Maya Tudor

How opposition parties sustain single-party dominance Lessons from India

When elections are free and fair, why do some political parties rule for prolonged periods of time? Most explanations for single-party dominance focus on the dominant party’s origins, resources, or strategies. In this article, we show how opposition parties can undermine or sustain single-party dominance. Specifically, opposition parties should be central in explaining single-party dominance in countries with highly disproportional electoral systems and a dominant party whose vote share falls short of a popular majority. Employing a quantitative analysis of Indian legislative elections as well as a paired case study, we show that opposition coordination plays a crucial part in undermining single-party dominance.

The Content of Democracy: Nationalist Parties and Inclusive Ideologies in India and Indonesia

India and Indonesia are the two largest and unlikeliest democracies in the postcolonial world. Southern Asia’s two greatest demographic behemoths have both long been riddled with almost every imaginable hypothesized malady for democratic development, such as severe poverty and inequality, extreme ethnic heterogeneity, violent separatist movements, and putatively “undemocratic” dominant religions. Despite these shared handicaps, India has remained a democracy nearly without interruption since independence, while Indonesia has surprisingly emerged as the steadiest and least endangered democracy in Southeast Asia over the last fifteen years. In the familiar parlance of democratic consolidation, democracy in both India and Indonesia today appears to have become “the only game in town.” What lessons might we learn from this surprising commonality in contemporary democratic robustness against similarly long odds? Despite the obvious importance of these two cases for world democratization, political scientists are yet to inquire whether India’s and Indonesia’s parallel outperformance of democratic expectations might have broader implications for democratization theory. The primary argument developed herein is that India and Indonesia possess a shared but heretofore unrecognized historical source of democratic strength: the inclusive ideology of their founding political parties. As leaders of incipient nationalist movements, India’s Congress Party and Indonesia’s Nationalist Party (PNI) responded to the historically specific imperatives of colonial rule by mobilizing active and direct support across

The Historical Inheritance of India's Democracy

The presence of a stable, consolidated democracy in the poor and unequal country of India poses a puzzle for contemporary democratic theorists, who contend that low levels of economic development and high levels of inequality and illiteracy are inimical to democracy. Yet a scholarly consensus on how and why one of the world’s most populous and diverse polities has managed to create a stable democracy and evade the autocratic and unstable regime trajectories commonly characterizing other post-colonial, developing countries has not emerged. The central question thus posed in this paper is, how and why did India first come to institutionalize this constitutive democratic institution? The paper explores the most commonly cited explanations and concludes that the creation of Indian democracy is best explained through a combination of a class interest that was conditioned by colonialism and the political party built to pursue that interest during the closing decades of colonialism.