor has been the main reason behind the fall of Left Front in the election. Secondly, except the local urban issues in the Kolkata Urban Agglomeration area, no other regional issue could influence the voting behaviour in the corresponding regions significantly. Thirdly, except the growth rate of NSDP, no other economic factor could significantly influence the voter choice. Finally, although the land acquisition, problems of tubal people and Maoist problems could not significantly influence the voting behaviour in the corresponding regions, they seem to be responsible for the overall decline in the support-base of Left Front in the state which was manifested in terms of a highly significant anti-incumbency voting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the incumbency effects using a large dataset on state legislative elections in India during 1975–2003. I use a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) that estimates the causal effect of incumbency by comparing candidates in closely fought elections. I find that there is a significant disadvantage to incumbency in Indian State legislative elections, and the adverse effect of incumbency has increased after 1991. Also, the incumbency disadvantage is higher in states that have lower availability of public goods such as health centers, and lower employment, poverty and per capita income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains variations in electoral volatility? The authors argue that fiscal space-availability of financial resources to enact policy initiatives and provide public programs-possessed by governments can explain the level of electoral volatility. Where governments have fiscal space, citizens reward incumbent parties with their continued support. But when fiscal space is constrained, the incumbent government's ability to provide state resources is drastically reduced. Citizens are therefore less likely to reward the party at the polls and are available to opposition politicians and alternative appeals. Voteswitching ensues, and the incumbent government is voted out of the office. The authors test this argument and others in the existing literature on electoral returns from state assembly elections across 15 major Indian states from 1967 to 2004. The results support the argument that fiscal space influences electoral volatility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how the cultural change in India influenced its 9th national elections in 1989. For the year-round, the public saw election campaigns, public discourse and press commentary and they also witnessed a high rating for Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in the polls. However, the 1989 elections saw the defeat of Gandhi's Congress Party which is only the second time in four decades. The country also saw the institutionalized transfer of power in the central government and in other major state governments with the new minority National Front government headed by Vishwanath Pratap Singh. The 1989 national elections illustrated that the Indian electorate tended not to be influenced by the aura of incumbency while political campaigns focused on person rather than party.