Approval and Legacy: Modi Mantra of Invoking Dead Leaders

• In Event: Poster Session: New Avenues in Human Rights Research & South Asian Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: South Asian Politics

Abstract

Taking advantage of widely available speeches and Natural Language Processing tools, we explore the evidence behind a leader’s tendency to invoke dead party leaders or other political figures with popular and stronger historical legacies. In line with recent work on hagiographies of Argentinian leader Juan Peron, we examine speeches of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for invocation of dead leaders--especially Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. Preliminary results point toward an increasing trend of Modi invoking Patel when his approval ratings are sliding.
This work, theoretically, is related to vertical accountability—a core concept of democratic theory. Regular elections are the tools to make leaders accountable to the electorate but accountability does not simply vanish between the elections. As recent works have demonstrated, leaders care about their approval ratings because they are the signs of popularity or public support which is a key to adopting preferred policies or consolidating power. In particular, if approval ratings are declining, the incumbent is expected to try to adopt different tactics to spike the popularity—rhetoric being one of those tools. In a common phenomenon of global politics, leaders often invoke their dead party leaders or other political figures with popular and stronger historical legacies in their speeches as a tool of image-based rhetoric. Such rhetoric which has symbolic importance can affect the voters in three ways—first, by linking the charismatic image of the deceased leaders with the current one; second, as a diversionary tactic, and lastly, as a nostalgia generator creating a positive image. Such strategic behavior of elites could be a tool to cloud public (at least supporters’) judgment about their poor performance or many a time ‘anti-democratic’ adventures of the leaders. Hence, understanding the invocation of deceased popular figures in leaders’ speeches also fits with the theme of this annual conference centered on democracy.
Such invocation though widely used by leaders, and its impact have been under-studied. In an attempt to fill the gap, we examine the speeches of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi who frequently invokes Vallabhbhai Patel. Though Modi is one of the global leaders who commands consistently high approval ratings, the availability of a granular dataset at a weekly level from the Executive Approval Proejct has enabled us to parse out the variations and the potential linkage between approval-invocation. Patel, a historical figure associated with the Indian National Congress (the main opponent of Modi's party BJP), is widely admired for his role in bringing all the independent princely states under united India after British rule ended. Patel who hails from Gujarat--the home state of Modi, is portrayed by historians as one of the founding fathers of independent India who had softer stances towards Hindu nationalists as opposed to the first Indian PM Jawahar Lal Nehru.
Two major concerns however may arise. First, such a spike in popularity may be just among the party cadres or supporters as the deceased figure whom the leader invokes may only connect to the followers of a particular party, especially in the case of a polarized political environment. Second, the question arises: what would be the observable implication of approval-invocation linkage? To address those concerns, firstly, I plan to examine the association between the frequency of invocation of a more neutral figure like Gandhi and Modi’s approval ratings. Next, I plan to survey Indian respondents to see if hypothetical messages from a leader with or without invocation of past figures would make any difference in persuasion or not. Though Amazon Mechanical Turks or Prolific’s only gender-balanced samples may have limitations, they could be feasible mediums to survey given the financial constraints.
This project contributes in four fundamental ways. First, it bridges the normative democratic theory and Zaller’s RAS (Receive-Accept-Sample) method by introducing a dynamic component in the concept of the elite’s responsiveness, and his tendency to shape public opinion. Second, it adds value to the burgeoning computational social science by using data science tools to address the puzzles in political science. Third, this project will provide external validity to the approval-invocation linkage observed in Latin America by expanding the research to Asia. Fourth, the project makes a scholarly contribution by exploring the South Asia region, a lesser-studied region though it accounts for a quarter of the world’s population.

Authors

• Mahesh Acharya, The University of Mississippi

• Amrit Poudel, University of Notre Dame