Elections and Voting in IndiaRichard Sisson ELECTION STUDIES IN INDIA: AN EVALUATION By Iqbal Narain , K.C. Pande, M.L. Sharma, & Hansa Rajpal Allied Publishers, New Delhi, 1978, Rs. 40.00 VOLUME III NUMBER 4 January/February 1979 This book, as noted in its preface, is
‘an Evaluation Report on the Elections and Voting Behaviour Studies conducted
in India since the first general elections’ commissioned by the Indian Council
of Social Science Research. It surveys and codifies this wide ranging, vast and
disparate literature and includes the results of a survey of scholars
concerning their appraisals of the state of the art, and conducted by the
author. It concludes by suggesting what are proposed as viable route of inquiry
for the future.
The
judgements and appraisals offered by the authors concerning this body of
scholarship are not particularly sanguine. Implicit in the drift of observation
and argument in the book is that with a few notable exceptions, the state of
election studies in India is at best inadequate, at worst dismal. Those studies
devoted to the first general elections, the authors opine, employed elementary
statistics, made ‘generalizations too sweeping to bring out the intricacies of
election politics,’ and endeavoured to ‘emulate American models of voting
behaviour studies without much success in terms of breadth or depth of
treatment.’ Studies of 1957 and 1959 elections are judged ‘inferior both in substantive
and methodological terms to the studies of the 1952 elections.’ While the
authors see studies of the 1962 elections making ‘considerable headway,’ it is
then suggested that ‘the studies have been rather weak from the point of view
of theoretical perspective and methodological rigour.’ While there are no general
summations of the studies of 1967, 1969, and 1971 and 1972 and the
commentaries become somewhat thin in the final chapter entitled ‘Towards a
summing Up’ the authors propose that in addition to the faults noted for
earlier inquiries electoral studies have tended to ignore relationships
between elections and inter-election politics, have not given adequate
attention to political performance, and are inordinately imitative of western
models in terms of theoretical frameworks, methods, and techniques. With the
exception of several unpublished studies conducted by Bashiruddin Ahmed, and
equivocal judgements of studies by Roy, Sirsikar, and Varma and Bhambri among
others, most are judged as woefully wanting in terms of· theoretical import,
clarity of focus, appropriateness and sophistication of method· or some
combination of the same.
For those
interested in studies of Indian elections, the book possesses several utilities.
It covers a wide range of studies and orders them in an intelligent manner.
These include analyses of elections at the level of ... Table of Contents >> |