This episode analyzes the elections in India and the trajectory of Indian democracy from the mid-seventies to today. How do voter motivations due to worsening economic conditions influence elections in the country? And how do expectations for democracy to deliver economic growth and development play a role? Listen to hear how a new alignment of parties can help the cause of democracy in Indian elections to come.
Guest featured in this episode:
Yogendra Yadav is an accomplished political theorist and an expert on elections and social movements in India, and also an engaged political activist himself. He quit his academic positions eight years ago to establish the Swaraj India Party. Yadav is a member of the Sanyukt Kisan Morcha Coordination Committee, which was involved in the successful Farmers Protest in 2021 and 2022. In 2022, he joined the Bharat Jodo Yatra, the march across the Indian subcontinent to unify the nation, led by Rahul Gandhi, in an effort at mass mobilization for national unity against a politics of hate.
Yogen is also a reputed psephologist. He played a pivotal role at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, where between 1996 and 2009, he designed and coordinated the National Election Studies, a comprehensive series of surveys of the Indian electorate.
In 2008, he received the Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for Development Studies and a year later, the Global South Solidarity Award of the International Political Science Association. Besides being a regular contributor to the press, Yogendra is also author and editor of several books on Indian politics, including State of Democracy in South Asia (2008), Electoral Politics in Indian States (2009), and Democracy in Multinational Societies (2010), which he co-authored with Alfred Stepan and Juan Linz. His most recent work is a collection of his essays titled: Making Sense of Indian Democracy: Theory in Practice (2020).
