Dr. Milan Vaishnav, Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a recent paper with Dr. Reedy Swanson published in India Review, examines whether good economics makes good politics. They examine the hypothesis that voters reward incumbent governments that perform well economically for India, looking at a state-level panel dataset for the period 1980-2012. They find that while there is no relationship between economic growth and electoral performance in the aggregate, post 2000 there seems to be increasing electoral returns to governments that deliver high growth rates. This points to a shift in the behaviour of the Indian voter. The paper can be accessed here.

Dr. Vaishnav had shared some of these findings at an IDFC-U discussion. Watch the video below: