India: Myron Weiner and John Osgood Field (Eds.): Electoral Politics in the Indian States—Party Systems and Cleavages. Manohar Book Service, Delhi, 1975, xxiii, 209p. Rs. 70

1977 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-115
Author(s):  
S.V. Kogekar
Author(s):  
Rafaela M. Dancygier

As Europe's Muslim communities continue to grow, so does their impact on electoral politics and the potential for inclusion dilemmas. In vote-rich enclaves, Muslim views on religion, tradition, and gender roles can deviate sharply from those of the majority electorate, generating severe trade-offs for parties seeking to broaden their coalitions. This book explains when and why European political parties include Muslim candidates and voters, revealing that the ways in which parties recruit this new electorate can have lasting consequences. The book sheds new light on when minority recruitment will match up with existing party positions and uphold electoral alignments and when it will undermine party brands and shake up party systems. It demonstrates that when parties are seduced by the quick delivery of ethno-religious bloc votes, they undercut their ideological coherence, fail to establish programmatic linkages with Muslim voters, and miss their opportunity to build cross-ethnic, class-based coalitions. The book highlights how the politics of minority inclusion can become a testing ground for parties, showing just how far their commitments to equality and diversity will take them when push comes to electoral shove. Providing a unified theoretical framework for understanding the causes and consequences of minority political incorporation, and especially as these pertain to European Muslim populations, the book advances our knowledge about how ethnic and religious diversity reshapes domestic politics in today's democracies.


India Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 496-522
Author(s):  
Sayan Banerjee ◽  
Charles R. Hankla

1979 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 414-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward T. Jennings

This article examines the logic underlying standard formulations of the interparty competition hypothesis in the comparative state policy literature, suggests a reformulation which provides some new insights into the conditions under which we might expect state policies to change as a result of party characteristics, and undertakes an initial test of the reformulation.I develop two propositions. The first is that party systems which divide the electorate along economic class lines will generate more generous welfare policies than party systems which do not so organize the electorate. The second is that within states with class-based electoral systems, change in welfare policy will be positively related to the degree to which the party or faction with lower- and working-class support gains control of government.I analyze welfare policies of selected American states for the period 1938 to 1970. My analysis suggests that (1) the class basis of electoral politics does influence state welfare policies and (2) parties and factions which differ in their constituency bases produce different types of policies when they are in control of government.


1977 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 1384-1405 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul R. Brass

This paper contributes to the substantive and methodological discussion of the issues concerning the causes of cabinet instability through analysis of data from Indian state politics. The focus of the analysis is on explaining the duration of Indian state governments in days with variables measuring the degree of fragmentation and cohesion in the party system, the composition of the cabinet, the characteristics of the opposition, and the role of ideological differences. A substantial amount of the variation in the durability of coalition governments is explained with variables that measure the degree of party system institutionalization and the extent of political opportunism, but ideological factors do not explain much of the differences in durability of governments. It is also found that none of the measures used can explain much of the variation in one-party majority governments for which, it is argued, explanations must be sought that focus on leadership skill and on relationships between leaders and factions in a dominant party.


1989 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pradeep K. Chhibber ◽  
John R. Petrocik

The social cleavage theory of parly systems has provided a major framework for the study of Western party systems. It has been quite unimportant in studying other party systems, especially those of developing countries, where comparative development, and not mass electoral politics, has been the focus of study. This article reports the results of an attempt to bridge these traditions by analysing popular support for the Congress Party of India in terms of the expectations of the social cleavage theory of parties. This analysis illustrates the degree to which Indian partisanship conforms to the expectations of the theory. More importantly, this social cleavage theory analysis offers some new perspectives on (1) the inability of the Indian political system to develop national parties other than the Congress and (2) the ‘disaggregation’ of the Congress party.


2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pradeep Chhibber ◽  
Irfan Nooruddin

Delivery of public goods varies significantly across the Indian states. This article argues that differences in state government expenditures are largely the result of differences in their party systems. Using macroeconomic data from 1967 to 1997 as well as postelection voter surveys, we demonstrate that states with two-party competition provide more public goods than states with multiparty competition, which, we argue, reflects differing mobilization strategies. In two-party systems, political parties require support from many social groups and therefore provide public goods to win elections. In multiparty systems, needing only a plurality of votes to win, parties use club, rather than public, goods to mobilize smaller segments of the population. In stressing the impact of party systems on state government performance in India, this article differs from recent political economy research, which has stressed either the effect of particular political parties or ethnic divisions on government performance and public goods delivery.


1995 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 312-326 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Ware

DURING THE FIRST HALF OF THE 1990s ABOUT ONE THIRD OF the countries which had been governed continuously by liberal democratic regimes since the mid-1950s experienced major electoral upheavals at a general election. In the case of eight countries an argument could be made that electoral politics was not as it had been, and that the party systems were now experiencing problems that were quite different in scale from those with which they had contended during the previous forty years. The countries concerned were:– Sweden, where the 1991 general election produced a major decline in the share of the vote (5.5 per cent of the total) for the governing Social Democrats; this was the largest change in its vote share between consecutive elections since 1944.


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