Dissertation

Three Essays on India's Weakly Institutionalized Party System

Nellis, Gareth

2016

Overview

This dissertation presents three essays on the origins, functioning, and consequences of weak party-system institutionalization in India, the world's largest democracy. • Political parties are thought to play a key role in countering the centrifugal tendencies of federalism. Yet we possess little systematic evidence about how nationalized parties work to shape electoral outcomes in developing states with federal systems. In such contexts, do powerful, resource-rich incumbents at the national level strategically mobilize votes for their parties in subnational elections? In the first paper of this dissertation, I theorize that incumbents' propensity to help co-partisans running in lower-tier races hinges on internal party organization, and above all factionalism. Where parties are cleaved along factional lines, incumbents decline to support the election of co-partisan candidates aligned with rival intra-party factions. Incumbents anticipate that doing so will undercut their own promotion prospects and likelihood of re-selection. Where internal feuding is muted, however, incumbents face clear-cut incentives to aid the election of co-partisans running in provincial races. Leveraging experimental and quasi-experimental methods, as well as new data on the linkages between India's national and state elections for the period 1977-2008, I find strong evidence to support these predictions. The paper advances our understanding of political accountability in multi-level electoral systems. It also contributes to the literature on the incumbency advantage, and illuminates the principal-agent dilemma at the heart of internally divided parties. • Why are party systems well-institutionalized in some settings, and chronically weak in others? Focusing on the phenomenon of electoral volatility, the dissertation's second paper argues that unstable party systems are more likely to arise in regions where nationally dominant parties monopolize political competition at the onset of mass-franchise democracy. Dominant parties crowd out political opposition. Hence the eventual break down of a dominant party entails the severing of all—or nearly all—party-voter linkages locally. In the resulting vacuum, politicians face uncertainty about the electoral prospects of newly emergent parties. This, I argue, leads to a collective action dilemma wherein candidates defect from expanding parties and sort instead into smaller, fragmentary ones. Consequently, stable party systems fail to take hold. Subnational evidence from India buttresses the theoretical propositions. The success of the once-dominant Congress Party during the country's inaugural elections (1951-2) robustly predicts greater electoral volatility in the decades following the decline of one-party dominance in the 1970s. Differential patterns of nationalist mobilization during the colonial period provide additional leverage on the paper's core claims. Overall, the findings imply a striking paradox: dominant parties that help \"bind the nation together\" during democracy's initial stages sow the seeds of long-run political instability. • Ethnic group conflict is among the most serious threats facing young democracies. The paper's final paper investigates whether the partisanship of local incumbent politicians affects the incidence and severity of ethnic violence. Using a novel application of the regression-discontinuity design, it shows that as-if random victory by candidates representing India's Congress party in close state assembly elections between 1962 and 2000 reduced Hindu-Muslim rioting. The effects are large. Simulations reveal that had Congress lost all close elections in this period, India would have experienced 11 percent more riots. Additional analyses suggest that Congress candidates' dependence on local Muslim votes, as well as apprehensions about religious polarization of the electorate in the event of riots breaking out, are what drive the observed effect. The findings shed new light on parties' connection to ethnic conflict, the relevance of partisanship in developing states, and the puzzle of democratic consolidation in ethnically-divided societies.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Political science
• ISBN: 9781369631173, 1369631170