As stated in the previous chapter, scholarship on Indian politics returned to institutional studies in a major way in the first two decades of the 21st century by focusing on state institutions and procedural democracy. The field expanded to look at the sculpting of behaviour in the larger field of institutional functioning. It was acknowledged that institutional design and work played a decisive role in shaping politics; institutional structures had agency that acted upon participatory politics and the social environment. The EC contributed to curating and stabilising political practice in the electoral field as did the parliament in the field of law-making and the judiciary in the arena of adjudication. A look at the EC takes us to the larger field of institutional studies in which this study is located. It elucidates why recognising institutional agency becomes vital in a study of politics.

An institution represents defined ways of working as opposed to arbitrary and abrupt modes. It is bigger than an individual and involves groups in a patterned interaction that have a predictability (Peters, 2012: 19). An institution is also an amalgamation of the intrinsic values of society, its collective wisdom and also its power equations, acquiring a definite form through its actions. Together these chalk out a direction for a polity and equip it with a certain mode of accomplishing tasks in routine ways over a long duration. Modernising polities have either replicated institutions of liberal democracy of the industrialised world or crafted their own institutional structures; some of them have even formalised different hybridised institutional arrangements. Specialisation of roles and differentiation of responsibilities characterise modern institutional functioning. The structures vested with specific roles work in an integrated way that brings coherence and stability to the political system. This keeps it in a cycle of orchestrated functionality to accomplish the given tasks. The electoral administration is part of this institutional ecosystem that in tandem with other state institutions actualises democratic citizenship.

Institutional Studies

Institutional theory, as it grew in its neo-institutional phase, emphasised that institutions are entities that impose constraints on actors. Justified and accepted on grounds of stability, order and efficiency, these constraints were seen to maximise gains among collective existence.