Aam Aadmi Party Research Articles

An ethnography of voting in the Punjab elections 2022 as social practice: Liminal spaces of symbolic change

ABSTRACT The paper attempts to look at the factors leading to the victory of the Aam Aadmi Party which have not been taken up by the traditional political analysis. Making an ethnography of the Punjab assembly elections 2022 in the Malwa belt of Punjab, it chronicles the social and cultural impact of the farmer’s movement, particularly its far-reaching impact on changing the mood of the electorate. The paper also focuses on the novel digital election campaign which resulted in new election outcomes from the past trends and a massive victory for the Aam Aadmi Party in Punjab.

Breaking Hegemony of Traditional Political Parties: A Study of Shifting Dalits’ Support Base in Punjab

The present study is an analysis of Dalits’ shifting support base among major political parties in Punjab, namely Congress, Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and specifically Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in 2022 Punjab Assembly election. With an established presence in the State, the AAP could present itself as a new alternative. The AAP defeated all the traditional/mainstream political parties in the recent Assembly election to put an end to the deeply entrenched family (SAD-Badal) and dynastic rule (Congress). The present research paper is an effort to find out the causes behind the shifting Dalit support base. The AAP’s success was a clear message from the people of Punjab that they were fed up with the power circle of traditional parties that were in agreement with each other to rule the State by turns. Paper argues that Dalits are likely to vote for the parties that have a chance to come to power as in 2022 Punjab Assembly Election, Dalit support base has widely shifted to AAP. The study was qualitative and conducted in the Doaba region of Punjab. It is an analysis of the interactions with 300 respondents of the targeted SCs population and 30 leaders from the major political parties in Punjab.

Gujarat 2022 Elections: Explaining BJP’s Hegemony

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) victory in the 2022 Gujarat state elections not only broke a record but also reversed the trend that was resulting in Congress’ growing effectiveness election after election. This time, the Congress registered its worse performance ever, largely because of the entry of a new player, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), but also because of the progress of the BJP. The ruling party is stronger than ever because of its ideology, its organization and, more importantly, its leader, Narendra Modi. These assets allow the BJP to get support across caste, classes and sub-regions like never before. Its rise, however, challenges democracy in different ways, not only its ‘OBCisation’ is not a synonym of plebeinization in terms of class, but its strategy of equating religious majority and political majority and to systematically undermine the opposition tends to make the BJP ‘the only game in town’.

The Impossible Portrait

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on a portrait of a young Somali man living in Delhi, India. The portrait depicts him in a park in South Delhi wearing a cap distributed by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) during their insurgent 2012‐2013 campaign to establish themselves as an alternative political force. I argue this parodic portrait and the text it accrues in its circulations on Facebook functions as a networked image‐event that evinces the impossible contradictions that Somalis face in India. Tracing this networked image event reveals how a surging antiblackness linked to the rise of the AAP Party in Delhi punctuates the in‐betweenness that Somalis experience while they wait for life elsewhere.

Channelling compassion towards change: elite volunteerism, corporate philanthropy and education reform in urban India

ABSTRACT This article explores how young elite urban professionals and fresh graduates in Mumbai and Delhi are fostering diverse aspirations of service, entrepreneurship and charting new professional mobilities through volunteering opportunities at a well-known corporate-supported non-governmental organisation (NGO), the Teach for India (TFI) programme. Mostly with commerce, engineering and management educational backgrounds, the TFI intervention operates as a nodal site for these elite youth to not just serve underprivileged children through ‘acts of compassion’ but also channel their experiences to understand the education system and reinvigorate it through corporate management values of enterprise and performance. Through examining the trajectories of these individuals, I foreground the nascent terrain of technocratic expertise being shaped through an interlinked collective of corporate NGOs that have become prominent in advising the Delhi state government, under the leadership of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), to improve public education through discourses of enterprise and performance.

Emerging Trends and Influential Factors in the 2022 Punjab State Elections

This study explores the emerging trends and factors that influenced the Punjab Legislative Assembly Elections in 2022, shedding light on the evolving dynamics of electoral politics in India. The research employs a comparative analytical approach, utilizing data from various sources such as published literature, online resources, and databases to examine voter preferences, party strategies, and electoral outcomes. The 2022 elections witnessed an unprecedented victory for the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), highlighting the shift in voter priorities towards development, unemployment, health, and sanitation. Key findings include the growing importance of social media and digital campaigns in shaping voter preferences, the increasing significance of women and youth voters in the electoral landscape, and the decline of traditional political forces. These results have crucial implications for the future of Indian politics, emphasizing the need for political parties to address changing voter priorities, engage with digital platforms, and cater to the concerns of women and youth demographics. This study provides valuable insights for political parties seeking to navigate the shifting landscape of the world's largest democracy.

