The Consequences of Political Inclusion of Regional Language Movements in India: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis

• In Event: 066 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 02. Citizenship and Inclusion

Abstract

When social movements enter the realm of institutionalized politics through political party formation and subsequently win elections, they are considered insiders capable of bringing about favorable policy shifts. Despite the assumed gains of political inclusion for social movements, it is unclear how they actually gain from inclusion – on the one hand, movements often only gain marginal insider status and on another, as a voluminous body of empirical research on veto-politics indicates, adding more vetoes to the policy making apparatus limits any likelihood of substantial policy changes. So we ask in this paper “How does political inclusion matter to movements?” Our empirical site is the contestation of regional language movements in India against the central government’s national language policy. Several regional language movements in India formed their own political parties and enjoyed electoral success. But bringing about sweeping policy changes has been a challenge due to the persistent opposition towards their goals from dominant insiders – the nationalist central government. We demonstrate in this paper that movements used their electoral gains as a political opportunity to strengthen their support base - they encouraged entrepreneurs by providing them symbolic and material resources to found regional language newspapers, which in turn also discouraged the founding of Hindi newspapers. To establish causality we use a regression discontinuity design to empirically analyze the impact of close-call electoral victory of movements.

Authors

• Rajiv Krishnan Kozhikode, Simon Fraser University

• Jiatao Li, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

• Rekha Krishnan, Simon Fraser University