POSTPONED DUE TO RAIL STRIKES. WILL BE RESCHEDULED FOR MAY 2023.

Please join us for a research talk with Dishil Shrimankar (Manchester).

Campaigns not only mobilize those they directly contact; they also benefit from “secondary mobilization”, when the voters they contact in turn mobilize members of their own social networks. In this article, we hypothesize that the existing social networks of local candidates form an important type of secondary mobilization. These mobilzation networks help to extend the range of people who are contacted by a campaign, boosting candidate support and in the process increasing turnout in the local area. We provide evidence for these hypotheses using geo-matched micro-level polling booth data to exploit within-electoral-district variation in candidate vote share and turnout in India (N=523,214).

Dishil Shrimankar is a Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the University of Manchester. Prior to joining the University, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London. He completed a PhD in political science from the University of Nottingham. His research interests lie at the intersection of comparative politics, Indian politics and quantitative methods. He is currently conducting research on local candidates in Indian elections as part of a Leverhulme Trust funded early career research fellowship. His doctoral dissertation explained the puzzle of why regional parties succeed in some Indian regions, but not in others. He showed that when national parties are decentralized and the regional branch is granted more autonomy, regional parties find it hard to succeed. A second component of the dissertation investigates why some regional branches of national parties have more autonomy where others do not.

Speaker: Dishil Shrimankar (University of Manchester)

Discussant: Simon Toubeau (University of Nottigham)

Chair and Convener: Fernando Casal Bertoa (University of Nottingham)

All welcome. This seminar will be held as a hybrid. Please indicate in your registration whether you wish to take part via our online platform or in person. The in-person event will take place in Law and Social Sciences A103 on the University Park Campus at the University of Nottingham.

Local Candidates in Indian Elections