Party organization and party proliferation in India

Abstract

Theories that explain variations in party systems typically emphasize the role of political institutions and social cleavages. Using a panel dataset of election returns from 15 Indian states from 1967 to 2004. this article establishes considerable variation in the effective number of parties across states and over time, despite the same political institutions and relatively stable social cleavages. We argue that a hitherto ignored dimension, the level of party organization, has a significant impact on the nature of the party system. The level of party organization incentivizes politicians differently in terms of their decision to stay, join another party or float a new party, when their ambitions are thwarted within a party. To test this theory, a unique indicator of party organization is developed on the basis of extensive qualitative research. We find that in Indian states where parties are more organized, both the effective number of parties and electoral volatility are lower.

Organizational and Ideological Strategies for Nationalization: Evidence from European Parties

“…This article contributes to the literature on parties empirically through this new dataset, and theoretically, by placing emphasis on party organization as a key explanatory variable. For quite some time studies of parties and party systems have neglected the role of party organization, 2 but recent studies suggest that it might be an important dimension to understand a variety of political outcomes such as electoral success (Janda and Colman, 1998;Tavits, 2011;Greene and Haber, 2015;Ishiyama, 2001), changes in party policy position (Schumacher, de Vries and Vis, 2013) and the number of parties in a party system (Chhibber and Suryanarayan, 2014). 3 Within this recent research agenda, this article is the first to investigate how party organization affects the territorial nature of parties' electoral support.…”

“… 22 Chhibber and Suryanarayan 2014. Kernell (2013) has written on party organization and political participation and Meguid (2008) explores how party organization explains decisions to decentralize the state among mainstream parties in the UK.…”

Development from Representation? A Study of Quotas for the Scheduled Castes in India

“…Although parties are often referred to as weak or disorganized in India (deSouza and Sridharan, 2006;Chhibber, Jensenius and Suryanarayan, 2014), the party leaderships strictly control who gets to run for election under the party label (Farooqui and Sridharan, 2014). Parties in India have generally been controlled by non-SCs leaders, and SC politicians may never be given the opportunity to run for office if they are not palatable to the party leadership.…”

Where’s the Party? The Decline of Party Institutionalization and What (if Anything) that Means for Democracy

“…Then for each state the authors calculate the proportion of organized versus personalistic parties. Using regression analysis with these data, Chhibber et al (2014) find that ‘in Indian states where parties are more organized, both the effective number of parties and electoral volatility are lower’ – measures that Chhibber has elsewhere (2011) related to worse democratic outcomes in terms of the quality of representation.…”