How leftist is India?

I wrote a column in Financial Express today: How leftist is India?. This draws on the data shown in this previous blog post. I just noticed a piece in The Economist which dwells on related themes which is well worth reading.



Many people wrote me email about this piece. An important criticism of this evidence is that individuals parse questions differently across countries. In India, it's easy to construct questions such as: The government must setup more PSUs so as to give jobs to the people where it will seem that there is overwhelming support for a more socialist position. The main advantage of the Pew data is that they are doing it, across time, and across countries. More fine-grained measurement of political attitudes would surely be nice to have. But we don't yet have such household survey databases in India. The CMIE Consumer Pyramids is good data - but on politics they ask really only one question, that of the most favoured political party.