Continuing on with some interim findings from my research with @Mukherjee_Anit, for the chapter on oversight of defense policy, I have been spending time looking at parliamentary questions on defense in India. 1/15

The conventional wisdom is that Indian MPs don’t know all that much about defense issues, in part because so few have served in the military… 2/15 https://theprint.in/opinion/not-even-1-of-indian-mps-have-served-in-the-military-and-thats-concerning/91832/

…and as I have previously pointed out, tenures on the Standing Committee on Defense are short… 3/15 https://twitter.com/walterladwig/status/1292775673107558400?s=20

…and attendance is generally poor…. 4/15 https://twitter.com/walterladwig/status/1293837516735471616?s=20

…but also as @NarangVipin and @pstanpolitics note, many defense issues are seen to have low levels of electoral salience. If voters don’t care, why should their elected representatives? 5/15 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09636412.2017.1416818

One way to gauge what MPs care about is to look at the topics that they devote attention to via parliamentary questions. Unlike roll call votes or floor debates, MPs are largely free from party constraints, so they are seen as a good indicator of their interests/priorities. 6/15

Over the past two decades, we can see defense isn’t a top-5 concern and doesn’t get a level of attention proportionate to its share of the budget. Not too surprising given what has been said above, nor the tendency in democracies to focus on “bread-and-butter issues.” 7/15

To provide some context, looking at another Westminster democracy (the UK), we see that defense gets almost twice as much attention (as a % of questions). Whether that means India is on the low end for a democracy or the UK is on the high end needs further investigation. 8/15

What specifically do MPs care about? The results are interesting. Technical topics like defense procurement are generally believed to have low levels of electoral salience, but more than 1 in 5 questions address that topic or the related issue of oversight of contracts. 9/15

You may be wondering why so few questions on China and Pakistan? Most questions on those topics go to the MEA, not the MoD. But, even if we add in the MEA questions, procurement gets more attention than Pakistan which is believed to have a high degree of electoral salience. 10/15

If we dig a bit deeper into procurement questions, we see that more than 1/3 are either about indigenous defense production or overseas defense acquisitions. 11/15

Likewise, on the oversight category, nearly 30% of questions have to do with allegations of irregular behavior or corruption. 12/15

This suggests a possible answer to the puzzle of why an issue area believed to lack electoral salience gets so much attention from MPs: the intersection with domestic politics. 13/15

Interest in indigenous defense production could be about jobs, while corruption allegations are a way to bash the political opposition. 14/15

More work to be done here. I have a spin-off paper in progress that examines which MPs actually engage with defense topics and the degree to which there is a demonstrated “electoral connection” to interest in defense issues versus other policy topics. Watch this space. 15/15