When Ideas Matter: Democracy and Corruption in India
Bilal A. Baloch
Oct 2021 · South Asia in the Social Sciences Book 16 · Cambridge University Press
Ebook
325
Pages
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About this ebook
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.
About the author
Bilal Baloch is a political scientist and visiting scholar at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania, where he taught at the Lauder Institute, Wharton School of Business. His research interests cover the political economy of government decision-making and intellectual history with a focus on South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa. Bilal is also co-founder of GlobalWonks, a software company that uses artificial intelligence to deliver expert insights to organizations worldwide.
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