 Votebank politics is the practice of creating and maintaining votebanks through divisive policies.As it encourages voters to vote on the basis of narrow communal considerations, often against their better judgement, it is considered harmful to the principles of representative democracy.The term vote-bank was first used by noted Indian sociologist, M. N. Srinivas (who also coined the terms "Sanskritisation" and "dominant caste"), in his 1955 paper entitled "The Social System of a Mysore Village".