Post-liberalisation competitive responses in Indian companies

Master'sMASTER OF SCIENCE (MANAGEMENT

Hollowing Out the State: Status Inequality, Fiscal Capacity, and Right-Wing Voting in India

What explains variation in fiscal capacity over time and across sub-national units within the same country? In this dissertation, I argue that incumbent political elites, anticipating the redistributive consequences of democratization, can hollow out fiscal capacity. Places where such a phenomenon is likely to occur are those characterized by high levels of social-status inequality arising from historical inter-group segregation. I examine fiscal capacity in colonial Indian provinces and demonstrate that an exogenous episode of limited franchise expansion to lower-status groups was followed by a period of declining fiscal institutions. I use a novel historical dataset spanning 43 districts in the provinces of Madras and Bombay between 1914--1925 and qualitative evidence from legislative proceedings in the two provinces, and find that tax institutions declined in the districts with higher levels of status inequality, as opposed to inequality in wealth. This decline was more pronounced in the reform years, as upper-status groups anticipating the ascendance of lower-status groups into politics hollowed out tax institutions. Next, I examine a case of political mobilization in contemporary India and demonstrate that an announcement by the Government of India in 1990 to implement affirmative action for lower-status groups was followed by a rise in the right-wing vote share for the Bharatiya Janata Party after 1990. Using survey data and electoral data, I finds that both wealthy and poor upper-status Indians voted for the right-wing after 1990 in places where there was greater status inequality in 1931 -- a pattern that did not exist in previous elections. These findings provide evidence for the claim that when upper-status groups face threats to their social standing, cross-class solidarities emerge in support of anti-redistribution parties

Replication data for: When do the Rich Vote Less than the Poor and Why? Explaining Turnout Inequality across the World

Replication Datase

data_bjp_paper_cps_replication – Supplemental material for When Do the Poor Vote for the Right Wing and Why: Status Hierarchy and Vote Choice in the Indian States

<p>Supplemental material, data_bjp_paper_cps_replication for When Do the Poor Vote for the Right Wing and Why: Status Hierarchy and Vote Choice in the Indian States by Pavithra Suryanarayan in Comparative Political Studies</p

Replication data for: When do the Rich Vote Less than the Poor and Why? Explaining Turnout Inequality across the World

The conventional wisdom that the poor are less likely to vote than the rich is based upon research on voting behavior in advanced industrialized countries. However, in some places the relationship between turnout and socioeconomic status is reversed. We argue that the potential tax exposure of the rich explains the positive relationship between income and voting in some places and not others. Where the rich anticipate taxation, they have a greater incentive to participate in politics and politicians are more likely to use fiscal policy to gain support. We explore two factors affecting the tax exposure of the rich -- the political salience of redistribution in party politics and the state's extractive capacity. Using survey data from developed and developing countries, we demonstrate that the rich turn out to vote at higher rates when the political preferences of the rich and poor diverge and where bureaucratic capacity is high

Party System Institutionalization and Economic Voting: Evidence from India

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

Ethnic inequality and the ethnification of political parties: Evidence from India

Abstract Why does group identity, such as ethnicity, become a salient element of electoral politics in some political systems but not others? We argue that inequality between groups plays an important role in answering this question: systems with the highest levels of group-based inequality should be the ones where identity is most salient to electoral competition. We test the argument using data from across the Indian states, finding that state-level party system ethnification is strongly correlated with economic inequality between groups in the states. We also find that when income differences between groups increase, the groups tend to support different parties. Thus, the analysis reveals a strong class component of identity politics in India, and it underlines the importance of disentangling the effect of group identity from that of economic well-being when studying identity politics

Replication Data for "Bureaucratic Capacity and Class Voting: Evidence from Across the World and the United States"

Why do the rich and poor support different parties in some places? We argue that voting along class lines is more likely to occur where states can tax the income and assets of the wealthy. In low bureaucratic capacity states, the rich are less likely to participate in electoral politics because they have less to fear from redistributive policy. When wealthy citizens abstain from voting, politicians face a more impoverished electorate. Because politicians cannot credibly campaign on anti-tax platforms, they are less likely to emphasize redistribution and partisan preferences are less likely to diverge across income groups. Using cross-national survey data, we show there is more class voting in countries with greater bureaucratic capacity. We also show that class voting and fiscal capacity were correlated in the United States in the mid-1930s when state-level revenue collection and party systems were less dependent on national economic policy

Fragmentation and Decline in India’s State Assemblies: A review 1967-2007

Tracing activity in 15 Indian state assemblies from 1967 to 2007, we find that overall legislative activity declined but there was also considerable variation across states. States with large electoral constituencies and politically fragmented assemblies showed the worst performance, which suggests a link between political fragmentation and institutional performance