The state's climate is unique among Indian states. Following the Koppen– Geiger classification of climatic regions of the world, over two-thirds of the land in India is tropical savanna, desert or semi-arid. Most of Kerala is monsoonal or highland tropics. The difference is this. The average summer temperature in the former regions can reach levels high enough to dry up surface water. The monsoon rains relieve that aridity, but only for a few months in a year. That dual condition makes water storage and recycling a fundamental precondition for economic growth. It elevates the risk of droughts and diseases from seasonal or periodic acute water shortages. Kerala, by contrast, does not get as fierce a summer as the other areas of India and receives a lot more rainfall. That dual condition implies a natural immunity from seasonal food and water scarcity and a low disease risk.

With its extraordinary biodiversity, this is a vast storehouse for natural resources. The state has a surface area of 38,855 square kilometres and is bounded by the Arabian Sea to the west and the Western Ghats to the east. The eastern highlands, the central midlands and the western lowlands, with 580 kilometres of coastline, can access a wealth of ocean resources and means of subsistence for their fisherfolk and the general populace. Compared with semi-arid India, the benign environment largely explains the head start in life expectancy (Chapters 1 and 6). Further, nature provides industrial resources that cannot be found elsewhere. The highlands have the ideal climate for growing coffee, tea and spices. Low hills are often planted with rubber. The seaboard traded with West Asia for centuries. The state's Gulf connection, thus, had a prehistory. A large tourism business has developed by selling nature.

On the other hand, recent experience shows that climate change and overdevelopment can jointly raise the risk of disasters. In the first three weeks of August 2018, Kerala received 164 per cent of the average rainfall for that time of the year. The following floods were devastating, comparable only to a similar event in 1924. In 2019, extreme weather repeated, now causing landslides. Mining and quarrying, frequent blasting and unscientific changes in land use patterns affected the highland ecology.

This chapter explores how different proponents of the idea of a competition–democracy nexus envisaged the opertationalisation of the twin-goal of republican liberty and democracy through the protection of competitive markets as an institution of antipower. Various republican antitrust paradigms shared the idea that competitive markets operate as an institution of antipower that maximises liberty as non-domination and promotes republican democracy as long as they diffuse economic power polycentrically amongst a multitude of independent economic agents. Based on this assumption, all iterations of the competition–democracy nexus saw the role of legal rules and, most notably, competition law as securing a polycentric and deconcentrated market structure. The various republican antitrust paradigms also envisaged different ways through which competition law can guarantee and preserve polycentric competitive markets. These design approaches can be largely divided into two categories: situational and conduct-based structuralism.

Chapter 7 scrutinizes how Congress’s internal resources impact the quantity and quality of information received by committees. Amid concerns over diminishing congressional capacity and the waning role of support agencies, the chapter explores the repercussions of downsizing initiatives – such as the elimination of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) – on committee information channels. Employing a difference-in-differences research design, the study reveals a stark decline in technical and scientific witnesses invited by committees heavily reliant on internally produced information post-OTA elimination. The findings underscore the critical role of robust congressional capacity in summoning research-based witnesses, emphasizing its pivotal significance in ensuring legislators’ access to vital scientific and technical insights.

This chapter explores the adoption of mobilization strategies in the case of the MAS in Bolivia. Drawing on extensive interviews with representatives of the party and societal organizations, as well as archival materials and ethnographic work in local organizations, it shows how the shared experience of moments of solidarity between the party proto-leaders and organizational allies during the party’s founding moments determined whether party–organization ties would later become institutionalized by adopting routinized rules and mechanisms that governed how candidates would be selected and factional disagreements would be settled. As it documents across different organizational allies of the party, where the party’s tie with an organization became institutionalized, these rules and mechanisms ensured that the party could rely on organizationally mediated strategies.

