How to Win Elections in the World’s Largest Democracy?
About the author: Aliz Toth ’18 is a Stanford PhD student in Political Science. She conducted research in India as a recipient of an FSI Small Research Grant.
This December was an exciting time to travel to India to research political campaigns. Next year the world’s largest electorate will go to the polls to decide about the direction of their country. At this time five of India’s twenty-nine states organized elections for their state assemblies. Political campaigns were in full-swing. The goal of my trip was to investigate how different political parties in India build their campaign organizations. With this question in mind, I conducted focus group discussions with party workers and interviews with a Chief Election Officer and members of an organization monitoring the integrity of campaigns and elections in Delhi.
Western scholarship on Indian elections has emphasized the importance of clientelistic relationships between voters and politicians and the salience of religious appeals. Recently, however, party workers and political strategists that I interviewed were primarily concerned with building tight organizations with clear lines of reporting in order to reach voters. “Door-to-door canvassing is still the most important weapon that parties have,’’ said a senior member of a regional political party. Focus group discussions from three different political parties revealed that each party had volunteers assigned to each polling booth. These volunteers then report to a polling-booth-in-charge, who in turn takes directions from block-in-charges and district-in-charges. “Winning elections is the most ruthless business [and … ] organization is an important factor,” argues one of my interviewees. When I probe why organization-building is so important if voting decisions are often based on histories of party affiliations or ethnic identities, I am told that around half of Indian voters are undecided prior to elections. It is crucial for political parties to reach these voters who could be convinced to turn out to vote and, even, to support a particular candidate based on the face-to-face interaction that door-to-door canvassing provides.
While my trip provided me with new insights into how parties contest elections in India, it also opened up new lines of inquiry in my research. Parties exhibited not only varying degrees of capacity to organize campaigns at the local level, but also different levels of internal democracy. I have interviewed members at the Association for Democratic Reforms, an organization dedicated to creating transparent reporting in elections. These interviews revealed that even though most parties mandate internal elections, not all of them conduct these regularly; others often submit candidates approved with “unanimous votes.” I hope to expand my current study on the impact of parties’ organizational capacity to investigate why parties develop different internal democratic cultures and how these intra-party institutions impact parties’ ability to attract volunteers and retain candidates. I am certain that I will keep pursuing these questions in the future, especially as next year’s elections, which will mobilize 850 million voters, draw closer.
