Five developments that may define 2014 elections

1. WELFARE PROGRAMMES AND ELECTORAL BENEFITS

The ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has spent close to Rs 12,00,000 crore on the social sector in the last one decade of its tenure. Inevitably, the agenda of development is its electoral wand of magic. Are the welfare programmes going to fetch votes for the UPA?

The case of Brazil is often cited to gauge how welfare measures influence elections. India has programmes and political posturing very similar to that of Brazil. An example is that country’s muchstudied ‘Zero Hunger’ programme, launched by Luis Inacio Lula da Silva when he became president of the country in 2003. The programme is similar to India’s food security law, mid-day meal scheme and the Integrated Child Development Scheme. Zero Hunger is an umbrella programme that includes many components like school food and extensive conditional cash transfer (CCT) schemes. There are many studies that have quantified the electoral benefits of the Zero Hunger programme in Brazil.

Lula’s re-election in 2006 is credited to the success of the programme. In January this year, the American Journal of Political Science carried an analysis of cash transfer programmes in Brazil and their impact on the last three elections, during 2002-10, coinciding with the beginning of the Zero Hunger programme. The analysis shows that such programmes do result in more votes, but their electoral utility diminishes in the longer run.

The study found that an increase of US $100 in yearly per capita coverage of the programme led to as much as a 15 percentage point increase in the vote share in 2002, but the figure fell to 6.5 percentage points in 2010. Lula’s party got more votes in areas that had relatively more coverage of the programme than in areas with none or negligible coverage. Such has been the programme’s electoral quotient that by the 2010 elections, all parties and presidential candidates pledged to expand it. The study says that this is why in the 2010 elections the voters did not vote on the basis of the programme as they were sure about its continuity. “CCTs have influenced the Brazilian elections since these policies first caught observers’ attention and in periods of poor and good economic performance alike. But more importantly, although CCTs have helped incumbents, there is no evidence as yet that they can radically reshape the political landscape,” says the analysis.

2. CIVIL SOCIETY IN POLITICS

The ascent of Arvind Kejriwal, a former non-profit head leading an anti-corruption campaign, to the position of Delhi’s chief minister has rattled conventional political parties. The civil society, often used by political parties to be politically correct, is now at the centre of electoral politics. Kejriwal’s Aam Admi Party is getting widespread support and participation from prominent members of the civil society.

India has had many people’s movements that proudly assumed political identity; in fact, most of them declared this upfront to gain more credibility. Kejriwal’s decision may sound ‘historic’ to many, particularly the contemporary middle class, but India’s rural areas have had a long history of such experiments. Most of these experiments revolve around rights over local resources. More importantly, these experiments have never suffered from a disjoint between governance and politics. They demand political changes that ensure people’s rights over land, forest and water, among other things. They proactively facilitate electoral events like campaigning to push their agenda among politicians. Their electoral success is negligible, but they still remain unified unlike the Team Anna campaign.

One of these experiments was the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS). The MKSS, a people’s movement working on Right To Information, work and ethical electoral process, fielded candidates for local bodies in Rajasthan. Already enjoying popular support, the candidates were successful. However, MKSS has not furthered its electoral base. But the decision to stick to local government is the lesson to be learnt. MKSS’ campaign for transparency in governance brought it closer to communities. At the local government level, issues bring more electoral mileage than party affiliations, and there is more direct interaction between candidates and voters.

India’s largest association of people’s movements, the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM), entered electoral politics in 2004 after rigorous internal debate. The alliance was set up in 1992 to offer solidarity to various communities fighting violation of their rights. NAPM terms itself a non-party political movement. In 2004, it created the People’s Political Front, a separate but related wing that can contest elections. By doing this, NAPM retained its non-party image. The Front promises an alternative to the Delhi-centric political parties, a promise Team Anna had maintained. One of NAPM’s founders, the Samajwadi Jan Parishad, registered itself as a political party in 1995.

Kejriwal’s close aide Yogendra Yadav is a member of this party. It has been contesting elections since then; it puts up candidates for panchayat, assembly and parliamentary elections. Its argument for joining party politics is that over the years it has mobilised communities on local issues, but these are appropriated by political parties during elections. Once the elections are over, the issues get a burial, demanding another round of mobilisation. The Jan Parishad did not perform well in assembly and parliamentary elections but has achieved some success in panchayat elections.

3.REGIONAL PARTIES AND DEVELOPMENT POLITICS

Regional political parties are India’s new electoral box offices. Analysts speculate they will be the key to government formation after the next general elections, so the two competing national parties — the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — are cracking tough political equations to win over as many of them as possible. There are valid reasons for this. Since 1984, not a single national party has formed a government on its own. The 1980s and 90s witnessed the electoral boom of regional political parties, which have been expanding both in number as well as in vote share.

In fact, the number of national parties has come down. In the first Lok Sabha elections in 1952, of the 55 parties that contested, 18 were regional parties. The number went up to 36 in the 2004 elections. In the 1984 general elections, the regional parties got 11.2 per cent of the votes; in 2009, their share went up to 28.4 per cent. In the past 20 years, the share of regional parties in total votes has consistently increased. For the next elections in 2014, analysts estimate regional parties will contest in 150-180 seats where the two national parties may not be significant players.

