Vivek's Commentary

Is it a Consumer Confidence, Consumer Expectation and Consumer Sentiments or Voters Confidence, Voters Expectation and Voters Sentiments?  Reserve Bank of India conducts the Consumer Confidence Survey (CCS). RBI conducts this survey in thirteen major cities Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Bhopal, Chennai, Delhi, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, Patna, and Thiruvananthapuram. The main aim of this survey is to capture the perceptions and expectations of the general economic situation, the employment scenario, the overall price situation, and own income and spending. The last data released by RBI is for November 2019.  Centre For Monitoring Indian Economy Pvt Ltd (CMIE) also tries to analyze the consumer sentiments through Consumer Pyramids Survey (CPHS). This survey is a longitudinal survey. CMIE provides the index for consumer sentiments, index for consumer expectation and index for current economic conditions. The perception about the economic condition (a...

The recent trends in Assembly elections show that the local issues do matter. In this article, I am trying to understand the constituencywise voting pattern for Bihar, Maharashtra, and Kerala in the assembly election. I wanted to compare Bihar and Kerala's last two assembly elections as these states witnessed the state election in consecutive years as well as the differences in the development pattern. I added Maharashtra just for interest ('_').  Bihar in 2010 witnessed the fight between two alliances (actually three NDA, UPA, and RJD+LJP) while in 2015 it was between two major alliances Mahagathabandhana and NDA. The main difference between the two elections is that one happened before the 2014 Loksabha election and another happened after the 2014 Loksabha election.  The concentration index is formed for each constituency by adding the square of vote shares (in total valid votes) of all candidates in a given constituency. Another index is formed by using total number...

Maharashtra Assembly 2019 results are eye-opening for every political party especially for parties in power. The important difference between Congress-NCP and BJP-Shivsena alliance was that INC-NCP localized the election while BJP-Shivsena centralized the election, therefore, BJP-Sena yuti was unable to overcome the local opposition. BJP-SHS alliance has witnessed a strong fight against their own rebellions. A similar thing is done by Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi. There is much discussion about the defeat of the INC-NCP alliance in some constituencies due to Vanchit Bahujan. The primary assumption for that is the people who vote for Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi, would prefer to vote for INC-NCP in the absence of the Vanchit Bahujan. But in 2014, BJP managed to attract the votes of the backward categories. Now it is not clear whether these voters would prefer INC-NCP over BJP-SHS in the absence of the Vanchit Bahujan. But yes it is true that alliance with Vanchit Bahujan would have more pro...

2014 Loksabha election has made a tremendous impact on Indian Politics. The rise of Narendra Modi has changed the political equation at national as well as sub-national level. In this article, I will try to understand the changes in the voting pattern by constructing the indicators.  The main change which is being witnessed is that India is moving towards new hegemony in Indian Politics (Palshikar (2018). This is contradictory to the political movement of the Indian democracy, Before 2014, Indian democracy was moving towards convergence from hegemony which means that in political competition the dominance of the single dominated players gets reduced (Palshikar and Yadav (2003)). This is also getting reflected in the voter's behavior where voters are looking for single dominated party and dominated leader.  To understand the changes in the voting pattern, I have constructed Gallagher’s index given by Gallagher (1991) and Effective Number of Political Parties developed b...