This chapter introduces a novel dataset encompassing 731,810 witnesses across 74,077 House, Senate, and Joint standing committee hearings held between 1961 and 2018. The dataset includes comprehensive details such as witness names, organizational affiliations, hearing summaries, committee titles, dates, and bill numbers discussed. The chapter describes the meticulous construction process, emphasizing the extraction of key variables focusing on witness affiliations, affiliation type, and gender. With eighteen categorized affiliation types and nine broader parent categories, this classification captures the diverse spectrum of external groups represented in congressional hearings. The chapter also provides rich descriptive statistics on hearings and witness over time and across committees.

This chapter analyses how the ideal of republican liberty and the concept of a competition–democracy nexus have been implemented through concrete competition policy. To this end, the chapter looks at the interpretation and application of the three substantive pillars (i.e., the prohibition of anticompetitive agreements, the regulation of monopoly power, and the control of mergers) of competition law in the US until the 1970s and in the EU until the early 2000s. It describes how all three branches of competition law were interpreted in accordance with a republican conception of economic liberty as non-domination that perceived the very existence of concentrated economic power as an obstacle to economic freedom and democracy. This republican concern about liberty as non-domination as the central element of the competition–democracy nexus primarily manifested itself in the overarching policy goal of preserving a polycentric market structure as an institution of antipower. The republican antitrust tradition in the United States and in Europe built upon the structuralist approaches envisaged by various republican antitrust paradigms to operationalise the idea of a competition–democracy nexus that we discussed in the previous chapter.

Chapter 5 examines the intent for a legislative hearing and how it affects a committee’s selection of witnesses. Committees, guided by the partisan goals of the committee chair, seek different types of information depending on whether they are considering specific bills in hearings. When the chair has not yet advanced a bill through the committee process, it gives the committee more political flexibility to hear from those who can provide expertise in policy development. Consistent with this argument, we show that committees turned to think tanks, universities, and bureaucrats – witnesses who can provide more analytical information – at higher rates for hearings without a bill (nonreferral hearings), when committees hearings to learn about an issue area. Committees tended to invite witnesses from mass-based groups, such as labor unions, trade associations, and membership associations, at higher rates for hearings on a specific bill (referral hearings). Different witness compositions between referral and nonreferral hearings suggest strategic choices of the identities of witnesses and thus the types of information that the committee hearing generates.

The series to which this book belongs began with the intuition that the pathway of economic change since independence from colonial rule (1947) differed fundamentally between the states of India because their prehistory, geography, political make-up and initial conditions were very different. So large is the difference that each case deserves a book. Contributions to the series will inevitably structure their work to adapt to the specific experience of the states and cannot follow a single template. In that decision, one thing matters: whether to write a chronological narrative or a thematic one.

There is no ideal choice. We decided to follow the thematic format because we wished to concentrate on the main drivers of economic change, like migration, trends in private investment or environmental change, which did not unfold in a coordinated way. We felt a chronological story suggesting that the 1970s saw one kind of change and the 1980s another would miss the point. Still, to keep chronology in the foreground, we discuss the changing character of the state's economy in the introduction and the conclusion (Chapters 1 and 9).

We wish to acknowledge the anonymous readers of the book proposal, and the reader of the manuscript, for their comments and suggestions that significantly improved the quality of this text. We thank Upasana Guha, who provided valuable research assistance, for her careful and diligent work. The help rendered by Rachel Mathew, Dulhaqe S. and Benna Fathima is also gratefully acknowledged.

A note on placenames: Many placenames have changed since 1956. In every chapter, in the first usage we write both old and new names and use the changed name in the rest of the chapter. Chapter 2 on history uses the old names in subsequent usages.

Kerala Is Different … Not the Way You Think

The book began with a one-liner – ‘Kerala is different’. The series to which this book belongs emerged from the intuition that every state in India ‘is different’. Kerala was not more different than Tamil Nadu, Gujarat or West Bengal. Geography and resource endowments, social conditions such as patterns of inequality, politics and markets were significantly dissimilar between the larger Indian states, and sometimes between regions within these states. Scholars doing development or history have not explored the differences enough.

And yet that shallow slogan has had an unparalleled impact on development discourse in the late twentieth century. Why has this one state drawn so much attention in the development scholarship? Because of a misreading of its economic history, the book argues.

As we mentioned in the introduction, the state's economic trajectory can be summed up, if crudely, with a chart with three lines, one measuring economic growth and the other two education and life expectancy. The state's position relative to India fell with the social indices but dramatically improved with economic growth. A preoccupation with social development lacks a strong justification, at least for economic historians of the state. The more challenging task for us was explaining the economic growth divergence with reference to prehistory and the state's geography.

The misreading emerged in the 1980s through an overstatement of human development performance. Many scholars inferred that the state's political ideology was more enlightened and developmental than that of other Indian provinces and that the state government's heart was in the right place. Whether due to the communist movement or Travancore and Cochin's princely heritage, the governments prioritised poor people's access to primary education and healthcare. Others further claimed that the state showed the world that economic growth was not needed for development.

This reading is not wrong. But, historically speaking, it is a naive reading. It is naive for three reasons. First, suppose Kerala was ahead of India in the 1950s and 1960s. In that case, a story of enlightened government does not make much sense because governments were relatively small then, and many factors besides the government were at work behind the initial advances in education and health.

This chapter outlines our book’s contributions to understanding how partisan incentives drive the information-seeking behavior of Congress and its committees. Moreover, it underscores the challenge legislators face in balancing their political roles with the need for expert insights. In this final chapter, we relate our arguments and findings to recent challenges Congress has faced in seeking information in its partisan environment. We propose new lines of research that build on our data and work in our book and emphasize the connections to long-standing issues in American democracy. Our book, empirical evidence, and accompanying analyses promote a new understanding of the dynamics underlying the acquisition and dissemination of information in Congress and, we hope, will stimulate further inquiry into the role of information in shaping public policy in a democracy.

This chapter explores the resulting party identification in the three cases. Drawing on original and existing survey data, it shows that membership in organizations that regularly support a new party is strongly associated with whether a voter develops an attachment to the party. Further analysis of the poster experiments suggests that the frequency of attending organization meetings is associated with the robustness of the attachment. Additional analyses of the natural experiment reveal that repeated organizational expressions of support over multiple years help new parties gain new followers. It then compares and contrasts this organizationally mediated path to partisanship (organizational cultivation), which can account for the development of robust partisan attachments to the MAS and MORENA, with an alternative path to partisanship that can yield party identification even for parties without organically linked organizational allies. In the case of Alianza PAIS, which could not rely on organizational cultivation through organically linked organizations, partisan attachments have developed in direct response to voters’ evaluations of the party’s performance.

Chapter 2 delves into the critical role of congressional hearings and witnesses during the committee stage, emphasizing their significance in shaping legislative outcomes and policy formulation. It explores how hearings serve as one of the prime avenues for information gathering, drawing from previous studies to highlight their impact on communication among legislators, interest groups, and bureaucrats. The chapter unpacks the intricate process of selecting witnesses, elucidating the process of inviting individuals who provide members of Congress information during the committee stage. It underscores the choices and variables present in this selection process – such as expertise, ideological leaning, and organizational affiliations. Ultimately, this chapter serves as a comprehensive primer on the process of witness selection for congressional hearings and describes the pivotal role played by witnesses in a key stage of policymaking.