2024, Vol. 6, Issue 1, Part D

Populism is the new mantra. In this era of competitive populism, no political party wants to remain aloof from this. Politicians are labelled as vote maximising agents whose ultimate goal is to attempt to attract voters by using different methods prior to the election as well as after the election to sustain in power. Few examples of this could be spending huge amount of money in election campaign, distributing gifts to the electorates and commencement of various programmes, policies and schemes targeting particular section of society from whom a political party get benefitted the most during elections. Therefore, based on both primary and secondary data, the objective of this paper is to understand the impact of few selected populist policies on the success of the regional party Biju Janata Dal (BJD) in the Balasore district of Odisha since 1999. The paper would also delineate the challenges and way forward in relations to implementation of populist policies and competitive populism in Odisha.