When Ideas Matter
Democracy and Corruption in India

A study of ideas, their substance, origins and salience, in government decision-making during credibility crises in India and developing democracies.

Bilal A. Baloch (Author)

9781009413022, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 24 August 2023

351 pages
27 x 18 x 2.3 cm, 0.585 kg

'Bilal Baloch makes a powerful constructivist case for the importance of ideas in explaining key outcomes and crises in post-independence Indian history, from the secular nationalist era of the 1970s, to the Hindu Nationalist present.' Steven Wilkinson, Yale University, author of Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India

Comparativist scholarship conventionally gives unbridled primacy to external, material interests–chiefly votes and rents–as proximately shaping political behaviour. These logics tend to explicate elite decision-making around elections and pork barrel politics but fall short in explaining political conduct during credibility crises, such as democratic governments facing anti-corruption movements. In these instances, Baloch shows, elite ideas, for example concepts of the nation or technical diagnoses of socioeconomic development, dominate policymaking. Scholars leverage these arguments in the fields of international relations, American politics, and the political economy of development. But an account of ideas activating or constraining executive action in developing democracies, where material pressures are high, is found wanting. Resting on fresh archival research and over 120 original elite interviews, When Ideas Matter traces where ideas come from, how they are chosen, and when they are most salient for explaining political behaviour in India and similar contexts.

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
1. Introduction
2. A constructivist approach to political behavior in India
3. The Emergency and the Jayaprakash Narayan Movement
4. India under Gandhi: Populism and partisans
5. Checks and balances and the India against Corruption Movement
6. United Progressive Alliance: Technocrats and transformations
7. The politics of ideas in India and developing democracies
Appendices
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Regional government [JPR], Central government [JPQ], Public administration [JPP], Political structure & processes [JPH], Politics & government [JP], Sociology [JHB]