The State of Female Autonomy in India: A Stochastic Dominance Approach

The promotion of female autonomy is both intrinsically and instrumentally desirable. We document differences in the distribution of female autonomy in India (using the National Family Health Survey 2005–2006) addressing two methodological challenges: the multidimensional nature of the concept and its frequent measurement with ordinal variables (which are not amenable to direct comparisons of social averages). We tackle these challenges with three methods based on stochastic dominance techniques suited for ordinal and dichotomous variables. Whenever these dominance conditions hold for a pairwise comparison, we can conclude that the multidimensional autonomy distribution in one state is more desirable than in another one across a broad range of criteria for the individual and social welfare evaluation of autonomy. Consistently across the three methods, we find that most of the states with better autonomy distributions (in pairwise comparisons) come from the north east and the south, whereas most of the states with worse autonomy distributions come from the north.     

Influence of Voter Demographics and Newspaper in Shaping Political Party Choice in India: An Empirical Investigation

Choice of political party is an important decision a citizen faces in a democracy. In recent times, as democracies in many countries have matured, a number of studies are focusing on party and candidate choice and their various determinants. India, being the largest democracy, provides a fertile ground for such research. Accordingly, in this paper we concentrate on demographic characteristics, newspaper-reading habits of voters, and their political choice. To study this we have considered a very unique data set collected just before the watershed elections in the state of West Bengal in India, where the ruling Communist coalition was defeated after thirty-four years of power in the state. The survey was conducted using a structured questionnaire to collect information on demographic characteristics of voters and their political choice. The respondents were asked to indicate their party choice from among the three major political parties. As the literature shows that gender, age, education, income levels, marital status, occupational status, and choice of newspaper have significant impact on political choice, we have considered these as predictor variables for our study. From our study it is seen that among the demographic determinants, gender, marital status, and income of the respondents do not influence the choice of political party in our sample. However, occupation and newspaper choice of voters have significant impact on political party choice in our sample. In addition, we have observed that certain categories of age of voters significantly influence decision making of voters along with occupation and newspaper choice categories.     

Ideology in the Era of Xi Jinping

Journal of Chinese Political Science - After 1978, Maoism as a living mass ideological and social force in the People’s Republic of China largely died away. The Party state’s legitimacy...     

Like a tree

The contemporary mediascape has been marked by a proliferation of popular TV genres in which the public appear as central protagonists. These genres are part of a broader shift in the relationship between media and audiences which challenges traditional conceptions of public service broadcasting and appear to represent a shift from media as public knowledge to media as constituting a space for diffuse popular engagement. A central feature of this shift has been the growing role of popular forms of expertise on television. This paper maps the main critical debates around participatory television and the role of the expert, from earlier work on talk shows to more recent discussions of reality and makeover TV. It notes a transition within the critical media and cultural studies literature from a focus on public sphere theory and questions of democratization to a growing concern with the role played by popular media culture in supporting new modes of governance based on the expert mediation of normative self-control. In this paper we analyze the role of experts on Oprah Winfrey's popular website Oprah.com, noting both the utility and limitations of a governmental perspective. Extending upon Foucault's notion of the productive nature of liberal subjecthood, the paper suggests the more positive role played by popular expertise in contributing to a media–civic culture articulated to a politics of recognition.     

The political determinants of fiscal policies in the states of India: An empirical investigation

Using data from the 14 major states of India, we investigate whether state governments' fiscal policy choices are tempered by political considerations. Our principal findings are twofold. First, we show that certain fiscal policies experience electoral cycles: state governments raise less commodity tax revenue, spend less on the current account, and incur larger capital account developmental expenditures in election years than in all other years. Second, we show that coalition state governments raise less own non-tax revenues and spend less on the current account than state governments that are more cohesive in composition. In sum, the dispersion of political power affects government size.     

Memsahibs and their servants in nineteenth-century India[1]

Abstract

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, British memsahibs, the wives of officials, military officers, missionaries, and merchants, consistently expounded an image of Indians to the female reading public in Britain through their letters and diaries to female relatives, and through published autobiographies, advice manuals, articles, and advice columns in women's periodicals. Since servants were the group of Indians with whom memsahibs had the most contact, their relationship with domestics shaped British women's attitudes towards the Indian in general. The servants' dark skin and their religious, social, and linguistic differences contributed to the negative attitudes of the memsahibs towards them. The Indian rebellion of 1857 and the emergence of social Darwinism further heightened memsahibs' beliefs that Indians were subhuman savages. Earlier generations of memsahibs influenced the later generations through their derogatory comments about Indian domestics. Furthermore, by writing about their Indian servants, memsahibs identified themselves as active participants in Britain's imperial venture in India.     

An Eventful Journey from Christian Feminism to Christian Humanism

This article tells the life story of Una Kroll, a retired medical doctor and Anglican priest, born in 1925. It describes her journeying through life, her higher education at Girton College, Cambridge and training as a doctor in the 1940s as well as the forces leading to her decision to become a missionary nun. The conflict she experienced between her Christian discipleship and her vocation as a doctor came to the fore when she worked in Liberia. In 1937 she married a monk, at considerable cost to his own reputation, and then worked for the National Health Service in England. She became increasingly drawn into the campaigns for the ordination of women as priests in the Church of England and in later life joined the Roman Catholic Church.