The Changing Political Economy of Federalism in India: A Historical Institutionalist Approach

Quantifying slum electrification in India and explaining local variation

“…Consequently, central-state cooperation is useful for progress in electrification. Such cooperation is more likely when the national and local ruling parties are aligned, as they would then share the same ideology and electoral incentives (Sinha, 2004;Rao and Singh, 2005). As long as people will credit the central government for improved governance, the New Delhi rulers will indirectly benefit from improvements at the local level.…”

Question Hour Activity and Party Behaviour in India

“…We focus on one of the representative aspects of the parliament -the increasing presence and consequent significance of subnational parties as national players. Thus far, much scholarship has examined the role of subnational political parties and their governments in patronage-based subnational ethnic mobilisation (Chandra, 2007), interstate economic competition (Rudolph & Rudolph, 2001;Sinha, 2004), opportunistic coalition behaviour (Sreedharan, 2004), but also -counter-intuitively -longterm policy stability (Nooruddin, 2011). However, scholarship is silent about the impact of regional interests and their political representation in the national legislative arena, not just in India, but elsewhere as well (Jensen & Spoon, 2010), although there is an important, growing literature regarding such behaviour in Europe's supranational parliament.…”

"The Dynamics of Reform of India's Federal System"

“…State governments have been able to pursue subnational economic agendas more freely. Regulatory and permission issues for the private sector were now often shifted to the state level rather than the center (Sinha, 2004(Sinha, , 2005. States have even been able to negotiate with multilateral institutions, in ways that may have shifted potential costs to the center (Chakraborty and Rao, 2006), in the form of softer budget constraints.…”

“…One institutional reform that did emerge in 1990 was the creation of the Inter-State Council (ISC), which includes the Prime Minister, state chief ministers, and several central cabinet ministers as members, and has become a forum where political and economic issues of joint concern can be collectively discussed, and possibly resolved. 21 Within this relatively static institutional framework, the 1991 economic reforms, which substantially loosened central government control of foreign and domestic corporate investment, allowed state governments to become more autonomous actors in economic policy (e.g., Sinha, 2004;Singh and Srinivasan, 2005;Singh, 2007), with horizontal competition among (at least some) state governments replacing rent-seeking interactions with the center. In this respect, therefore, reforms that liberalized central 21 The flexibility and breadth of scope of the ISC's possible concerns distinguish it from the much older National Development Council (NDC), which has somewhat similar membership, but focuses only on fiveyear-plan allocations.…”

“…Sàez (2002) tackles similar issues to the current piece, but interprets the process and evidence quite differently. Sinha (2004Sinha ( , 2005) offers a conceptual framework somewhat similar to that offered here, though with differences of emphasis. An important cross-country comparison of the dynamics of reform in federal systems is Wallack and Srinivasan (2005).…”