Rahul Verma

Making Sense of the House: Explaining the Decline of the Indian Parliament amidst Democratization

Although the Indian Parliament has witnessed progressive democratization in terms of representation of various sections of society, it has declined as an effective institution of accountability. Unlike in Western democracies, the decline of Indian parliament is not due to strengthening of the executive. Ironically both the executive and the parliament in India have remained weak during the ‘democratic upsurge’ era, while some non-parliamentary institutions have succeeded in asserting their autonomy. We find that existing literature on Indian parliament fails in explaining the paradox of declining parliamentary performance amidst its democratization. In this article, we highlight five such paradoxes. We bring in political parties as the main explanatory variable and argue that the changing character of political parties during the ‘democratic upsurge’ era in India lies at the heart of this debate: the emergence of new players representing sectional interests though increased representation of various sections of society, yet adversarial politics among these parties led to parliament’s decline.

The State as Guardian of the Social Order: Conservatism in Indian Political Thought and Its Modern Manifestations

Conservative Indian political thought, in addition to being alive and well in contemporary discourse, has a long lineage. We explore the intellectual roots of this tradition by examining older and more contemporary writings ranging from the Manusmriti and the Ramayana to those of Gandhi and Maududi and place them in contrast to those of more liberal thinkers like Ambedkar and Nehru. We find that, in particular, the conservative idea of the ‘limited state’ has an extensive history embedded in sub-continental religions, religious practices and social norms. Central to the concept of the limited state is the belief that the state is subservient to society, the belief that dharma is ontological prior to the state, the belief that the king or leader must preserve the social order and the belief that individual reform is the primary source of social change. An understanding of this set of beliefs, and the idea of the limited state more generally, is important not only for understanding India’s past, but also for insight into contemporary politics. We demonstrate the continued vitality of these concepts through an examination of recent National Election Studies (NES) and World Values Survey (WVS) data.

Design-based Approach in Social Science Research

In their famous book on econometric research methods, Angrist and Pischke (2009) urge the reader to imagine their research questions as a randomized experiment. According to the authors, if you cannot think of your hypothesis in terms of a randomized experiment, however unrealistic or expensive, you may not have a causal research question at hand. By imagining the hypothesis as a randomized experiment, the researcher is forced to clearly identify the ‘treatment’, or the independent variable of interest. This is important because, as researchers we are interested not just in describing a phenomenon, but also in explaining the cause(s) of the phenomenon; it is difficult to make a causal argument without having a clear idea about what is being ‘manipulated’ or ‘changed’. Other researchers have also echoed this thought process by saying, ‘To find out what happens when you change something, it is necessary to change it’ (Box et al., 1978, p. 495). Behind every causal statement, there is an implicit assumption of manipulation of some independent variable that seems to be the ‘cause’ (Holland, 1986). This idea that there is no causation without manipulation is at the heart of current shifts in social science research, especially the fields of economics and political science that have placed greater emphasis on causal analysis that clearly identifies the cause of a particular outcome. Randomized control trials (RCTs)—experiments where researchers use random assignment to create well-defined treatment and control groups—have acquired the status of ‘gold standard’, and have become synonymous with high-quality research.2 However, RCTs are expensive and resource intensive to implement, and many times provide answers to narrowly defined questions. Further, there are many questions of interest that are beyond the realm of RCTs. For example, if one is interested in ‘causally’ estimating the effect of exposure to violence on a given set of outcomes

Book Review: Anastasia Piliavsky (ed.), Patronage as Politics in South Asia

Anastasia Piliavsky (ed.), Patronage as Politics in South Asia. Delhi: Cambridge University Press. 2014. 485 pages. ₹895.