T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan: India, America, religion and politics

OKONOMOS

When the Congress was out of power, it went back to the tried and trusted populism of the Garibi Hatao era. Now that the BJP is out of power, will it go back to the tried and trusted Hindutva formula?

The answer depends on what L K Advani, the new president of the BJP, thinks is the best way of getting back the core BJP vote.

He might find an answer in a recent paper* by Edward Glaeser, Giacomo Ponzetto, and Jesse M Shapiro. They may as well have written it from Indian data and for Indian political parties.

The paper is about the use of religion in its extreme forms in politics. The authors have tried to answer a question that has bothered many Indians, namely, "Given the high returns from attracting the median voter, why do vote-maximising politicians veer off into extremism?"

After some exhaustive analysis, they find that "strategic extremism" is used to "induce core constituents to vote". The extreme message is actually thus aimed at those core constituents.

Being economists, they have also constructed a model. It predicts that "the political relevance of religious issues is highest when around one-half of the voting population attends church regularly."

Clearly, church attendance is used as a proxy for religiosity. The sudden mushrooming of temples from about the mid-1980s, that is, after the BJP won only two seats in the 1984 general election, is thus no coincidence.

But they also find that if you go very much above or below 50 per cent, the strategy doesn't work. Other factors then come into play.

Another finding from the data is that in the US while the correlation between income and religiosity has been more or less the same since the 1960s, "the correlation between religious attendance and party affiliation has risen over this period." And, of course, as in India, this has happened simultaneously with the increase in religious extremism.

The paper is full of the most important insights. Thus, whether or not (and to what extent) a political party turns to extreme religious messages depends on whether or not there are what the authors call "two electoral margins".

One is an "extensive margin where a politician competes for voters from the other party." The other is an "intensive margin where the politician attempts to bring his own voters into the voting booth".

And from this comes the general prescription. "If there is no intensive margin and therefore no reason to cater to the party faithful, politicians will lose votes if they move their policies away from the preferences of the median voter."

But nothing is costless and there is a major problem with strategic extremism. As we saw in India during the last general election, it energises the opponents, who come together far more cohesively than they would otherwise have done. The UPA, with its "secular" tom-tomming, is living proof of this.

Hence the need for "extremism to be an equilibrium". This requires that if a party is going to adopt extreme tactics, it must be able to mobilise more of its voters on voting day than the opposition does. Here, too, the BJP failed while the UPA succeeded.

There is yet another important inference. This is that if there are two issues, and voters have strongly held preferences about both, "extremism is more likely along the issue where there is greater heterogeneity of preferences".

This means that the returns to extremism in homogenising the heterogeneous preferences are higher. That is, you pat everyone down into very similar opinions. This is what the BJP successfully did in the 1989, 1996, 1998 and 1999 general elections.

It is also what the UPA successfully did in 2004 "" it homogenised voter preferences about poverty. It simply focused the ambivalent feelings that the India Shining campaign (another form of extremism, actually) better than the BJP did.

It would thus seem that extreme political stands work not just for religion but for other things as well. This is the key message and it would be wrong to ignore it in an environment of brutally competitive politics.

Strategic Extremism: Why Republicans and Democrats Divide on Religious Values NBER Working Paper No. 10835, October 2004