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The Tiger Triumphant: The Mobilization and Alignment of the Indian Electorate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

William G. Vanderbok
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Extract

The literature on Indian electoral behaviour portrays parliamentary elections since independence as a series of critical, realigning and restoring contests in which voters are repelled by and attracted to the Congress party in great waves. The model is examined from the perspective of voter mobilization. Not only is the established view misleading, it often fails even to describe accurately what actually happened. Significant differences in voting behaviour are found separating the Hindi and non-Hindi speaking areas of India. District-level voting trends are explored within the framework of a multiple regression model applied comprehensively across all of India's general elections and administrative districts. Persistence of democratic politics is to a considerable degree due to the contained volatility of the Congress and opposition party coalitions.

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Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , April 1990 , pp. 237 - 261
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

1 Harrison, Selig S., India: The Most Dangerous Decades (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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9 Mendhelsohn, Oliver, ‘The Collapse of the Indian National Congress’, Pacific Affairs, 51 (1978), 41–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar This consensus is based on an analysis of campaign strategy, tactics and rhetoric. Graves employs a variance component analysis of constituency returns which disputes this, attributing 40 per cent of the variance in the Congress vote between 1957 and 1962 to national factors (Graves, Daniel R., ‘Elections and National Mobilization in India’, Comparative Political Studies, 11 (1978), 255–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Between 1962 and 1967 the national factor rises to 51 per cent. However, it falls to only 21 per cent for the 1967–71 transition. Elaborating Graves's findings, Bueno de Mesquita calculates that overall only 4 per cent of the variance is due to national factors. See de Mesquita, Bruce Bueno, ‘Redistricting and Political Integration in India’, Comparative Political Studies, 11 (1978), 279–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar He attributes the difference in findings to gerrymandering. Strangely, if Graves is right, 1971 was the least national of the early elections. If Bueno de Mesquita is right, they were never very national.

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26 Data for the period 1952–67 were originally collected for the Data Confrontation Seminar, sponsored by the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research. Data for the period 1971–84 have been collected by the author using official census and election returns.

27 Robinson, William S., ‘Ecological Correlations and the Behavior of Individuals’, American Sociological Review, 15 (1950), 351–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alker, Hayward R. Jr, ‘A Typology of Ecological Fallacies’ in Dogan, Mattei and Rokkan, Stein, eds, Social Ecology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974)Google Scholar; Bourke, Paul F. and DeBats, Donald A., ‘Individuals and Aggregates: A Note on Historical Data and Assumptions’, Social Science History, 4 (1980), 229–50.Google Scholar

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29 An earlier effort, by Dasgupta and Morris-Jones, to combine census and electoral materials used ‘share of the valid vote cast’ rather than ‘mobilization’ and only covered the first four elections, 1952–67 (Dasgupta, Bilap and Morris-Jones, W. H., Patterns and Trends in Indian Politics: An Ecological Analysis of Aggregate Data on Society and Elections (Bombay: Allied Publishers Private Limited, 1975).Google Scholar Their central concerns were with developing a taxonomy of districts based on voteshare change from one election to the next (termed institutionalization) and describing party performance in terms of district development categories and simple correlations.

30 The scheduled castes, although they are Hindus, are officially identified (scheduled) as having suffered historical discrimination. While such listing makes these castes eligible for special govern ment benefits, it most certainly does not mean that the members of such castes have a sense of corporateness to the extent that Muslims or Sikhs presumably do. However, and in spite of their heterogeneity, the scheduled castes form a common unit in political discourse. In addition, there are no statistically consequential differences between scheduled castes and tribes in this analysis, and so they have been combined into a single variable.

31 Both tolerance and condition indices were employed to identify and eliminate collinearity problems.

32 Ever since the 1971 general elections the Congress has entered into an electoral arrangement with either the DMK or AIADMK in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. The result is the lack of a Congress candidate in a large number of constituencies. This in turn produces extraordinary vari ances in district level support for the Congress. Tamil Nadu has therefore been excluded from the analysis for the years 1971–84 inclusive. Electoral adjustments have also taken place in Kerala from time to time, so that it, too, has been dropped, beginning with 1971.

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36 This is not to imply that regional politics is free of communal tension. In recent years very serious Hindu-Muslim riots have occurred in Ahmedabad and Hyderabad. Assam has linguistic/immigrant tensions. Sikh separatist demands and terrorism in the Punjab regularly receive international attention.

37 Manor, James, ‘The Electoral Process Amid Awakening and Decay: Reflections on the Indian General Election of 1980’, in Lyon, Peter and Manor, James, eds, Transfer and Transformation: Political Institutions in the New Commonwealth (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1983), pp. 87–116.Google Scholar

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39 Brass pursues this theme at great length in an ecological analysis of Uttar Pradesh voting in which the dependent variable is classified in a series of fine gradations from agricultural labour and ‘dwarf’ land-holders to giant talukdars. Unfortunately, this strategy led to small sample sizes, large variances and innumerable cross-level inferences based on twenty-seven pages of product-moment correlations. Moreover, in a state that is 82 per cent rural with 84 per cent of its agricultural labour- force being owner-cultivators, it is hard to imagine any party being successful without an agricul tural base. See Brass, , Caste, , Faction and Party, p. 74.Google Scholar

40 If agricultural land-owners dominated agricultural labour there would be a high correlation between these variables, leading to one or the other being dropped on multicollinearity grounds. The correlation, 0.63, hovers at the cutoff point and so both variables were retained.

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46 This leaves aside both the question of voter exchanges between the Congress and opposition parties from one election to the next and the problem of dropouts. I deal with these and related issues in Vanderbok, William G., ‘Critical Elections, Contained Volatility and the Indian Electorate’, Modern Asian Studies, forthcoming.Google Scholar

47 Weiner, Myron, ‘The Wounded Tiger: Maintaining India's Democratic Institutions’Google Scholar, in Lyon, and Manor, , eds, Transfer and Transformation, pp. 49–57.Google Scholar

48 Eldersveld, and Ahmed, , Citizens and Politics.Google Scholar