Kanchan Chandra

Why ethnic parties succeed : patronage and ethnic head counts in India

List of maps figures, and tables List of abbreviations A note on terminology Acknowledgments 1. Introduction Part I. Theory: 2. Limited information and ethnic categorization 3. Patronage-democracy, limited information and ethnic favouritism 4. Counting heads: why ethnic parties succeed in patronage-democracies 5. Why parties have different ethnic head counts: party organization and elite incorporation Part II. Data: 6. India as a patronage-democracy 7. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Scheduled Castes (SCs) 8. Why SC elites join the BSP 9. Why SC voters prefer the BSP 10. Why SC voter preferences translate into BSP votes 11. Explaining different head counts in the BSP and congress 12. Extending the argument to other ethnic parties in India: the BJP, the DMK and the JMM 13. Ethnic head counts and democratic stability Appendices Bibliography Index.

Ethnic Parties and Democratic Stability

Ethnic divisions, according to empirical democratic theory, and commonsense understandings of politics, threaten the survival of democratic institutions. One of the principal mechanisms linking the politicization of ethnic divisions with the destabilization of democracy is the so-called outbidding effect. According to theories of ethnic outbidding, the politicization of ethnic divisions inevitably gives rise to one or more ethnic parties. The emergence of even a single ethnic party, in turn, “infects” the political system, leading to a spiral of extreme bids that destroys competitive politics altogether. In contrast, I make the (counterintuitive) claim that ethnic parties can sustain a democratic system if they are institutionally encouraged: outbidding can be reversed by replacing the unidimensional ethnic identities assumed by the outbidding models with multidimensional ones. My argument is based on the anomalous case of ethnic party behavior in India. It implies that the threat to democratic stability, where it exists, comes not from the intrinsic nature of ethnic divisions, but from the institutional context within which ethnic politics takes place. Institutions that artificially restrict ethnic politics to a single dimension destabilize democracy, whereas institutions that foster multiple dimensions of ethnic identity can sustain it.

Measuring the Effect of “Ethnicity”

Most tests of hypotheses about the effects of “ethnicity” on outcomes use data or measures that confuse or conflate what are termed ethnic structure and ethnic practice. This article presents a conceptualization of ethnicity that makes the distinction between these concepts clear; it demonstrates how confusion between structure and practice hampers the ability to test theories; and it presents two new measures of ethnic practice—ECI (the ethnic concentration index) and EVOTE (the percentage of the vote obtained by ethnic parties)—that illustrate the pay-offs of making this distinction and collecting data accordingly, using examples from the civil war literature.

What is an ethnic party

This article shows that even if we stipulate a single definition of both an ethnic group and an ethnic party, there are many reasonable indicators that can be used to classify parties as ethnic, which may generate different counts of ethnic parties. It then maps the range of indicators that can be used to classify parties as ethnic, shows how previous questions raised in the study of ethnic parties can be better answered by some indicators than others, and identifies new questions that can be raised by each classification in relation to the alternatives.

Ethnic Bargains, Group Instability, and Social Choice Theory

This article makes two arguments: first, it argues that theories connecting ethnic group mobilization with democratic bargaining are based, often unwittingly, on primordialist assumptions that bias them toward overestimating the intractability of ethnic group demands. Second, it proposes a synthesis of constructivist approaches to ethnic identity and social choice theory to show how we who study ethnic mobilization might build theories that rely on the more realistic and more powerful assumption of instability in ethnic group boundaries and preferences. It illustrates the promise of this approach through a study of the language bargain struck in Indias constituent assembly between 1947 and 1949.

The Transformation of Ethnic Politics in India: The Decline of Congress and the Rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party in Hoshiarpur

The politics of ethnicity—caste, religion, and language—has been central to politics in twentieth-century India. However, as the dominant Indian National Congress declines in favor of a number of smaller parties, the manner in which ethnic identities are being invoked in the political arena is being transformed. The key aspect of this transformation is not, as it is usually understood, the replacement of a single multiethnic party with a collection of monoethnic parties. Many of the smaller parties are in themselves multiethnic, although the coalitions that they seek to build are usually narrower than those built by Congress. Rather, the key aspect is the change in the type of ethnic politics that dominates the political arena. Congress plays a coded ethnic card, invoking ethnic identities quietly in its selection of candidates but not openly in its identification of issues; targets certain ethnic groups without openly excluding others; builds differentiated ethnic coalitions across constituencies and states; and courts the support of these ethnic coalitions through the distribution of patronage but never through the rhetoric of identity.