CSDS, India

The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) is one of the premier research Institutes in Asia. Established in 1963, the Centre is widely recognized today, nationally and internationally, for the quality, variety, and extent of its research and contribution to thinking about the transformation process in developing societies. It has fostered theoretical and empirical research relating to a broad range of interests including democratic politics; the politics of knowledge and of cultures, alternatives and futures, and violence, ethnicity and diversity. It has an independent programme on China and East Asia and has also launched a new initiative SARAI to explore the outcomes of the new information technology, the nature of the media, and the contemporary city. An international review Group (IRG), that was invited by the Ford Foundation and the CSDS to give a report on the Centre, has identified it as "a leading - perhaps the leading - institution in Asia for the study of politics."

From the very beginning, much of the Centre's work has been focused on democratic politics, addressing a broad range of issues: from an analysis of Indian electoral politics to cross-polity and cross-cultural surveys; from democracy's diversities to re-evaluating the democratization enterprise; from studies of party systems to political processes and movements outside the formal institutions of democracy; and from exploring the role of institutions of democracy to their salience in promoting rights, justice and development. These studies reflect alternative formulations of politics and explore unorthodox ways of doing political theory. All this has made the Centre a significant presence in the academic scene, nationally and globally. In these four decades, the Centre has been consciously and continuously working out analytical perspectives, different from those provided by the dominant schools of thought, to understand democratic processes in 'developing' societies such as ours. We have laid special emphasis on producing historically sensitive theoretical and empirical research on democratic processes, and in acknowledging their cultural and philosophical anchorage.

Prof. Peter Ronald deSouza, Visiting Senior Fellow and Co-director of Lokniti programme

Lokniti : Institute for Comparative Democracy was established in 1997 as a research programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi. By bringing various projects of the CSDS on elections and party politics together, under a single programme, Lokniti seeks to engage with global debates on democracy.

Lokniti contains within itself various research projects. The most ambitious of these has been the National Election Study, 1996-99, a panel study involving six waves of survey of a national representative sample of about 15,000 Indian electors across three parliamentary elections that took place in this period. This is perhaps the largest panel study of its kind in any democracy.

The NES series attempts to go beyond the mere numbers of electoral politics so as to understand the larger forces and long-term changes taking place in democratic politics and society. The findings of the NES series have been widely used in academic and journalistic writings and on television, both within and outside India, and has reshaped the commonsense on Indian democracy.

Besides the NES series on parliamentary elections, the CSDS initiated in 1993 a series of studies on the assembly elections in all the major states of the Indian union. After the inception of Lokniti, we have conducted special surveys in each of the major states that went to polls. These include Uttar Pradesh (1996), Punjab (1997), Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Delhi and Mizoram (1998) and Bihar, Orrissa and Haryana (2000). It is hoped that these surveys will become a necessary point of reference for students of comparative politics.

In the process of undertaking all these surveys CSDS have built a nation-wide network of scholars based in universities and other research institutions. All our major studies are conceptualized, operationalised and executed by this network and involve university students as field investigators. Thus Lokniti has contributed to the formation of a peer-group of established and young analysts of politics.

Contacts

Prof. V. B. Singh
Senior Fellow
Director of the Lokniti programme.
Email: lokniti@del3.vsnl.net.in

Prof. Peter Ronald deSouza
Visiting Senior Fellow
Co-director of Lokniti programme
Email: peter@csdsdelhi.org

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