Using SNA to design political campaign of a newly formed political party in India

Context:

In the past 12 months, many government scams have surfaced in India. A few examples being 2G spectrum allocation scam (USD 32.15 Billion), Coal scam (USD 194.25 Billion), etc. Transparency international ranks India 94 among 176 countries on its corruption perception index, 2012.

Frustrated with these developments & the state of affairs, few social workers under the leadership of Indian activist Anna Hazare started a non-violent protest on the principles of Mahatma Gandhi to exert pressure on the government to pass a law establishing an independent ombudsman ("Lokpal") with over reaching powers. They sat on indefinite hunger strikes a number of times only to be deceived by the Indian Government with various unfulfilled/semi-fulfilled promises (the last hunger strike lasted for 12 days).

Arvind Kejriwal one of the activists who was involved in passing of the "Right to Information Act" in India and was involved in this campaign, realized the futility of expecting anti-corruption measures from individuals who the activists were accusing of being corrupt themselves. He launched a political party to provide Indian electorate a "non-corrupt" alternative to be able to reach position where the activists could themselves pass the ombudsman law.

The party has been named "Aam Aadmi Party" (AAP) which literally translates into "Common Man's Party".

Challenges facing this new party AAP:

AAP faces three major challenges-

1. While it has a country wide support base on the issue of corruption (which has been made an issue by many parties in the past elections), Indian voters have been known to decide their votes based on other issues/factors. AAP needs to recognize these main issues/factors to prepare its political manifesto and translate this ideological support base into actual votes.

2. This political party launched a few weeks ago, lacks political organization and currently doesn't have grass root candidates. This is a major challenge as general elections for the central government of India are scheduled to happen in 2014 and may well happen in the next 12 months if one of the coalition partners of the current government pulls out.

3. As in any election, preparing political manifesto and recognizing able candidates is just half the battle, the other half is communicating that to the electorate using political campaigns. Given the short time frame before the next elections, AAP needs to be smart in designing its political campaign to be able to challenge the incumbents.

Social Network Analysis (SNA) to the rescue:

SNA can be employed by AAP to overcome all these challenges in the following way:

Data required:

1. Identifying voters: Census/ Election Commission data of various regions, villages, cities, community blocks, etc.

2. Identifying voter attributes: occupation, gender, age group, income level, number of people in households, etc.

3. Identifying preferences: Most important issue for their individual vote & have they voted for the same party in the past 5 elections?

4. Identifying opinion makers: Who (individual or group) in their community do they listen to & has the power to influence their vote?

Solving AAP’s problems:

1. Political Manifesto:

Data on most important issue for individual voters in a community can be used to prepare political manifesto and customize them as per various electoral communities to ring a bell with maximum no. of voters.

2. Candidates:

Data on most important opinion makers can be used to form committees at grass root level in each electoral group. This committee can then be tasked with the job of selecting their own candidates based on certain reasonable selection criteria of AAP. This exercise of selection by communities themselves before actual election through major opinion makers instead of imposing party-selected candidates may lead to community support in favour of AAP candidates.

3. Campaign:

After identifying the right candidates and the important issues, AAP can exploit SNA further by customizing its election campaign in each electoral block. 

Issues most important to majority of electorate in a community can be identified and local campaigns can be built around them. AAP can also utilize the influence of opinion-makers in their candidate's favour as it had involved them in the local candidate selection process. It can also focus its campaign efforts on swing voters (voters who have voted for different parties in the last 5 elections) as they tend to decide their votes on issues rather than some bias based on caste (a major issue in some states), political affiliation, etc. which could possibly be the reason in case of voters who have voted for the same party in the last 5 elections. 

This issue based targeting will also strengthen & bring into practice AAP's political ideology of issue based politics over caste, religion and language based politics.

Feasibility of conducting SNA:

While individual voter data can be easily obtained from election commission &/or census body, data on questions like opinion-makers, voting trend in last 5 elections, most important issue for vote, etc. for each individual voter (there were 714 million voters in 2009) cannot possibly be collected in a short span of 12 months. 

However, if AAP is committed to change and would like to focus on next general election in 2019 or intermittent state and local elections, this analysis is possible to a reasonable extent. But, even in this case getting data on each and every voter would still be a major challenge. 

By
Mamtesh Sugla
Exchange Student at HHL Graduate School of Management, Leipzig