Abstract
The parliament, media, and citizens, are key stakeholders in any democracy. We study their priorities pertaining to four economic policies in India – Demonetization, Aadhaar, GST, and Farmers’ Protests – by examining the content of questions asked by politicians in the parliament, news articles published in the mass media, and data from social media. We find that the mass media covers stories about different constituencies (the poor, middle-class, corporates, etc.) but shows biases in terms of which constituencies it chooses to focus on for each policy. The parliament tends to focus on procedural aspects of the policies. We also find that the social media simply echoes the trends of whatever is emphasized more in the mass media, without much deviation in the attention placed by social media users on different issues. We further find out that instead of selecting issues of importance based on feedback from citizens, the parliamentarians mostly indulge in partisanship, and shape their questions based on party goals that change depending on whether their party is in power or not. Overall, we are able to use this analysis to comment on how representative and responsive the Indian democracy is to its citizens.