Democratic Backsliding in the World’s Largest Democracy

Abstract

Erosion of trust in the honesty of elections and concomitant weakening of democratic institutions and practices are growing concerns in modern global politics. This paper contributes to the discussion by detecting and examining a rare electoral irregularity observed in 2019 general election in India – the incumbent party won disproportionately more seats than it lost in closely contested constituencies. To examine whether this is due to electoral manipulation or effective campaigning by the ruling party, the paper tests for endogenous sorting of close election constituencies across the win margin threshold by applying the regression discontinuity design and other methods on several unique datasets. The evidence presented is consistent with electoral manipulation and is less supportive of the campaigning hypothesis. Manipulation appears to take the form of targeted deletion of voter names of and electoral discrimination against India’s largest minority group – Muslims, partly facilitated by weak monitoring by election observers. The results present a worrying development for the future of the World’s largest democracy.

Keywords: Electoral fraud, precise control, democracy, economics of religion

JEL Classification: D72, D73, P00, Z12