Indian Elections Research Articles

NOTA: a strategic choice with a positive impact on Indian elections

ABSTRACT In this article, we study how the introduction of a None of the Above (NOTA) option in Indian elections since 2013 has affected voting patterns and election outcomes. First, we examine the relationship between position on the ballot with electoral outcomes by constructing a simple statistic that measures relative performance by position on the ballot or Electronic Voting Machines. Within non-party options, we show that the last option on the EVM ends up being a salient choice, which is an inversion of the usual findings in the literature on order effects, where earlier options are generally preferred. Second, the NOTA option is the salient choice for voters who choose not to vote for a party, and thereby substituting for independent candidates. This share is more than can be explained by ballot position alone. We argue that the existence of a NOTA option is not merely a procedural technicality; instead, voters use NOTA as a strategic option to express their protest.

Social media, political discourse and the 2019 elections in India: Journalists’ perspectives on the changing role of the mainstream media in setting the political agenda

With the rise in social media usage, India now grapples with the problem of polarized political discourse via digital platforms. In light of the general elections in 2019, veteran Indian journalists, during in-depth interviews, discussed how social media influenced political discourse and enabled a polarized political narrative that gave rise to aggressive nationalism and majoritarian viewpoints. Journalists asserted that social media were instrumental in setting the agenda for the mainstream media and that social media had redefined their professional roles as the platforms enabled the politicians to bypass the mainstream news media and reach the voters directly.

Participation of Youth in Urban Local Body Elections in India

The progress and development of the nation lies in the hands of young generation. The youth populace are the pillars of the society. India is a young nation as it comprises of greater number of youth populace. The political system of the country determine the growth and development of nation. The youth populace has significant features such as powerful decision making skill, innovative thinking, highly knowledgeable and educated. These dominant features will make them to shine in the political activities. The urban governance acts as an intermediary among the people and government. This study investigates the significance of youth populace in the urban local body elections in India. The research design is exploratory and descriptive in nature. The research performs a quantitative analysis using the SPSS version 23 software package, through survey assessment from youth respondents in Kochi, India. A structured questionnaire survey method is used to gather the data from the youth populace in Kochi. The main idea behind the survey method is to collect the data relating to the perception of youth populace regarding urban local body elections and their engagement in the political activities. Descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, and ANOVA test are performed in the research. The outcomes of the study revealed that the youth populace are aware about the significance of urban local body elections. Furthermore, the study recommends that the challenges faced by the youth populace in the political system are to be eradicated and the opportunities should be provided to them in future elections.

Indian Elections: An inclusive study of ‘Money’ & ‘Muscle’ power

Being the largest democracy of the world, India has presented itself as an example of nurturing a democracy. But in spite of that, the democracy has not been realized up to the full extent because of certain issues rooted in the exercise of its Elections. Here, the researcher has tried to indicate the most important and integral happenings in the present day electoral system under two broad categories viz. money power and muscle power. This is to say that all the issues pertaining to the elections in India have somehow, the root cause as either of the two powers titled above. Some of these issues have been regulated by the Honorable Supreme Court of India and the Election Commission of India, in the past such as invoking communalism in elections, opinion polls, spending limits, paid news, vote purchasing, use of Government machinery, criminalization, etc. But there are still some issues which are difficult to eliminate and even not got much breakthrough in the Courts and by the Commission, in the name of individual rights & liberty and Directive Principles, such as regulation of the political parties under Right to Information Act, the announcement of freebies in the manifestos, corporate financing of the Elections, horse trading, etc. This paper tries to discuss the various manifestations (covering all the election issues) of money and muscle used as power to win the elections and the steps taken by the Government.