Bypassing the Patronage Trap: Evidence from Delhi Assembly Election 2020

Scholars have long theorized on the limits of patronage politics and the possibility of counter-mobilization it produces against clientelist strategies. Analysing the recent win of the Aam Aadmi Party in the 2020 Assembly election in Delhi, this article shows that programmatic policies of welfare can help parties to circumvent this trap and avoid targeted patronage networks. We find that this broad-based appeal increases the social base of the party to even include those segments of voters who remain aloof to patronage-based exchanges. Additionally, we test the salience of majoritarian issues in the presence of universal welfare. We find that by locating themselves on issue positions of relative advantage, and reducing the ideological distance with their chief competitor, a policy-focussed party may capture not just ideology-agnostic, but also peripheral voters who might be opposed to the other challenger. Using a logistic regression model, we find that policy concerns catapulted AAP to victory, while its ideological distance from the BJP added to this. Our analysis has significance for understanding the underlying changes to patronage-based linkages, especially in the presence of heightened ethnic appeals that increasingly characterizes electoral contexts in the country.

‘We do politics so we can change politics’: communication strategies and practices in the Aam Aadmi Party’s institutionalization process

ABSTRACT This decade has marked a rise in social movement-originating political parties, many of which have gained considerable political power and achieved surprising electoral success. In doing so, these parties have challenged traditional definitions and conceptualizations of party institutionalization. One such party is the Aam Aadmi Party in India, formed in the wake of the massively viral 2011 India Against Corruption (IAC) movement. Through interviews and observations, as well as digital artefact analysis, we trace the process of the Aam Aadmi Party’s institutionalization through an analysis of its media and communication practices. We argue that party workers’ drive to institutionalize into a durable electoral force has pushed AAP into projecting contradictory images and embracing conflicting narratives, both online and offline. However, the durability of the party and recent electoral successes point to the ways AAP can nonetheless inform conceptions of institutionalization.

Political Representation in the Discourse and Practices of the “Party of the Common Man” in India

One of the many challenges presented by populism concerns its relationship with political representation. What happens when an anti-politics movement wins elections? This article offers an analysis of the exercise of power by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP, Party of the Common Man), which has been ruling the city-state of Delhi since 2015, in order to bring elements of answer to this question. On the basis of discourse analysis as well as direct observation of meetings, the article first identifies a series of populist tropes in the official discourse of the AAP, including a de-emphasis on representation to the advantage of participation. It then describes the two main participatory schemes implemented by the AAP government since 2015, and shows that these generate, in different ways, a magnification of the mediation work that is central to political representation at the local level in the Indian context. Finally, the article argues that the party has been developing, through these participatory schemes, a form of “inclusive representation” (Hayat, 2013), in which inclusion is linked to mobilization.

Digital Politics in the Diaspora: U.K. Aam Aadmi Party Supporters Online and Offline

In 2012, the Aam Aadmi (common man) Party (AAP) made its debut on the Indian political scene on a platform promoting ethical politics, anticorruption action and active citizenship. Inspired by the AAP’s call to “change politics,” many nonresident Indians (NRIs) in the U.K. Indian diaspora joined an international network of groups that provided support for the party in subsequent successful election campaigns. This article follows the ways in which digital media played a key role in the formation of intense individual attachments to the party, and how, for some, it became the means through which disillusionment with the party and its project was expressed. By attending to digital politics in the Indian diaspora as it plays out in this relatively recent political formation, we can gain a new perspective on the circulations, connections, and class values through which postliberalization projects to reform the nation are worked on from beyond its borders.

