This book, as noted in its preface, is ‘an Evaluation Report on the Elections and Voting Behaviour Studies conducted in India since the first general elections’ commissioned by the Indian Council of Social Science Research. It surveys and codifies this wide ranging, vast and disparate literature and includes the results of a survey of scholars concerning their appraisals of the state of the art, and conducted by the author. It concludes by suggesting what are proposed as viable route of inquiry for the future.
The judgements and appraisals offered by the authors concerning this body of scholarship are not particularly sanguine. Implicit in the drift of observation and argument in the book is that with a few notable exceptions, the state of election studies in India is at best inadequate, at worst dismal.
Those studies devoted to the first general elections, the authors opine, employed elementary statistics, made ‘generalizations too sweeping to bring out the intricacies of election politics,’ and endeavoured to ‘emulate American models of voting behaviour studies without much success in terms of breadth or depth of treatment.’ Studies of 1957 and 1959 elections are judged ‘inferior both in substantive and methodological terms to the studies of the 1952 elections.’ While the authors see studies of the 1962 elections making ‘considerable headway,’