There is already a certainty in mainstream political dialogue that national parties have ceded space to regional parties. This, according to political pundits, is because the national parties have not been able to address regional ‘aspirations’.

The big question, therefore, is: have the regional parties lived up to these ‘aspirations’? Much before the 1980s when these parties came to national prominence, they were dominant players in many states like Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Odisha and Tamil Nadu. India’s long experiment with regional parties offers little evidence to suggest that regional parties performed differently than national parties. They may have fueled regional pride but in terms of regional development, their performance hardly differed from that of national parties. Rather, regional parties now adopt and implement policies of national parties more aggressively at the state level.

The rise of regional parties was sharp in the late 1980s and 90s when the country saw acute polarisation of voters in terms of socio-economic groups. During this period voters from the disadvantaged sections took greater part in voting. Many regional parties used this to carve out their political identities. They promised development and social and economic equity in the face of economic liberalisation, at a time when regional disparity was stark and livelihood crisis was severe.

4. COALITION GOVERNMENT AND SOCIAL SPENDING

Alliance is the accepted way of political life in India. Coalition governments appeared at the state level in 1967 and at the centre in 1977. After 45 years, coalition is a natural political choice, making access to power conditional to more than one party’s interests. India has long accepted the political compulsions behind economic decisions. How do such multiple interests and ideologies within a government influence its economic decisions? There seems to be a decisive impact on government’s expenditure — both current and capital — decisions. A series of studies on the subject find more positive than negative impacts from the perspective of the aam admi. In essence, most of these studies have concluded that the rise of coalition governments has been one of the major drivers for increasing public spending at the state level.

The National Institute of Public Finance and Policy has studied whether the size and composition of public expenditure are related to government-specific political characteristics. The analysis covered fiscal decisions of 14 states in 27 years. The study is relevant since it covers a period, 1980-81 to 2006- 07, of consolidation of coalition government. During this period, coalition governments ruled in 32 per cent of the total 366 fiscal years. The study found that a coalition form of government is good for public expenditure. An additional party in a government as a coalition partner leads to 2.5 per cent increase in public expenditure. Interestingly, the analysis says weak opposition leads to less public expenditure. Average per capita capital expenditure of states decreases by one per cent with the inclusion of an additional party in the opposition, the study says. Coalition government is suitable for encouraging more capital expenditure. In fact, the more the number of partners in a coalition government, the more is the percentage of capital expenditure. With every percentage increase in support to the government, the expenditure rises by 0.1 per cent. According to the study, “ideology” is the less defining aspect in a coalition era. Rather, it says a government that is staunch in ideology will incur less capital expenditure. “One of the possible reasons for its insignificance could be that in the era of coalition governments and competitive politics, the governments do not treat the electoral cycle years differently from the normal ones,” the study says.

  There have been a few other studies that looked at composition of a coalition and spending on specific sectors. A study by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth published in February 2013 found that spending on irrigation increases if a coalition partner is a regional party. In coalition governments, education spending is usually high. “Because of clear increasing returns to education in a liberalised economy, demand for increased resources devoted to it makes sense from the voters’ point of view,” argues the study. In 2005, Mala Lalvani of the University of Mumbai published a similar analysis based on a study of 27 coalition governments in 14 states during 1980-99. Lalvani found that coalition governments favour capital expenditure on social services. The impact on revenue expenditures was also positive. This means that coalition governments raise the per capita state domestic product. This is contrary to current popular fears that coalition compulsions will slow economic reforms, and therefore stunt economic growth.

5. FIRST-TIME VOTERS

In the 2014 elections, the number of new voters will be higher than votes polled by any party in the general elections of 2009. In fact, the new voters as a block will be larger than the much sought after ‘minority’ vote banks. At the same time, they are India‘s truly first generation that has grown up with liberalised economy; growth is the only measure of national wellbeing they know and recognise. Are they going to be electorally influential?

Going by the census report of 2011, there will be 12 crore voters who will vote for the first time during the elections of 2014. The actual figure may go up to 14 crore as the census data was collected in 2010-11. India has about 79 crore eligible voters. In general elections of 2009, the Congress polled a total of 11.9 crore votes while the BJP managed to get 7.8 crore. The importance of the new voters can be assessed from the fact that the politically important state of Uttar Pradesh (with 80 Lok Sabha seats) has the country’s highest number of first-time voters. As a block, they account for 17.6 per cent of the state’s total voters, a bit less than the Bahujan Samaj Party’s total votes (2.6 crore) polled in 2009 elections. It is no wonder that both the Congress and the BJP leaderships appease the youths of the state that is ruled by a young chief minister. Maharashtra, where regional parties with young leaderships are prominent, is the second state in terms of new voters. More than 13 per cent of its voters are first timers.

It is not only the first-time voters emerging as a block, but also the urban and semi-urban middle class voters. They are a block of 15 crore eligible voters. Despite the usual practice of looking at voters in terms of caste grids, the elections in 2014 may witness these groups emerging as the new electoral castes. While talking about the urban voters, social media users have emerged as an influential subgroup of voters who may swing election results. According to the report of the Internet and Mobile Association of India published in October 2012, social media users like the members of Facebook can swing votes in the range of 3-4 per cent in 24 states. In India, there are nine crore voters who access social media. This survey found that political parties in India had already earmarked around two to five per cent of their election budgets for social media campaigns.

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