Battle for Bihar: A Lesson in Political Behavior
If you followed the Bihar election, you’ll realise it was like Game of Thrones minus nudity — full of drama, action, tragedy, abuses and emotions. Sources says that Bihar Election broke all the records on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes with over 100% ratings. It’s Bihar Election, Go Big or Go Home.
The reach of this election was not just limited to the people of Bihar but also to monkeys, who paid their respect by visiting the polling both. A few of the leaders started their own tours and travels business by selling packages to Pakistan, Bangladesh and other countries.
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Elections in general are all about buying voters, but when it comes to Bihar, it has to be grand. And why not, the latest census says total population of Bihar is 1.7 million! There is an old Hindi song ‘ye jo public hai sab jaanti hai’. But is this the real case? Economists have proved that voters are mostly ignorant, but this is what they term rational ignorance. They are not stupid, they just work better on incentives. Politicians have cracked this code long time back, so this is the mechanism they use to lure the voters.
The biggest pull during this election was the Janta Parivar, where, instead of dividing votes between minorities, castes and sex, all the big guns came together with a solution of forming a grand alliance.
Few handouts promised by Nitish Kumar were very simple and indeed quite attractive to masses. Be it giving Rs 1000 per month for 2 years to all the unemployed youth of Bihar, or student credit card with credit limit of Rs 400,000 or free electricity connection for every household. Since alcohol consumption is a problem in Bihar and especially for the women, he also promised to put a prohibition on liquor (we all know how well banning things works in India). The list went on with so many favours, there was something for every Bihari and Bahari.
To counter this, our “Vikas Man”, Prime Minister, Modi had to come and hit some sixes and fours on the pitch! He came up with the idea of Digital India, providing free internet services in every village and hence connecting them with the semi-urban or urban cities. With a healthy village, the party also promised in its vision document, Atal Medicine Centres which would provide medicine at a discount. Further, they promised plots for the landless. And of course, since women should come in forefront, taking Nitish Kumar’s idea of cycle one step further, Mr Modi promised 5000 scooters to girls to go to high schools and take a positive step towards female education. After this, of course there was a need to take care of Dalits and Maha Dalits, so colour television sets for them! The BJP also promised to distribute 50,000 laptops to meritorious Class 12 students who “perform better” in exams. One can always ask how these things will help walk on “Vikas Marg” but these questions are usually asked by people who did not get the benefits, and are simply disgruntled now. Who follows logic anyway in politics?!
Nobody cares how much the State and the Centre had to invest if either of the party wins the election. Tax more or print more money, more foreign investments or any other measure. These come with their own problems, it is not as easy as just making promises (but again, let’s leave logic out of this!)
But as we all know you cannot win an election by just dangling a carrot. For those who were not receiving any of the above benefits, politicians made a play on emotions with words like secularism and nationalism, and the sacrifices they have made for their state and nation.
We must realise one thing, human beings act on incentives. Each individual has their own priorities and they act accordingly. Politicians don’t become saints when they join the politics, functioning as do-gooders. Their incentive is to win elections. Even if there is a bad policy in a place, there is a likelihood of that getting passed in the Parliament because it has very close relationship with emotions and vote banks, not necessarily good policy-making.
This election already proved that you need to connect and sell them emotions and also handouts and goodies. This doesn’t make voters irrational or stupid, but rather makes them alert enough to crack the code and demand tangible things which they really want in the short term, since the nature of politics is such that no one cares about the long run anyway.
Milton Friedman has said “I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.”
Public choice Theory refers to “the use of economic tools to deal with traditional problems of political science”. Its content includes the study of political behavior. Watching the Great Indian Drama live from Bihar was an excellent lesson in public choice.
Congratulation Grand Alliance for figuring out what are the correct set of incentives ;)
