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| Comparative Electoral Ethnography |
| Introduction |
Comparative Electoral Ethnography is a research project funded by the Economic and Social research Council of UK directed by Dr. Mukulika Banerjee of University College London, in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
This is a proposal for a multidisciplinary and collaborative project to conduct a comparative study of Indian elections. Bringing together the strengths of large-scale surveys and local-level investigations, the current project aims to provide comprehensive electoral ethnographies in 12 sites across India. These electoral ethnographies will mark a whole new approach in the study of elections. Rather than treat elections as dry statistical events that focus on the ‘numbers game’ and results, elections in this project will be studied with their full cultural and cosmological meaning, as the most important modern and secular festival of democratic India. While democracy clearly involves things other than voting - such as a free press and civil rights - elections are still its fundamental and defining feature (Pastor 1998, Schmitter and Karl 1991 in Coles 2004:553). Elections in India are seen to overturn the status quo and are marked by a riot of colour and sound and this is what makes them a carnivalesque festival, quite unlike anywhere else in the world.
In contrast to the recent records of turnout in the West, electoral participation in India is positively buoyant (Yadav 2004). Although voting is not mandatory, and the journey to the nearest polling station can be arduous, in general elections, the average voter turnout is over 60%. Moreover, amongst poorer people the turnout is even higher and is usually well over 80%. Rural dwellers vote more than urban, and female voting rates are now much closer to men’s. This is all quite counter-intuitive from the perspective of political science orthodoxies and the general perception of India as a developing country with widespread social inequality, illiteracy, inefficiency and corruption. Research on this subject reveals that the main reason for this extraordinary enthusiasm of Indian voters is because elections have come to take on a variety of meanings in people’s lives – in some cases as instrumental acts to bargain for better livelihoods, but also as an important ritual to reinforce a national pride of being a functioning democracy, and above all as a sacrosanct marker of a modern identity as citizens. Given India’s enormous cultural, linguistic and historical diversity, elections have both a universalistic and particularistic appeal in each region across the country.
At an organizational level, an Indian general election is the largest single organized event in the world. The scale of the organization is truly phenomenal: 700 million voters, 8 million polling stations, over 7 million civil servants and officials and over one million voting machines that are moved through the country so that votes can be cast electronically in 5 phases which take into account the movement of troops to provide security, topography and climate differences in India, especially the arrival of the monsoon rains.
The next general election, scheduled for April-May 2009, offers an ideal and timely opportunity for this groundbreaking project of electoral ethnography, which will seek to capture the diversity of the electoral experience across different settings in India through simultaneous studies by a team of 15 scholars in multiple sites, covering all aspects of the electoral procedure and popular participation, as it unfolds over 4-6 weeks, from nominations, campaigning, and media coverage to voting and the declaration of results. This project will therefore generate new, comparative understandings and collective insights into the social, political and cultural life of elections in India as a whole despite the enormous local variations and will lead to new understandings of democracy within contemporary India.
India’s success in conducting free and fair elections in which voters participate enthusiastically has given her a special global status. This project will add valuable added insight to current studies of elections globally and may offer important lessons for modern western democracies struggling with voter apathy and unclear notions of citizenship. India’s Election Commission has enormous international standing and fledgling democracies such as Bhutan and Iraq have turned to India for advice. In fact, most of Asia and Africa see India as providing a more relevant and attractive model than European and American countries. But even more mature democracies such as the UK turn to India for advice on electoral matters. In 2001, when the Electoral Commission was set up in the UK, India’s Chief Election Commissioner’s views were invited and during the 2004 elections in India, UK’s Electoral Commissioner Karamjit Singh, visited India to observe the success of the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs).
Research questions
1. Why do people vote?
Voters in India are no less sceptical about politicians than anywhere else yet they continue to turn out in record numbers. Why? I have found a number of different answers while conducting previous research at the village level. A sense of exercising one’s rights as a citizen as well as duty, a sophisticated awareness of their power to overthrow the ruling party if they don’t like what they have done, and a rare opportunity to be ‘King for a day’ – as an equal to everyone else, whatever their social status.
Moving away from the question of –‘who did you vote for’ (that psephologists and political scientists pose) - to –‘why do you vote?’ we will explore the reasons behind India’s phenomenal rates of political participation. Notions of ‘citizenship’ ‘rights’ and ‘duty’ will be probed to assess levels of popular engagement with these terms.
2. What is the Culture of the Polling station?
The ideal of egalitarianism of democracy is realized in the richness of the simple experience of casting one’s vote at a polling station. As one peasant woman in rural Bengal explained:
“As a low caste woman I can’t even sit down in a high caste woman’s courtyard unless she asks me to, leave alone sharing food or water. But at a polling station I go to vote and everyone is the same. It doesn’t matter who you are, or when you arrive at the polling station, you have to queue like everyone else. You are forced to rub shoulders with everyone regardless of caste or religion. For that one day everyone is the same and your vote is the same.”
