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Why do poor people often vote against their material interests? This puzzle has been famously studied within wealthy Western democracies, yet the fact that the poor voter paradox also routinely manifests within poor countries has remained unexplored. This book studies how this paradox emerged in India, the world's largest democracy. Tariq Thachil shows how arguments from studies of wealthy democracies (such as moral values voting) and the global south (such as patronage or ethnic appeals) cannot explain why poor voters in poor countries support parties that represent elite policy interests. He instead draws on extensive survey data and fieldwork to document a novel strategy through which elite parties can recruit the poor, while retaining the rich. He shows how these parties can win over disadvantaged voters by privately providing them with basic social services via grassroots affiliates. Such outsourcing permits the party itself to continue to represent the policy interests of their privileged base.
Contents: Acknowledgments. I. Introduction. II. The Primary Groups and Politics. III. Experiments and the Political Process: 1. The Culture of the Laboratory. IV. Experiments and the Political Process: 2: Bridging the Gap. V. The Concept of Leadership. VI. Leadership: Affective and Instrumental, 1. VII. Leadership: Affective and Instrumental, 2. VIII. Leadership and the Norms of the Group. IX. The Participation Hypothesis, 1: Application of a Small Group Finding. X. The Participation Hypothesis, 2: The Generality of a Small Group Finding. XI. A Concluding Note. Bibliography. Index. Originally published in 1961. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Explores the conditions that shape whether and how citizens in rural India make claims on the state for social welfare.
In Pursuit of Proof brings forth a hitherto unattempted history of claiming, making, and verifying identification documents in the urban margins of India and Delhi in particular. The book summons to life past and contemporary processes of bureaucratic recognition and administrativeverification of subjects by locating them in the everyday material worlds of especially the poor. In attempting to illuminate the paper regimes of welfare that are now being radically transformed owing to the technological infrastructures of Aadhaar, the author resorts to eclectic forms ofethnography and archival research to delineate the pursuit of proof across various timescales. This piece of historical writing moves with methodological agility across moments as disparate as World War II, the Partition, "Licence Raj", a forgotten but portentous enumeration initiative, and the production of a unique number. What however weaves this vast and ambitious narrative together isthe book's intricate and layered exposition of a state whose welfare capacities of governing are drawn from popular practices of knowledge around documenting and proving identities.
For decades, India has been a conservative democracy governed by the upper caste notables coming from the urban bourgeoisie, the landowning aristocracy and the intelligentsia. The democratisation of the ‘world’s largest democracy’ started with the rise of peasants’ parties and the politicisation of the lower castes who voted their own representatives to power as soon as they emancipated themselves from the elite’s domination. In Indian state politics, caste plays a major role and this book successfully studies how this caste-based social diversity gets translated into politics. This is the first comprehensive study of the sociological profile of Indian political personnel at the state level. It examines the individual trajectory of 16 states, from the 1950s to 2000s, according to one dominant parameter—the evolution of the caste background of their elected representatives known as Members of the Legislative Assembly, or MLAs. The study also takes into account other variables like occupation, gender, age and education.
Specifically tries to understand the increasing influence of communist, regional and lower caste-oriented socialist parties in Indian politics
Today, regional parties in India win nearly as many votes as national parties. In Why Regional Parties?, Professor Adam Ziegfeld questions the conventional wisdom that regional parties in India are electorally successful because they harness popular grievances and benefit from strong regional identities. He draws on a wide range of quantitative and qualitative evidence from over eighteen months of field research to demonstrate that regional parties are, in actuality, successful because they represent expedient options for office-seeking politicians. By focusing on clientelism, coalition government, and state-level factional alignments, Ziegfeld explains why politicians in India find membership in a regional party appealing. He therefore accounts for the remarkable success of India's regional parties and, in doing so, outlines how party systems take root and evolve in democracies where patronage, vote buying, and machine politics are common.
"Enquires into the ways in which food and its production and consumption are enmeshed in aspects of human existence and society, taking India and its interaction with food as its focal point"--
In this gripping in-depth account of the 2016 presidential election, authors Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck reveal how Trump's victory was foreshadowed by changes in the Democratic and Republican coalitions that were driven by people's racial and ethnic identities.
How challenger parties, acting as political entrepreneurs, are changing European democracies Challenger parties are on the rise in Europe, exemplified by the likes of Podemos in Spain, the National Rally in France, the Alternative for Germany, or the Brexit Party in Great Britain. Like disruptive entrepreneurs, these parties offer new policies and defy the dominance of established party brands. In the face of these challenges and a more volatile electorate, mainstream parties are losing their grip on power. In this book, Catherine De Vries and Sara Hobolt explore why some challenger parties are so successful and what mainstream parties can do to confront these political entrepreneurs. Drawin...