ON THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF GENERAL STRIKES

Abhirup Sarkar
Additional contact information
Abhirup Sarkar: Indian Statistical Institute Calcutta, India

Chapter 6 in New and Enduring Themes in Development Economics, 2009, pp 133-144 from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

Abstract: AbstractThe paper seeks to explain why in LDCs like India political parties call general strikes which, unlike strikes in a factory, are often held as general protests without any specific economic goal to achieve. We argue that political parties call general strikes to signal their strength, which determines their probabilities of winning elections as perceived by the vulnerable. The vulnerable are crucially dependent on political favours for their survival, in turn, are more likely to join the party which can signal more strength and a higher probability of winning. We show that an increase in the relative size of the vulnerable increases the frequency of general strikes.

Keywords: Development Economics; Happiness; Well-Being; Political Economy; Economic of Labour; Agricultural Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9789812839428_0006 (application/pdf)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789812839428_0006 (text/html)
Ebook Access is available upon purchase.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:wschap:9789812839428_0006

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in World Scientific Book Chapters from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().