Background - Women’s Reservation Bill, India 2010
After over 14 years of attempts to pass a reservation quota for female electoral candidates, on Tuesday, March 9th 2010 India’s upper house of parliament, the Rajya Sabha, passed a bill to reserve 33% of local, state assembly and parliamentary seats. While it is still too early to understand how the bill will affect Indian voting patterns, it has nonetheless received praise from a wide array of political leaders, including Manmohan Singh, India’s Prime Minister and member of the Indian National Congress. The INC’s typical opponent, the BJP has also lauded the nascent law. The passage of such a bill is not a surprising move for the Indian government, which holds political reservations for other groups considered to be disadvantaged, including Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST) and in the tiny state of Sikkim, the Bhutia Lepcha ethnic group.
The passage of this bill has met with wide political opposition from parties such as the BSP, that claim further quotas within the reservation should be allotted for SC, ST and muslim women. The BSP, a party formed in 1984 to represent the interests of OBCs (other backwards castes, scheduled tribes, scheduled castes), refused to vote on the bill, walking out on parliament. Parties representing similar interests such as the JD(U), RJD, the SP (Samajwadi Party) and Shiv Sena have all voiced opposition to the bill for similar reasons. However, these parties are the minority in the Rajya Sabha with a total of only 24 votes.
Opposition can also be found on blogs, opinion pieces and news polls. Many of these pieces cite that the reservation could be misused for political purposes, that uplift of women should occur at the grassroots level, and most simply, that women already hold places of considerable power in Indian government. In essence, there are an innumerable number of positions that give good reason to both support and oppose the bill. The question I attempt to explore using prior electoral data, is how parties are arriving at their decisions to support the 33% reservation using visualizations that speak to the natural state of the data.
This project uses R and Hadley Wickham’s ggplot2 to create visualizations utilizing a method called grammar of graphics (GoG). GoG, popularized by Leland Wilkinson proposes that the rules which govern display of data in graphical format are both mathematical and aesthetic. GoG incorporates elements of Object Oriented Design and allows us to present complex multivariate data in new and sophisticated ways. With this, a few warnings are in order.
Current Indian electoral data is incredibly hard to come by. The election commission is slow to release data from recent elections. For instance, data from the 2008 general elections is non existent. A page organized for the 2004 elections contains a considerable amount of easy to use Excel files. However, these files are obviously sub queries from a much larger database. Lastly, the lack of continuous data here (especially time) makes developing wide varieties of visualizations a particularly tricky issue.
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