Neuromarketing in predicting voting behavior: A case of National elections in India

AbstractPolitical choice has huge importance, either expressed in the balloting place or in the exit poll, in bringing a political party to power and thus impacting the economy and society's welfare. Research in leadership and decision‐making suggests that the physical characteristics and traits of an individual influence the consumer's trustworthiness. Despite being a less explored research area, studying the impact of specific verbal and non‐verbal cues of a political leader through a technological lens, such as eye‐tracking has been sparsely talked about. Three sets of experiments were conducted to study voters' visual attention and reactions to gage their willingness to vote. First, an eye‐tracking tool was used to record the visual attention and regions of interest (ROI) of voters. Subsequently, a short survey was used to analyze the “willingness to vote”, followed by a pilot study on their attention to non‐verbal cues from the candidate. Also, a sentiment analysis of the voters was gathered from social media platforms. The present study analyzed the non‐verbal aspects of a political leader with regard to voting intention and found that even a few of the non‐verbal cues have an influence on the willingness to vote for a candidate. The findings contribute to the literature of neuro‐politics and decision‐making by analyzing voters' experiences of two political leaders, Narendra Modi (NaMo) and Rahul Gandhi (RaGa) based on non‐verbal cues. Political parties and candidates should focus on non‐verbal cues to increase their chances of winning elections. In addition, practitioners from the industry should incorporate appropriate non‐verbal cues while designing ad campaigns, personal branding, PR campaigns, and CEO addresses.

Keyword/ Keyphrase Extraction from Text of Indian Election Domain

In recent years, there has been a tremendous increase in the amount of data generated from various sources including social media, news articles, and blogs. With the rise of social media platforms, people are expressing their opinions more freely than ever before. This has led to an explosion of data in the Indian Election domain, where people express their views on various political parties and candidates. In order to extract meaningful information from this vast amount of data, it is important to identify and extract relevant keywords and phrases. Keyword and phrase extraction is the process of automatically identifying important words and phrases from a piece of text. This process is crucial for various natural language processing tasks such as text mining, sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and text classification. In this research paper, we focus on the task of keyword and phrase extraction from Indian Election domain text. We aim to extract relevant keywords and phrases that are most commonly used in the context of Indian elections. This research is important as it can help in understanding the key issues and concerns of Indian voters during the election season. We use various natural language processing techniques and machine learning algorithms to extract keywords and phrases from a large corpus of Indian Election domain text. Our approach involves pre-processing the text, including tokenization, stop-word removal, stemming, and POS tagging. We then use various statistical and machine learning models to identify the most relevant keywords and phrases.

Political Legitimation and Charismatic Routinization of Modi ‘Wave’ in India

Modi ‘Wave’ is a political phenomenon that describes a strong hegemon (Prime Minister Narendra Modi) who scripts landslide victories in Indian elections based on political charisma and electoral legitimacy. The consecutive victories of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in national elections 2014 and 2019 is a testimony of charismatic routinization of Modi ‘Wave’. ‘There Is No Alternative’ to Modi seems to be ingrained in the conscious psyche of the electorate (will of the majority), which provides successive leadership legitimacy renewals. The political momentum of Modi’s charisma is a discursive dynamic, but it continues to institutionalize right-wing ideology and expand saffron electoral footprints in India.

Decentralized Voting System Using Blockchain

Abstract: India is the world's huge democracy and has the greatest population. The necessity for more advanced technology is brought on by security flaws in the current voting system. Although there are difficulties in creating a safe electronic voting system, there are advantages such as ease and cost savings. There are problems that need to be solved, like user authentication and faulty equipment. In order to increase security and transparency, the suggested solution calls for building a secure voting system that makes use of blockchain technology. The dependability and integrity of the Indian election process would increase as a result of this, which would guarantee the users' legitimacy and safeguard against manipulation or fraud.

Do Political Connections Pay? Evidence from India

ABSTRACT This article examines the influence of political proximity and cash-holding behavior of Indian firms on firm value and operating performance. Using a robust data set of political donations and connections for listed Indian firms around three general elections in India from 2009 to 2019, we find that firms with political connections show higher performance than their nonconnected peers. We also observe that politically connected Indian firms with higher cash holdings achieve substantially better valuations over time. Our results are robust and consistent after controlling for various factors. The article coincides with the introduction of electoral bonds through an amendment in Finance Bill 2017, which formalized the corporate financing of political parties and will likely strengthen the corporate-political linkages via more substantial donations. Overall, the article introduces political proximity/connection as a new indirect factor influencing firm performance.

