How do ideas shape government decision-making? Comparativist scholarship conventionally gives unbridled primacy to external, material interests—chiefly votes and rents—as proximately shaping political behavior. These logics tend to explicate elite decision-making around elections and pork barrel politics but fall short in explaining political conduct during credibility crises, such as democratic governments facing anti-corruption movements. In these instances of high political uncertainty, I argue in this book, elite ideas, for example concepts of the nation or technical diagnoses of socioeconomic development, dominate policymaking. Scholars leverage these arguments in the fields of international relations, American politics, and the political economy of development. But an account of ideas activating or constraining executive action in developing democracies, where material pressures are high, is found wanting. The purpose of this book is to trace where ideas come from, how they are chosen, and when they are most salient for explaining political behavior in India and similar contexts including Brazil, Turkey, and Indonesia.

The empirical analysis in this book delves into government response to two movements from contemporary Indian history in order to examine political behavior during the broader credibility crisis. The suppressive response of decisionmakers in the Congress Party government to the Jayaprakash Narayan, or JP, protests that brought to a crescendo a credibility crisis in 1975; and the negotiated concessions of elites in the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance coalition to the India Against Corruption (IAC) protests that illustrated the credibility crisis faced by that government in 2012.

The contemporary case relies on over 120 elite interviews from the period including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, cabinet ministers, party leaders, and senior bureaucrats. The historical case is rooted in deep archival research into over 4,000 documents of official government records and memos, meeting minutes, and private diaries and letters across three national archives (India, US, and UK). I have also conducted a forensic study of daily newspaper reports covering both periods. The project utilizes fresh process-tracing methods and “thick” description to tell a narrative causal story.