An Insight into An Election Campaign on A University Campus

by Shreya Urvashi

Although election campaigns attract great attention from voters, media and academics alike, the academics tend to focus their research on the electoral result and on societal and long-term political factors influencing that result. As a microcosm within the larger genre of election studies, students and the elections in university campuses, need to be dissected to understand the functioning of politics at the student level. Further, it is indispensable to analyze the framework of student political associations to understand the functioning of politics at the student level.

This paper takes inputs from a study done on Delhi University Student Union (DUSU) Elections 2015, including looking at the campaigning strategy adopted by Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the incumbent party as well as the party that won that elections. The extent of their conformity to their said ideology and how these are manipulated to extend their voter base makes for an important discussion. The explicit and implicit ways of influencing the voters, including manipulating the legal aspects
and with overt illegal methods have also been tried to put in the paper. Nevertheless, this paper is just a preliminary insight into the complexity that is student politics and hopefully would lead to generation of more academic interest in this field.

Find the complete article here!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR