The researchers have used indicators like voter turnout, women’s participation, both as a voter and as candidates, criminal backgrounds of candidates, and victory margins from the last three general elections to measure how strongly a constituency performs on the index.

There have been lots of conversations in the last few years about the state of Indian democracy, based mostly on perception surveys. A group of researchers based in Pune has now come up with data-based assessment of the ‘health’ of Lok Sabha constituencies in Maharashtra using a few commonly-used indicators, which can provide a measurable way to see how strongly democracy was performing in the individual constituencies.

The researchers from FLAME University in Pune – Professor Yugank Goyal, Tanya Chandra and Vrinda Mandovra — have come up with an Electoral Health Index that seeks to measure the quality of democracy being practiced in the constituencies. Not very surprisingly, rural and some of the relatively less developed constituencies in Maharashtra rank higher in the index than the bigger towns and cities like Mumbai or Pune. In fact, of the top five constituencies on this index – Nandurbar, Gadchiroli-Chimur, Hatkanangle, Yavatmal-Washim, and Ramtek — three are reserved constituencies. Nine of the 48 Lok Sabha constituencies in Maharashtra are reserved, five for scheduled castes and four for scheduled tribes.

The researchers have used indicators like voter turnout, women’s participation, both as a voter and as candidates, criminal backgrounds of candidates, and victory margins from the last three general elections to measure how strongly a constituency performs on the index.

“These are commonly used indicators used in electoral analysis. There is nothing unique about them. But we have combined them together, given different weightages, and produced an index that, we think, is able to capture the health of electoral democracy at the constituency level in just one glance. At this time, we have done this exercise only for Maharashtra, but this can be easily extended to the rest of the country as well, and we would like to do that soon,” Professor Goyal said.

“The main utility of this exercise, we think, is that it gives us a tool to measure democratic strength at the constituency level. Most of the electoral analysis in India has been done at country or state level. India is too big and diverse a country to be taken as one unit. Even states are very large and diverse. Constituencies are more manageable units for studies like this,” he said.

“The first impression that you get when you glance at the index is that people in a place like Nandurbar, for example, which tops the index are more serious about the Lok Sabha elections than people in Mumbai, let’s say. You might be tempted to dismiss this as just another effect of a stronger turnout in rural constituencies compared to urban constituencies as has been the general trend. But we have tried taking out every individual indicator that we have used to check the elasticity of the index, and the result is that the constituencies’ rank on the index do not change much by withdrawing just one indicator. It seems to be a robust index in that manner. We need to try this for the assembly constituencies as well,” Goyal said.