An exploratory case study focusing on the creation, and development of a new political brand: The case of Aam Aadmi Party

In the backdrop of India's rising prominence in BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), understanding of its political environment, electoral competition, and constituent parties with their political ideologies contesting to form government attracts immense interest from the researchers in political science, political marketing, and public policy. Although literatures in political marketing are more than two decades mostly carried out in developed democratic systems like the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, India as a posttransition democracy received relatively less attention. The article has been conceptualized in the context of 2014 Indian general elections Lok Sabha 2014 as an attempt to study application of political marketing principles in a cross‐cultural democracy. The author has probed the emergence of new political party Aam Aadmi Party riding on the success of Janlokpal (civil society movement), the marketing approach used by Aam Aadmi Party, essentially positioning and branding strategies, during the national elections and party institutionalization. Research strategy followed secondary research of published data for examining the new party creation from a marketing perspective.

India’s Aam Aadmi (Common Man’s) Party

The Aam Aadmi Party (Common Man’s Party, AAP) has taken over part of the program of the Indian National Congress. The AAP was able to include new solutions within the traditional political repertoire. In Delhi the AAP took over the traditional Congress electorate but was also able to reach out to the middle-class voter.

New Product Development Approach to Political Party Development in India: Study of Aam Aadmi Party

In the backdrop of India’s rising prominence in BRICS, understanding of its political environment, electoral competition, constituent parties with their political ideologies contesting to form government, attracts immense interest from the researchers in political science, political marketing and public policy. While literatures in political marketing are more than two decades (Harrop 1990, Gronroos 1990, Henneberg 1998, Kotler 1999, O’Shaughnessy 2001, Marshment 2001) mostly carried out in developed democratic systems USA, UK, Australia and New Zealand, India as a post transition democracy Heller (2000) received relatively less attention. The article has been conceptualized in the context of 2014 Indian general elections Loksabha 2014 (LS2014) as an attempt to study application of political marketing principles in a cross cultural democracy. The authors have probed the emergence of new political party Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) riding on the success of Janlokpal (civil society movement), the marketing approach used by AAP, essentially positioning and branding strategies, during the national elections and party institutionalization. Research strategy followed secondary research of published data (Yin 2009) for examining the new party creation from a marketing perspective.

Campaigns, Digital Media, and Mobilization in India

Early research in western contexts finds evidence of online participation leading to political engagement. We test this hypothesis in a nonwestern campaign context. We discuss India’s complex “hybrid media system,” political parties, leaders, and issues in the 2014 national election that saw more use of digital information channels by all parties, and more so by the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the young Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) than the incumbent Indian National Congress (INC). We hypothesize that online engagement and, specifically, sharing of campaign information is a significant predictor of political engagement in the campaigns of each of these three parties. Our dependent variable is a scale of engagement in campaign activities. Independent variables include campaign interest, issue salience, exposure to outdoor party publicity, attention to political information in various traditional media, party contact and sharing information with others (both measured face-to-face and electronically), and controlling for age, gender, and education. Our models, based on survey data from Delhi, Bengaluru, and Mumbai, show that party contact, sharing campaign information, and campaign interest are significant predictors of engagement while the other items vary in terms of significance.

Contending representative claims in Indian democracy

ABSTRACTThis article essays an interpretation of representative claims articulated in the campaign for the Lok Sabha election of 2014, arguing that this election signals a shift from one dominant type of representative claim to another. The first two claims—the classical liberal view of political representation as an aggregation of preferences and descriptive representation—are embodied by the Congress Party and the social justice parties respectively. These claims are located within the universe of representative democracy, and are sought to be transcended by two new representative claims, encountered in the 2014 election. These are counter-democratic populism and realist Caesarism, signified by the Aam Aadmi Party and the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party, respectively. While these two do not dispense with representative democracy, their claim to provide a more effective or stronger form of democracy indicates a significant departure that redefines the relationship between representation and democracy.

Agonistic democracy: the endurance of the Gandhi and Nehru legacy

This paper examines the political developments around the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption movement that escalated in India through most of 2011. Although the overtone of the movement was primarily about corruption, my aim in this paper is to explore the debates regarding democracy that the movement unleashed. The accounts that this paper draws on focus on the tension and competition that arose during the anti-corruption movement amongst two civil society groups – ‘Team Anna’ and the National Campaign for the People’s Right to Information – regarding the meaning and practice of democracy. I argue that this conflict reflects a broader tension deeply rooted in democratic debates in India, traceable to the early nationalist debates during the anti-colonial Independence movement. These findings suggest that conflict and competition are crucial ingredients of democratic debate, contributing to the sustenance and enrichment of the idea of democracy. This argument is particularly timely, for it helps us to understand the rise to power of the Aam Aadmi Party.

