In recent years, scholarship (Levendusky 2017, Iyengar et al. 2019, Luke and Westberg 2022) has stressed the pivotal role of three types of polarization in the deterioration of democratic systems across the globe: partisan, media and affective polarization. Such phenomena incentivize political leaders to disown democratic principles to gain/retain power (McCoy and Somer 2021), promote anti-pluralist policies (Sato 2021) and trade off the rule of law for in-group loyalty (Graham & Svolik 2020).
In the Indian context, polarization is often referred to in the context of communalism and hate speech (Hasan 2022). Recent studies have shown that political activity on social media is often associated with radical ethno-nationalism (Verma 2023), violent partisan discussions (Udupa 2019) and political propaganda on mainstream television channels (Neyazi 2019). Yet, numerous traits of India's distributive democracy (Auerbach et al. 2021) sit uneasy with traditional understandings of "pernicious polarization" (McCoy and Somer 2024). Non-polarizing practices include constant party switching (Khosla and Vaishnav 2024), harmony-ridden discourses of by the ruling dispensation (Jaffrelot 2021), the rapid invisibilization of opposition media (Neyazi 2024) and a relative electoral success of diverse regional parties in the 2024 parliamentary elections.
This panel seeks to assess in which ways polarization contributes to India's ongoing shift towards competitive authoritarianism (V.-Dem 2024). Contributions will aim to assess the viability of the concept within the Indian context and explore various potential hyphenations to the practice, including "irenic polarization," "hegemonic polarization," and "ethno-nationalist polarization." From a methodological standpoint, panelists will draw from a variety of approaches rooted in comparative politics, both inferential and interpretive. These include computational discourse analysis of political elites, institutional theory of party politics, media and communication studies as well as qualitative historical surveys.
Bibliographic references
https://zbib.org/0eb32d9fe1a441cf91ca802d496b9cea