This experience of lived popular sovereignty is achieved through the actual workings of the polling station. To capture all aspects of this important aspect careful observation and interviews will be conducted about how polling stations and the actual act of voting are run, how the personnel are trained, how Electronic Voting Machines are delivered, set up and dispatched on polling day, the role of security forces, the placement of observers and how the queues outside the polling station are managed. Further, we will also trace typical journeys to the polling station from surrounding areas, the time of the day when different social groups choose to make the journey, what they choose to wear and how they represent themselves, the distances involved, the modes of transport used, and the groups that form and travel together to cast their votes.
3. What is the language of voting and the vocabulary of politics and participation?
In India, what is perhaps most surprising is the degree of political literacy even in the absence of literacy and the levels of sophistication in the voter’s understanding about the nature of multiparty politics and his or her own role in it. A detailed record will made through in depth interviews with voters about the language they use to describe the concepts of the state, bureaucracy, political party, coalitions, campaigning, speeches and so on. There are over 300 languages spoken in India, so this exercise will help us assess the impact of English terms on local languages and the fluency of people’s own languages in capturing political concepts.
4. What is a typical election campaign in India?
We wish to capture all aspects of an election campaign as it typically plays out over a concentrated two-week period. In each site, the names of all contesting candidates and party affiliations will be recorded. We will conduct in-depth interviews with the main contenders and shadow them during their campaign. This will typically involve attending several public rallies (at which again Indian audience numbers are high) of different scales. Thus, street corner meetings, large public rallies, door-to-door campaigns and interviews to the media will be covered. An audio and visual record will be maintained of speeches made at these meetings, spot interviews about the content and style of the speech will be addressed to members of the audience.
In addition we will look at the workings of the political parties involved in campaign, attend strategy meetings, interview veteran and new party workers, and discuss the role of the manifesto and design of campaign material in their planning. Most political parties have permanent or make-shift party offices and we will record ‘a typical day’ in these offices by noting how campaign material is stored and disseminated, how queries from visitors are dealt with, how morale is maintained during a campaign and how popular moods and responses are assessed.
5. What is the role of the media in elections?
The media clearly plays an important role in disseminating political messages and political styles of politicians in India. To investigate this systematically, copies of the two largest circulating dailies in each field site will be collected over a period of 4 weeks. Detailed content analysis of their stories and letters to the editor will be documented. Also to study television coverage, we will shadow ‘a stringer’ reporter over a period of two days to observe closely how stories are captured, made and filed. A sample of voters will be chosen to record their consumption of radio, television and newspaper journalism.
Electoral Ethnography: The Need for Multidisciplinary Methodologies
My collaborator in this project is Delhi-based Lokniti, a research programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) and a pioneer in developing large-scale empirical studies of politics and political processes in India, housing one of the largest archives of social science survey data on political behaviour and attitudes spanning over three decades. Institutions such as Lokniti, through its large-scale surveys on electoral participation and outcomes, have contributed greatly in identifying these perplexing patterns of voter behaviour in India and have generated an important body of regional data and comparative analyses of the evolving trends in political processes. Its National Election Studies (NES), initiated in 1967, have been a vital source of information on voter attitudes and opinions over a number of parliamentary election cycles, the most recent of which covered the last general election in 2004. Like most large-scale survey-based analyses, however, these studies are better placed to indicate what is happening in terms of different socioeconomic parameters of participation, rather than explain why, and are unable to creatively observe and engage in the lively and complex experiences and articulations that animate and give meaning to the electoral exercise from the varied points of view of its diverse actors. Moreover, given the nature of survey evidence and the increasing prominence of polling, they inevitably attract most interest for their short-term predictive potential. On the other hand, eminent Indian sociologists have offered few detailed, micro-level studies of politics that provide fine-grained insights based on deep knowledge of a field site. When anthropologists have chosen to study elections in particular, they have tended to neglect all quantitative data, often missing out even the most basic information about population sizes and socioeconomic status (Shah and Srinivas (ed) 2007).
The current project thus grows from recognising this need to combine disciplinary strengths and methodological approaches, using both qualitative and quantitative approaches, in the study of Indian elections. While the surveys identify important patterns and apparent paradoxes, an ethnographer’s attentiveness, improvisation and wide-ranging interactions illuminate the electoral experience and its meanings to produce complementary, if often challenging insights. The study of the Indian elections deserves both.
This project has therefore been planned carefully to create a synergy of different approaches and expertise. This will be achieved according to the following timetable:
January 2009
Preliminary meeting in Delhi between PI and State Coordinators of the National Election Studies (NES) to finalize the exact field sites, appoint the researchers, and consolidate all background materials on each of the 15 sites. As this will be the first multi-sited, multi-disciplinary study of its kind in India, the process of preparing for the research will in itself have to be consultative, collaborative and creative. The PI will also travel to the field sites to finalize local arrangements. PI will also formally meet with the Election Commission in Delhi, although their enthusiastic support has already been enlisted through meetings in London during the EC’s visit in July 2008.
