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Enfranchisement, Political Participation, and Political Competition: Evidence from Colonial and Independent India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 January 2025

Guilhem Cassan ,
Lakshmi Iyer Open the ORCID record for Lakshmi Iyer [Opens in a new window]  and
Rinchan Ali Mirza
Guilhem Cassan
Affiliation:
Professor, University of Namur, 8 Rue du Rempart de la Vierge, 5000 Namur, Belgium. E-mail: guilhem.cassan@unamur.be.
Lakshmi Iyer*
Affiliation:
Professor, University of Notre Dame, 3054 Jenkins Nanovic Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556. E-mail: liyer@nd.edu.
Rinchan Ali Mirza
Affiliation:
Rinchan Ali Mirza is Lecturer, University of Kent, Office 255, Sibson Building, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7PE, UK. E-mail: r.a.mirza@kent.ac.uk.
*
E-mail: liyer@nd.edu
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Abstract

We examine how political participation and political competition are shaped by two class-based extensions of the franchise in twentieth-century India. Creating a new dataset of district-level political outcomes between 1920 and 1957, we find that both the partial franchise extension of 1935 and the universal suffrage reform of 1950 led to limited increases in citizen participation as voters or candidates, and neither reform had a significant effect on increasing political competition. Despite the limited effects on political outcomes, districts with greater enfranchisement increases experienced higher education provision by provincial governments.

Type
Article
Information
The Journal of Economic History , First View , pp. 1 - 39
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Economic History Association

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Footnotes

We thank three anonymous referees, Latika Chaudhary, Dan Keniston, Akshay Mangla, Nicola Persico, Meg Rithmire, and seminar and conference participants at several universities for helpful comments and suggestions. We are thankful to Latika Chaudhary and Francesca Jensenius for their immense generosity with data sharing, and to Paradigm Data Services and the Trivedi Center for Political Data (Ashoka University) for excellent research assistance. Guilhem Cassan and Rinchan Ali Mirza gratefully acknowledge financial support of the FNRS, through the Mandat d’Impulsion Scientifique “Democratisation in Colonial India.” This work was financially supported by the Excellence of Science (EOS) Research project of FNRS O020918F.

References

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