I think China's disproportionate dominance demands some form of government intervention. Usually, the market failure concept applies to a domestic context and doesn't take unfair global players into account. Seen another way, China's subsidies and opaque government support is information asymmetry, it has disproportionate market power, and its overcapacity leads to negative externalities. So, government intervention is justified. My point is that it shouldn't be in the form of complicated PLIs.
It means every electoral system has major flaws. India's current system works for our context. It allows multiple parties to come up (a benefit attributed to proportional representation systems) on one hand. And provides the benefits of relatively stable governments and electoral simplicity (which FPTP provides).
I agree that the modern Indian republic has had a multitude—both in terms of number and diverse political ideologies—of political organisations despite, (1) the FPTP system, which tends to support a preferential attachment of power, and (2) the domination of two political behemoths (INC and BJP) for large parts of its history. So Joan Robinson's "whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true" holds in this scenario as well seeing that Duverger's Law applies to India but also doesn't apply.
However, I am not sure if this quirk would persist much longer because now the dominant political organisation doesn't even need to be 'first' to be past the post. As the stand-up comic referenced in this week's newsletter put it quite pithily—First the Shiv Sena separated from the NDA, then the Shiv Sena separated from the Shiv Sena, and then the NCP separated from the NCP. A conversation on the relative merits of different voting systems in the Indian context, be it FPTP, proportional representation, ranked choice, or something else, needs to grapple with this changed reality as well.
Of course, we may be just needlessly splitting hairs as some mathematicians have already determined that democracy is (mathematically) impossible.
Great piece!
No market failure, no govt intervention. ECMS funding will come from tax payers pocket.
Thanks for this comment..
I think China's disproportionate dominance demands some form of government intervention. Usually, the market failure concept applies to a domestic context and doesn't take unfair global players into account. Seen another way, China's subsidies and opaque government support is information asymmetry, it has disproportionate market power, and its overcapacity leads to negative externalities. So, government intervention is justified. My point is that it shouldn't be in the form of complicated PLIs.
I have always found Ranked Choice voting much better compared to PR. Are there any obvious drawbacks for it in Indian context?
The Tyranny of Context dictates that the tyranny of the majority is preferable to the tyranny of the minority/ies?
It means every electoral system has major flaws. India's current system works for our context. It allows multiple parties to come up (a benefit attributed to proportional representation systems) on one hand. And provides the benefits of relatively stable governments and electoral simplicity (which FPTP provides).
Thanks for the reply.
I agree that the modern Indian republic has had a multitude—both in terms of number and diverse political ideologies—of political organisations despite, (1) the FPTP system, which tends to support a preferential attachment of power, and (2) the domination of two political behemoths (INC and BJP) for large parts of its history. So Joan Robinson's "whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true" holds in this scenario as well seeing that Duverger's Law applies to India but also doesn't apply.
However, I am not sure if this quirk would persist much longer because now the dominant political organisation doesn't even need to be 'first' to be past the post. As the stand-up comic referenced in this week's newsletter put it quite pithily—First the Shiv Sena separated from the NDA, then the Shiv Sena separated from the Shiv Sena, and then the NCP separated from the NCP. A conversation on the relative merits of different voting systems in the Indian context, be it FPTP, proportional representation, ranked choice, or something else, needs to grapple with this changed reality as well.
Of course, we may be just needlessly splitting hairs as some mathematicians have already determined that democracy is (mathematically) impossible.