This chapter explains the methodological approach behind the measurement of analytical information in witness testimonies. Focusing on House hearings from the 105th through 114th Congresses, the methodological approach quantifies technical information relevant to policymaking – analytical information – and shows how witness affiliations can capture meaningful differences in the amount of analytical information that witnesses provide Congress in committee hearings. Bureaucrats and research-affiliated witnesses excel in delivering analytical testimony, while citizens and religious institution representatives provide the least. The patterns in this chapter demonstrate that not all testimony provides the same type of information and that committees may receive different amounts of analytical information depending on the types of witnesses they invite. Taken together, the findings and patterns illustrated in this chapter motivate our argument that the composition of witnesses has important implications for committees, as witness invitations not only indicate from whom committees choose to hear but also signify the different types of information committees may ultimately receive.

This chapter further tests the argument about how the experiences during a party’s founding moments shape which mobilization strategies the party adopts through a paired comparison with a new party that did not experience moments of solidarity with its organizational allies. Alianza PAIS was founded in Ecuador during a period of mass mobilization similar to the one in Bolivia and initially could rely on a broad coalition of powerful societal organizations – representing sectors similar to those in the founding coalition of the MAS. However, as this chapter shows, drawing on extensive interviews with early party leaders and organizational representatives, Alianza PAIS leaders had little trust in their organizational allies due to a lack of experience during the party’s founding moments. This made them hesitant to adopt internal rules and mechanisms that would institutionalize their tie with their organizational allies. Instead, ties remained instrumental and largely broke down when policy disagreements between the party leadership and its organizational allies arose. As a result, Alianza PAIS could not rely on organizationally mediated appeals and had to primarily use direct appeals.

In 1956 (and even now), two distinct types of agriculture existed in the state: cultivation of seasonal field crops and cultivation of tree crops. The latter held steady in the long run. But traditional agriculture, especially paddy cultivation, for which the lowlands and the river basins were especially suitable, has seen a relentless decline since 1970. Twenty years into the new millennium, traditional agriculture was an insignificant employer and earner, and for most people still engaged in it, the land provided no more than a subsidiary income. A relative retreat from traditional agriculture is not news. It happened everywhere. In the state the fall was spectacular.

What was this a change from? Although agriculture employed a smaller proportion of the workforce than in India at the start of this journey, it was not a marginal livelihood. Land control secured the political power of the elites in the princely states. A variety of crops were cultivated throughout the state, from monsoon rice to tapioca, ginger, groundnut, sugarcane and pulses. Most were rarely traded outside the region but were vital to sustaining local consumption. Good croplands occurred in clusters. Because of the topography, land available for the cultivation of traditional field crops was less than half the total land area of the state. Alluvial soil occurs in a narrow strip along the coast or in river valleys. Land elsewhere is not as fertile, though frequently suitable for tree crops. Unlike in most regions of India, access to water was not a serious problem. Soil quality and drainage of excess water were bigger problems.

Good land, however, was extremely scarce relative to the population. The exceptionally high population density in the areas of cultivation ensured a level of available land per head that was a fraction of the Indian figure (0.6 acres against an Indian average of 3.1 acres around 1970) and low by any benchmark. Partly, the density reflected high labour demand in lowlands to deal with drainage and seasonal flooding. Paddy yield was very high in these areas, but paddy cultivation needed a lot of people. From the 1940s, this zone in the middle was emerging as a political battleground.

This chapter expands on the micro-level evidence from Chapter 6 on how effective one-off organizational endorsements are at swaying vote preferences by exploring how repeated organizational expressions of support over multiple years (due to a mechanism that institutionalized a new party’s ties with its organizational allies) can help new parties secure support in subsequent elections. Analyzing a natural experiment from Mexico, in which MORENA uses lotteries to select candidates for national public office, it shows how the party took root and mobilized voters more successfully in localities where it was able to tap into organizational networks through candidates who are embedded in local organizations.

This chapter analyses the decline of the concern about liberty as non-domination and the idea of a competition–democracy nexus following the ascent of the Chicago School and the rise of a More Economic Approach towards antitrust law on both sides of the Atlantic. It shows how the Chicago School not only challenged the economic foundations of the republican antitrust tradition but also put forward the consumer welfare standard as a versatile, principled framework to supersede the conception of republican liberty with a narrow negative notion of economic liberty as non-interference. The Chicago School thus shaped a laissez-faire approach to antitrust that seeks, in the first place, to preserve entrepreneurial liberty against state interference.