The present Election Commissioner is Naveen Chawla. The Election Commission of India performs several functions, starting from the announcement of the elections to the final declaration of the result.
It drafts and implements the Code of Conduct for elections and takes disciplinary action against parties violating it. The Election Commission is authorized to advise the government on decisions affecting the election and control the transfer of government officials across departments and roles. The Election Commission also has the function of controling the work of government officials on election duty. The Election Commission has the power to order a re-poll in case it finds evidence of unfair practices during polling.
The Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index gives a snapshot on the health of democracy in countries and two territories. Also, these rankings do have "rules and parameters".
V-Dem says it measures "hundreds of different attributes of democracy" with almost 30 million data points, involving more than 3, scholars and country experts. The Economist's Democracy Index is based on measuring electoral process and pluralism, the functioning of government, political participation, political culture and civil liberties".
And Freedom House says it uses a two-tiered system consisting of scores and status - a country is awarded points for each of its political rights and civil liberties indicators. Such rankings, according to a study by University of Pennsylvania, are the result of quantitative assessments - like distribution of seats in the national legislature among political parties - and qualitative judgements, like evaluating whether safeguards against corruption are effective.
Aggregating these indicators into an index is a subjective exercise, depending on the judgements of experts to identify metrics to include and how to weight each appropriately. Yonatan L Morse, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Connecticut and a country expert for V-Dem, agrees there is a "degree of subjectivity" in assessing democracy.
But Prof Morse says V- Dem does a number of things "really well" to address this: a comprehensive list of questions to measure important elements of electoral democracy suffrage and clean elections, among others , and rating clean elections by assessing different factors.
Each country is rated by a number of experts. Differences of opinion among experts are transformed into a single measure using statistical models that help forecast outcomes more reliably. Also most rankings do not impose a single definition of democracy - experts agree that an "electoral democracy" is really the bare minimum. Going by rankings, democracy, despite its enduring appeal, appears to be in trouble all over the world.
And in the Democracy Index, only 75 of the countries and territories covered by the model - or India is the latest example of this following Hungary and Turkey. The Indian case stands out given the size of its population and past record as a successful model of multi-ethnic democracy," says Prof Morse. He says India follows the pattern observed in other cases of recent democratic breakdown. They then often repress freedom of expression by censoring media, limiting academic freedom, or curtailing civil society.
Populist leaders often polarise society and delegitimise the political opposition, often presenting them as enemies of the state or people. What follows is often violation of electoral integrity itself and outright fraud," says Prof Morse. Paul Staniland, associate professor of political science at University of Chicago, has examined V-Dem's measurement of India since Independence in in its democracy index.
He found India's ranking was lower during the Emergency in the mids when Indira Gandhi, the former prime minister belonging to the Congress party, suspended civil liberties. The s show up as more democratic than the ss, a decade which was politically dominated by the Congress party.
There is no major decline in ranking during the BJP-led coalition government between and Indeed, there's a very slight drop [in rankings] from to under the Congress-led UPA government. V-Dem is not a huge fan of Indira Gandhi's rule in s or early s. There are important alternative approaches to measuring these things and lots of important caveats about how precise they can be.
But there are a lot of reasons to think they capture important big-picture dynamics and trends," says Prof Staniland. Rohan Mukherjee, an assistant professor of political science, at Yale-NUS College, says these rankings are useful for research and identifying very broad trends that academics are interested in. Some of this also gets to the heart of how we define democracy and who gets to define democracy. Prof Mukherjee says most non-academics would be incredulous that a handful of research assistants and country experts get to decide that a country is an "electoral autocracy" while hundreds of millions of that country's citizens would disagree.
The operational concepts across the two domains are very different. Democracy in the V-Dem dataset, says Prof Mukherjee, has a precise and multi-faceted definition, many aspects of which the vast majority of Indians do not keep in their heads as they go about their lives and think about the political system in which they live.
Image source, Getty Images. Mr Modi's government has been accused of targeting minorities. So what's going on?
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