March 2009 The training workshop
In this intensive three-day workshop, we will communicate the research questions for the field research to be carried out during the project to all 15 researchers. Each participant will be given training in the required research methods - note taking, interview techniques, confidentiality and ethical issues, maintaining data, documenting visual and audio material - to build on and refresh their own expertise. Each of the anthropologists will have language competence and field experience in the site and will posses a strong understanding of the regional context. The fact that they might not have closely studied an election before will in fact bring a freshness to their engagement and allow for the drawing out of connections from their previous immersions in studying other dimensions of social, economic, political and cultural life in India. Further, detailed discussions will also be held on the various strategies involved in studying political processes, including the various local leads and resources available to the researchers in their field sites. We will pay special attention to the issues regarding ethics of doing this research. At a national level, the PI has established contact with senior members of the Election Commission, who have offered to share both their experience and relevant information.
A team of experts will advise this workshop. These will include:
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Scholars based in India and abroad who have studied the chosen locations in previous studies to provide historical and comparative expertise. Through engagement with their writings, we will not only break new methodological ground through the combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, but also will also restore and renew engagement across generations of surveys and scholarship on Indian elections and democracy. |
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Resource persons who can ‘read’ and interpret the survey data generated by previous NES Surveys. These interpretations will help frame further research questions specific to each site. Further, while the NES archives and survey data will provide important background information and contextual parameters for the ethnographers, the ethnographic fieldwork will not only seek to explore statistical trends, but also strengthen the relevance and sensitivity of survey questionnaires in return. |
Therefore, the workshop will be essential not only to the execution of the project, but also to the spirit of exchange that has been envisaged.
April/May 2009 Field research
The research sites have been chosen, keeping in mind regional balance, electoral histories, the availability of researchers and accessibility, and coverage by previous studies. The PI has extensive contacts with anthropologists and researchers based outside and inside India and a number of scholars have agreed in principle to undertake this research. Each researcher is a social scientist/ anthropologist, has extensive local knowledge of the site and is a scholar in his or her own right. They are currently based in India, Europe and US.
The unit of study of each site will be a neighborhood (mohalla) in a town/city or a cluster of villages in a rural setting. It is expected that in some cases the research site will cover more than one polling station whose average catchments area is c.1000 voters. This will also provide a more varied section of the electorate to be captured by the study.
Each researcher will conduct research for a period of 30 days. On the basis of the Election Commission’s usual calendar of events, it is expected that in 2009 the elections will be declared in March and polling will be carried out in 5 phases across the country concluding by 20 May 2009 by when the new government needs to be appointed. The electoral timetable will be thus: 15 March 2009 Formal opening of nomination procedures; 22 –23 March Scrutiny by EC of nominations; 26 March Deadline for withdrawal of nominations; 14 days of campaign. The first polling date for the first phase is likely to be 15 April. The rest of the four phases will be held between 15 April and 10 May 2009.
June 2009
All researchers will be invited back to a de-brief workshop to be held in Delhi by the PI and Lokniti in Delhi. Each researcher will be expected to submit a written report and make an oral presentation. Each report will be followed by a detailed discussion to reflect on the data and analysis presented. A writing fee will be awarded to each researcher on completion of a revised and final report by the end of June 2009. According to the research design of this project, the common framework of questions, issues and methodologies a collection of genuinely comparative essays on electoral ethnography will emerge.
Publications/ Outputs of the project
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A report for the Election Commission of India |
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An academic volume with the findings of the comparative study will be submitted to the book series ‘Exploring the Political in South Asia’ by Routledge. |
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A book of photographs of all visual material collected during the project. |
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A 40 min radio documentary for BBC Radio 4 to be broadcast on a Thursday evening (already commissioned to the PI and production company ‘Culture Wise’). |
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A website will be set up and maintained by the staff of Lokniti and CSDS in March 2009 which will be updated regularly to document the materials collected during the project. Visitors to the site will be encouraged to leave comments, add their own pictures and 'election stories'. |
Impact of this Project
The findings of this project - comparing elections as they happen, within India, across diverse settings - will be of enormous interest to a number of audiences. First, as an academic study, it will interest scholars for its unique methodological innovation of using both quantitative and qualitative methods in studying democracy. This study will also offer important theoretical insights that have come to be expected from the rich and diverse literature of South Asian studies, by offering, for the first time, the perceptions of the voters themselves who are usually neglected by theorists of democracy. Further, given the subject matter of democracy and elections, there is an interested audience outside academia. India provides a unique case of the world’s largest democracy with over 700 million voters with robust levels of voter turnout and participation. This study will chart the perceptions of the democratic process from the point of view of the avid voters who in India are often illiterate and under privileged. This will provide significant insights into the workings of democracies elsewhere, both new and old ones, where elections are not the popular festival as they are in India. In addition, the Election Commission of India, which has emerged as the leading advisor national governments, is also keen for us to share our findings with them. As an unusually responsive public body, it intends to use our findings to further improve and nuance their own. Finally, given India’s status as an emerging economy, there is widespread international media attention focused on the country. India’s record as a functioning democracy is essential to its growing economic clout and so the elections of 2009 will be of considerable interest to those watching the formation of its next government. Special care has been taken in the planning of this project to put in place arrangements that will disseminate the results as widely as possible. |
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