Democratic Backsliding and Election Campaigns: The Case of Bihar, India

Shivani Choudhary, Yale University

This paper examines how citizens and political actors in Bihar, India, perform, translate, and sustain democracy amid democratic backsliding. In the last ten years, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has gained an unprecedented amount of power in India. This has raised concerns about the weakening of democratic institutions and pluralism. The 2025 Bihar state elections, held after a decade of centralized rule, tell a more complex story, one in which coalition politics and civic participation continue to reproduce democratic meaning despite institutional strain under a populist government at the national level. In the charged environment of electoral campaigning, this paper scrutinizes the performance and practice of democracy. Drawing on Jeffrey C. Alexander’s theory of cultural pragmatics, I treat campaign spaces as arenas in which political actors perform to foster cultural extension and personal identification, thereby mobilizing voters. Following Frederic Schaffer’s (2014) argument that translation is a moral and political act, I explore how democratic concepts are redefined through campaign discourse and everyday talk. These translations reveal democracy not as a fixed institutional ideal but as an ongoing process of negotiation performed by citizens. To elaborate on the argument, my study combines participant observation at campaign events with interviews of party workers and prospective voters. I introduce the concept of “performative resilience” to describe how democracy endures through everyday acts of reinterpretation and dissent amid democratic backsliding. Ethnographic attention to Bihar’s electoral politics offers a crucial vantage point for understanding how citizens sustain democratic life in uncertain times through collective meaning-making.

See extended abstract

 Presented in Session 145. Democratic Backsliding and Authoritarian Politics