Collaborators: Kartikeya Batra, Avantika Prabhakar
My ongoing project, DEM-PRENEURS, explores why some democracies renew themselves under pressure while others stagnate or decline. It places political entrepreneurship—the capacity of political actors to refresh agendas, reconfigure coalitions, and translate new grievances into representation—at the heart of democratic resilience.
The first paper from this project rethinks how parties compete by treating two things usually fused together—the issues a party campaigns on and the electoral coalition it seeks to assemble—as separate strategic choices. Existing theories of political entrepreneurship recognize only two options: defending an established order, or overturning issues and coalitions at once. I show that pulling these dimensions apart reveals a wider repertoire of strategies, and that which one a party adopts follows predictably from its structural position in the electoral market. Testing the framework on a recent Indian state election—pairing systematic coding of two months of campaign discourse with a preregistered conjoint experiment, and corroborating the pattern with cross-national manifesto and expert-survey data—I find that incremental, single-dimension innovation is the ordinary form of party competition, while the wholesale realignment that dominates existing accounts is in fact the rare exception. I presented the first iteration of this work at the Democracy’s Reach: Political Representation and Elections in India conference in Oslo in June 2026.
Neeraj Prasad 