Misogyny in election discourse: Analysing the 2019 General Elections in India

This article examines misogynist comments on women politicians as part of the campaign discourse for the 2019 General Elections in India. The objective is to understand and critically examine the broad patterns of misogynist discourse during election times and the socio-cognitive interface that enables such misogyny. Using a Critical-Feminist-Socio-Cognitive-Discourse Analysis, which combines Lazar’s Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis and Van Dijk’s Socio-Cognitive Approach, we analyse the explicit stating and implied underpinnings of 22 misogynist comments and identify 4 broad patterns and 8 sub-patterns. We argue that, while sharing similarities with global patterns and stereotypes of misogyny, election misogyny in India originates in socio-cognitive and cultural tropes unique to its patriarchal society. When reproduced in misogynist verbal attacks directed at female politicians, these historically rooted misogynist tropes further reinforce the dominant patriarchal culture and add to the attempts to delegitimize Indian women’s political representation and agency.

It’s All in the Name: A Character-Based Approach to Infer Religion

AbstractLarge-scale microdata on group identity are critical for studies on identity politics and violence but remain largely unavailable for developing countries. We use personal names to infer religion in South Asia—where religion is a salient social division, and yet, disaggregated data on it are scarce. Existing work predicts religion using a dictionary-based method and, therefore, cannot classify unseen names. We provide character-based machine-learning models that can classify unseen names too with high accuracy. Our models are also much faster and, hence, scalable to large datasets. We explain the classification decisions of one of our models using the layer-wise relevance propagation technique. The character patterns learned by the classifier are rooted in the linguistic origins of names. We apply these to infer the religion of electoral candidates using historical data on Indian elections and observe a trend of declining Muslim representation. Our approach can be used to detect identity groups across the world for whom the underlying names might have different linguistic roots.

Aane Wala Hai

Abstract The Bharatiya Janata Party won the 2014 parliamentary elections in India, popularising the slogan ‘Achhe din aane wale hai’ (‘Good days are coming’). Even as the good days remained elusive, in 2019, the party won the popular vote again, with an additional promise of culling out putative ‘infiltrators’ from India by announcing ‘NRC aane wala hai’ (‘NRC is coming’). Drawing on ethnographic research carried out between 2016 and 2019 in a largely Muslim working-class neighbourhood next to one of Asia's largest garbage dumps in Mumbai, this article attempts to grasp the force of the state through its affective deferral by examining this aane wala hai form of governance – the forever-deferred, the always-arriving, the ready-to-strike – that is predicated upon weaponising deferral into a tactic of governance.

Role of Media Management and social media in Election Campaign in India: A Case Study of 2019 General Election

The social media behemoths Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube have become significant players in the national elections and state assembly elections in India. Social media has grown in importance as a campaigning tool in the Indian electoral system. These new media platforms are believed to play a key role in luring voters, particularly the new generation of young adults. Political parties and candidates can more quickly and efficiently reach a huge number of voters thanks to social media. Social media, as opposed to traditional media, enables politicians to actively communicate with potential voters. Social media enables political parties and candidates to communicate their values, objectives, and accomplishments with voters directly, giving them a sense of increased involvement in the election.
 Candidates may more easily track participation on social media and provide their supporters with a behind-the-scenes look at their campaign. The gathering of news that is most pertinent to important target audiences is also made easier by these new media platforms. Research is crucial because social media usage is on the rise and has been proved to be significant. The current study focuses on the usage and growth of social media in the political sphere and how it affects public participation in politics and society at large. The study will first look at the growth of social media as a voter outreach tool.

Political uncertainty and investments by private and state‐owned enterprises

AbstractWe study corporate investments around national elections in India. Investment rates drop by a nonsignificant 2.2% for state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) in election years. The decrease is significantly larger for private firms, which record an investment drop of 7.4%. The decrease in investment for private firms is likely attributable to political uncertainty. SOEs balance political uncertainty with the desire to woo voters who want government investments. Investments in election years are perceived positively for both private firms and for SOEs. Increased investment by SOEs and reduction in investment by private firms during election years are associated with improved investment efficiency.

The Radical in Ambedkar: Critical Reflections

The Radical in Ambedkar: Critical Reflections

Political incumbency effects in India: a regional analysis

The significance of a study of political incumbency and the factors influencing it stems from the fact that it directly affects the behaviour of the incumbent political party and its accountability to the electorate. We use data on Parliamentary Elections in India from 1980 to 2014 to tease out evidence of incumbency advantage. We employ Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) to estimate the incumbency effect. Our results indicate the absence of any incumbency effect when considering all elections in India together. This finding is at odds with the research reported so far. To explain our contrary result, we drilled down deeper to obtain a more granular view of the incumbency effect in India. We do this across various regions of India. The results show that north Indian states generally show strong evidence of incumbency disadvantage while south Indian states show strong evidence of incumbency advantage. We also show that incumbency advantage has increased over time

Right to Vote Behind Bars: Is Imprisonment not Enough?

India ­­­­­has been characterized as the biggest democracy in the world because of the significant nature that take place all over the country. People collectively take participation into choosing their leaders, whether for the national general elections or state elections. Elections are the root of the concept of democracy, as democracy brings out the idea of people’s rule and hence a large amount of people goes to the poll to elect members for the Lok Sabha, State legislative assembly, and the legislature of the union territories. One of the basic features of our Constitution is Free and Fair Elections. Election gives a ruling party an immense amount of power and hence it is vital for the sake of protecting democracy that nothing hampers with such process of electing members. Elections in India are almost treated equally to one of the big festivals, as people are collected to celebrate the process of voting and campaigns take place all over the country or state in a grand manner. This paper particularly talks about Right to vote of prisoners. The paper would analyze the concept of right of vote in a democracy and the degree of importance that a mere right can hold. The paper would also be comparing the right to vote for prisoners internationally, so as to reason behind the concept of different opinions when compared to the Indian society. Prisoners are felons of the society and they are treated always lesser than the other citizens but it is important to make sure that how much low they can be treated for what they have done, as taking away right for being a prisoner but not on the basis of the degree of the crime is how far right and how far wrong.

"Decoding Democracy: An In-depth Analysis of Indian Election Results"

India's elections are contested and crucial to its future. This extensive study examines voter turnout, party campaign tactics, and Indian government effects towards election. First, the article briefly covers India's electoral process from independence to the present date. After that, it examines how caste, religion, regionalism, and socioeconomic status affect Indian voting. This study examines how political parties use media, social media, and grassroots organizing to affect voters. Popular leaders and political alliances are examined. The study also examines coalition administrations, policy revisions, and elected officials' reactions to the election results in India. This study details the Indian voting system using quantitative and qualitative data. This study illuminates India's layered democracy, providing policymakers, scholars, and others interested in its diverse political system with valuable insights.

Challenges and Hurdles Regarding Free and Fair Elections in India: A Study of Voters' Opinion

India claims to be the world's largest democracy. Over the last 65 years, it has seen the execution of successful electrical campaigns, peaceful changes in the government at Focus and in the States, and people guiding freedom of speech and articulation, religion, and progress. India is experiencing social and economic change. Similarly, we constantly consider arguments about the prevalent inequities, lack of assumed fulfillment, and betrayal of some elements of society. Individuals do not feel like they are participating in this complete voting procedure. This is because a system based on majority rule represents the public authority of the people, for the people, and by the people. It implies that a majority-rules government is not confined to the system of choices but also to fulfilling people's economic and social desires. People in our country discuss different aspects of a majority rule system, including its successes and drawbacks. In this method, a large number of investigations have been conducted.

Economics and politics under Modi government: A synoptic view

In 2019, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won the general elections in India with a thumping majority for the second consecutive term. The BJP government has undertaken controversial policies which have been interpreted as flowing from its ideology of Hindutva, an ideology of aggressive Hindu nationalism. As a result of pursuing these policies, there has been a hollowing out of democracy in India according to scholars and reputed international organizations. On the other hand, in the last 8 years, the Indian economy has gone through major slowdowns and policy-induced crises, which the pandemic has further intensified. The paper tries to look at these political and economic processes under the Modi government simultaneously. It shows that the conditions of the Indian people have deteriorated during BJP rule. However, this has not affected the political fortunes of the government. The paper tries to answer how one can view the economic stagnation witnessed during the last 8 years together with the rise of Hindu nationalism in India. We argue that BJP wants to redefine the Indian nation in its Hindutva image. Such a re-imagination backed by state power has postponed the political blowback resulting from the economic crisis. Additionally, the BJP has articulated a new politics for the poor (without redistribution) and a new politics of caste to sustain its hegemony. The enduring dominance of BJP in the political domain of India even after a below-average economic performance during the last 8 years is therefore a result of multiple factors pertaining to Hindutva, nationalism and a new politics of caste and the poor.