This book provides a conceptual toolkit to understand the changing technologies and dynamics of political campaigning in India. Examining political campaigning and party strategies across many Indian states, with special attention to regional politics, histories, cultures, social and technological contexts, the book discusses the potential impacts of campaign strategies on electoral outcomes. Political campaigning reached a tipping point with millions of social media users engaging online with family and friends, political issues, parties and candidates in India’s 2019 parliamentary election. Although India’s political parties had been working with consultants and professional advertising agencies for decades, by 2019, millions of first-time voters as well as older voters were microtargeted with campaign messaging by parties and their affiliates, including frequent misinformation from unknown sources supporting one party or another. Filling a key gap in political communication research on election campaigns in digital India, the chapters in this book capture how political campaigning is important for the electoral fortunes of political parties in India’s diverse regions and states. This book will appeal to students, scholars, and practitioners in political communication, public administration, and political consulting, as well as anyone interested in data-driven political campaigning. It will also be an invaluable reading for those interested in South Asian studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

This book provides a fresh perspective on the importance of the Hindi media in India's political, social and economic transformation with evidence from the countryside and the cities. Accessed by more than forty percent of the public, it continues to play an important role in building political awareness and mobilising public opinion. Instead of viewing the media as a singular entity, this book highlights its diversity and complexity to understand the changing dynamics of political communication that is shaped by the interactions between the news media, political parties and the public, and how various media forms are being used in a rapidly transforming environment. The book offers insights into how print, television, and digital media work together with, rather than in isolation from, each another to grasp the complexities of the emerging hybrid media environment and the future of mobilisation.

One of the most troubling critiques of contemporary democracy is the inability of representative governments to regulate the deluge of money in politics. If it is impossible to conceive of democracies without elections, it is equally impractical to imagine elections without money. Costs of Democracy is an exhaustive, ground-breaking study of money in Indian politics that opens readers’ eyes to the opaque and enigmatic ways in which money flows through the political veins of the world’s largest democracy. Through original, in-depth investigation—drawing from extensive fieldwork on political campaigns, pioneering surveys, and innovative data analysis—the contributors in this volume uncover the institutional and regulatory contexts governing the torrent of money in politics; the sources of political finance; the reasons for such large spending; and how money flows, influences, and interacts with different tiers of government. The book raises uncomfortable questions about whether the flood of money risks washing away electoral democracy itself.

This book critiques the use of algorithms to pre-empt personal choices in its profound effect on markets, democracy and the rule of law.

The world is undergoing a profound set of digital disruptions that are changing the nature of how governments counter dissent and assert control over their countries. While increasing numbers of people rely primarily or exclusively on online platforms, authoritarian regimes have concurrently developed a formidable array of technological capabilities to constrain and repress their citizens. In The Rise of Digital Repression, Steven Feldstein documents how the emergence of advanced digital tools bring new dimensions to political repression. Presenting new field research from Thailand, the Philippines, and Ethiopia, he investigates the goals, motivations, and drivers of these digital tactics. Feldstein further highlights how governments pursue digital strategies based on a range of factors: ongoing levels of repression, political leadership, state capacity, and technological development. The international community, he argues, is already seeing glimpses of what the frontiers of repression look like. For instance, Chinese authorities have brought together mass surveillance, censorship, DNA collection, and artificial intelligence to enforce their directives in Xinjiang. As many of these trends go global, Feldstein shows how this has major implications for democracies and civil society activists around the world. A compelling synthesis of how anti-democratic leaders harness powerful technology to advance their political objectives, The Rise of Digital Repression concludes by laying out innovative ideas and strategies for civil society and opposition movements to respond to the digital autocratic wave.

Digital, Political, Radical is a siren call to the field of media and communications and the study of social and political movements. We must put the politics of transformation at the very heart of our analyses to meet the global challenges of gross inequality and ever-more impoverished democracies. Fenton makes an impassioned plea for re-invigorating critical research on digital media such that it can be explanatory, practical and normative. She dares us to be politically emboldened. She urges us to seek out an emancipatory politics that aims to deepen our democratic horizons. To ask: how can we do democracy better? What are the conditions required to live together well? Then, what is the role of the media and how can we reclaim media, power and politics for progressive ends? Journeying through a range of protest and political movements, Fenton debunks myths of digital media along the way and points us in the direction of newly emergent politics of the Left. Digital, Political, Radical contributes to political debate on contemporary (re)configurations of radical progressive politics through a consideration of how we experience (counter) politics in the digital age and how this may influence our being political.

Digital India and The Poor examines how the poor are evoked in contemporary Indian political discourse. It studies the ways in which the disadvantaged are accounted for in the increasingly digitised political economy, commercial and public policy, media, and academic research. This book: Interrogates the category of the poor in India and how they have come to be classified in economic and policy documents over the past few decades Explores the influential digital education technology ‘experiments’ conducted in Indian slums from the late 1990s, now popularly known as the ‘hole-in-the-wall experiments’ Discusses financial inclusion initiatives, predominantly as they converged between 2014 and 2017, such as the Jan Dhan Yojana, the Aadhaar Project, and the banknote demonetisation Presents an in-depth study of the bearing of technology on domestic employment in India The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of South Asian studies, politics, political science and sociology, technology studies, linguistics, and development studies.