Report on Media Activism and Other Manias: How the English Mass Circulation Indian Press Framed the 2014 Election Campaign

This report analyses the role of the English press in framing the 2014 election campaign in the world’s largest democracy. India’s General Election of 2014 was expected to be a different kind of campaign where social media and mobile technology along with mainstream media were going to play a major role in the election campaigns. Already in 2013, social media played a major role in the Delhi assembly campaign which brought the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), an alternative and anti-corruption party to power. Most major political parties are developing an online presence, and social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook were a pivotal factor in Modi’s decisive election victory. It was far from being the difference between winning and losing, but it was significant nonetheless. Social media is still evolving in unpredictable ways and, not surprisingly, there were other, more important factors at work.Our report examines three interrelated parts of that story. In the first it looks at the way the mainstream media helped frame the 2014 election by buying into narrative which positioned Modi as the Prime Minister to lead India into the 21st century. The press played a critical role in creating a ‘bandwagon effect,’ propelling Modi into India’s highest office. Secondly it examines the growing importance of Facebook and Twitter as communications platforms used for many diverse purposes at election time. Its capacity to mobilize marginalized voters in a country as vast and diverse as India should not be underestimated.Finally, our report looks at the state of Indian democracy. One of its conclusions is that the 2014 election is likely to be a harbinger of things to come in India. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) broke the pre-existing political mould of electioneering. Under the BJP, these techniques were taken to the next level. Political campaigning has become professionalized, is increasingly run by dozens of experts, is financed by corporate India, and has become dependent on U.S.-style ‘on the message’ tactical campaigning. For smaller alternative parties like the AAP, with its anti-corruption message, social media was an important resource to finance its activities in the election. Alternative communications strategies derived from social movements were an essential means of getting their message out to voters and mobilizing their base. Despite the disappointing results for the AAP in 2014, its campaign demonstrated the potential of these strategies for future election battles.

Local Contest, National Impact: Understanding the Success of India’s Aam Aadmi Party in 2015 Delhi Assembly Election

In this paper, I discuss how a relatively new anti-corruption political party in India—the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)—was able to achieve an unprecedented electoral victory in the 2015 Delhi assembly election, comprehensively defeating the two national parties—the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress Party. Although Delhi is a small Indian state with limited powers, AAP’s victory provides it with a platform to expand in other parts of the country. However, to do so, it will need to deliver effective governance in Delhi, enunciate a clearer ideology and develop credible regional leaders. As things stand now, the AAP could be characterised as a party whose appeal is more likely to be in the urban, media-thick Indian cities and towns than in the rural areas. If this description of the AAP is correct, then its ability to challenge the larger national and regional parties in the near future may be limited.

Arvind Kejriwal's leadership of the Aam Aadmi Party

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) made its national debut in 2014. Arvind Kejriwal, the National Convenor and a founding leader of the AAP, had a decisive impact on the character of the party. This paper reflects on the significance of Kejriwal's leadership in relation to the literature on party systems and political leadership. In 2014, he attempted to open up a new political cleavage and add a new party to the national party system. His entrepreneurial activity drew attention to the issues of corruption and governance. Kejriwal's political leadership is assessed in terms of his ability to set objectives for the party, his interaction with followers, his efforts to represent those followers and the development of party institutions. Kejriwal's performance as a party leader in 2014 was uneven. The outcome of the Lok Sabha elections exposed the geographical limits of Kejriwal's appeal even as he attempted to provide national leadership.

Return of the ‘National’ in Indian Elections: When do National-level Factors Play a Role in Influencing the Outcomes of State Assembly Elections?

The outcome of the assembly elections held in November 2013 in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Delhi could possibly be summarized in one sentence: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) retained Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, and the incumbent Indian National Congress (INC) lost power in Rajasthan and Delhi. It was a 4–0 defeat for the Congress. What explains the Congress’ rout in these four states? Moreover, why did the BJP do well? And how did a new political outfit—Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)—manage a stunning debut in Delhi within a year of its formation? Using data from the pre-poll and post-poll surveys from the above mentioned states, we find that there was a visible dissatisfaction with the Congress-led UPA government at the centre and that led to the party’s debacle during the elections. We suggest that the interaction of two variables—temporal proximity of state assembly elections to Lok Sabha elections and nature of party competition in the state— determines when national-level factors would play important role in influencing electoral outcomes in state elections.