Hindu nationalism and education: Why vigilance is needed under a BJP government

Dishil Shrimankar argues that education policies are vulnerable to being influenced by Hindu nationalist perspectives under a BJP government with a strong mandate

Party organisation and polity-wide parties in India

Why do polity-wide parties in a multi-level context dominate in some sub national units but not others? Existing scholarship in comparative politics has either focused on regionally-based social cleavages or on political and economic decentralisation to explain the variation in the dominance of polity-wide parties at the sub-national level. Deviating from this predominant approach in comparative politics, I argue that political and economic decentralisation and the presence of distinct regional cleavages are necessary, but not sufficient conditions to explain the dominance of polity-wide parties. In other words, polity-wide parties are able to maintain their dominance at the sub-national level in a politically and economically decentralised polity with distinct sub-national regional cleavages if their sub-national branches have autonomy from their central branches. If intra-party autonomy is important in explaining the dominance of polity-wide parties at the sub-national level, then why do polity-wide parties have different levels of intra-party autonomy? Existing literature in comparative politics has focused on federalism, electoral systems, incumbency, the nature of regional party competition, the timing of regional elections, and internal party features in explaining the differing levels of intra-party autonomy. While these explanations are of particular importance in understanding cross national party organisational variations, I evaluate their merit at the sub-national level within a federal country with similar electoral systems. Empirically, this dissertation uses evidence from India, the world's largest democracy. It uses a multi method approach that combines statistical analysis of all major Indian states with a sub-national comparison of two Indian states to present the empirical findings. Building on previous work on the Congress Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at the national level, it looks at the dynamics of these two polity-wide parties in two Indian states, namely Gujarat and Maharashtra. Both the states are selected based on the Most Similar Systems Design, which further helps rule out alternative explanations in a systematic manner. Furthermore, the findings from Gujarat and Maharashtra are based on a long period of field research with semi-structured interviews with sub-national and local level politicians in Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar, Mumbai and New Delhi, India. Finally, in the latter part of the thesis, I use statistical analysis to test the qualitative findings across all the major Indian states using Chhibber, Jensenius and Suryanarayan (2014) dataset on party organisation. The findings from the statistical analysis are consistent with the main findings from my qualitative study providing further confidence in support of the primary theoretical arguments put forward in the thesis

Party organisation and polity-wide parties in India

Why do polity-wide parties in a multi-level context dominate in some sub national units but not others? Existing scholarship in comparative politics has either focused on regionally-based social cleavages or on political and economic decentralisation to explain the variation in the dominance of polity-wide parties at the sub-national level. Deviating from this predominant approach in comparative politics, I argue that political and economic decentralisation and the presence of distinct regional cleavages are necessary, but not sufficient conditions to explain the dominance of polity-wide parties. In other words, polity-wide parties are able to maintain their dominance at the sub-national level in a politically and economically decentralised polity with distinct sub-national regional cleavages if their sub-national branches have autonomy from their central branches. If intra-party autonomy is important in explaining the dominance of polity-wide parties at the sub-national level, then why do polity-wide parties have different levels of intra-party autonomy? Existing literature in comparative politics has focused on federalism, electoral systems, incumbency, the nature of regional party competition, the timing of regional elections, and internal party features in explaining the differing levels of intra-party autonomy. While these explanations are of particular importance in understanding cross national party organisational variations, I evaluate their merit at the sub-national level within a federal country with similar electoral systems. Empirically, this dissertation uses evidence from India, the world's largest democracy. It uses a multi method approach that combines statistical analysis of all major Indian states with a sub-national comparison of two Indian states to present the empirical findings. Building on previous work on the Congress Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at the national level, it looks at the dynamics of these two polity-wide parties in two Indian states, namely Gujarat and Maharashtra. Both the states are selected based on the Most Similar Systems Design, which further helps rule out alternative explanations in a systematic manner. Furthermore, the findings from Gujarat and Maharashtra are based on a long period of field research with semi-structured interviews with sub-national and local level politicians in Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar, Mumbai and New Delhi, India. Finally, in the latter part of the thesis, I use statistical analysis to test the qualitative findings across all the major Indian states using Chhibber, Jensenius and Suryanarayan (2014) dataset on party organisation. The findings from the statistical analysis are consistent with the main findings from my qualitative study providing further confidence in support of the primary theoretical arguments put forward in the thesis

Rerunning Patterns of Members of Legislative Assembly in India's State Elections, 1985-2018

The dataset covers regional assembly or Vidhan Sabha elections in India from 1985-2018. We first divided the data into two sets, pre-delimitation (1985-2007) and post-delimitation (2008-2018). We used the stringdist package in R developed by Van der Loo (2014) to name-match candidates in order to identify which of them reran for the same party in the same seat. The stringdist package offers a uniform interface to a number of well-known string distance measures, such as edit-based, q-gram and heuristics distances. Following an iterative process, we used a combination of Damerau-Levenshtein, q-gram, cosine, jaccard, and Jaro-Winker distances to identify candidates which have rerun for political office. We manually went over a large portion of the data, and corrected for any measurement errors. There were 91260 candidates with 17961 constituency-years in 4424 Vidhan Sabha constituencies for the pre-delimitation period after excluding independents. We further subset the dataset to top four candidates because candidates further down the list rarely received many votes. We were left with 58842 candidates with 17959 constituency-years in 4424 Vidhan Sabha constituencies. We further subset the data to observations where incumbent and/or challenger parties reran for elections in the same seat. We were further left with 20362 candidates with 12310 constituency-years in 4098 Vidhan Sabha constituencies. Out of the 20362 candidates, we have 10920 incumbent party candidates and 9442 challenger party candidates. Therefore, for the pre-delimitation time period, we have rerunning data for 10920 incumbent party candidates and 9442 challenger party candidates. For the post-delimitation period, there were 27723 candidates with 9096 constituency-years in 4067 Vidhan Sabha constituencies after removing independents and subsetting the dataset to top four candidates. We further subset the data to observations where incumbent and/or challenger parties reran for elections in the same seat. There were 7543 candidates with 4652 constituency-years in 3792 Vidhan Sabha constituencies. Therefore, for the post-delimitation time period, we have rerunning data for 3953 incumbent party candidates and 3590 challenger party candidates