Suchergebnisse

This article explores the origins and consequences of India's regional parties and subnationalism, focusing and expanding on the key arguments made by Prerna Singh and Adam Ziegfeld in their books. According to Singh, when political leaders promote an inclusive form of subnationalism, it creates a feeling of cohesive solidarity across the region, which helps to achieve superior social welfare outcomes in the Indian states. Ziegfeld provides an elite-centered explanation for the emergence and success of India's regional parties, and considers Indian politics to be dominated by clientelistic relationships between parties and voters, which leads to delivery of particularistic rather than public goods. The article also discusses two key themes emerging from the books relating to the importance of subnational versus national identity, and the significance of interests versus ideas in shaping Indian politics and public policy. Finally, it identifies future areas for research on regional parties and subnationalism in India.

Many existing methods of statistical inference and analysis rely heavily on the assumption that the data are normally distributed. However, the normality assumption is not fulfilled when dealing with data which does not contain negative values or are otherwise skewed – a common occurrence in diverse disciplines such as finance, economics, political science, sociology, philology, biology and physical and industrial processes. In this situation, a lognormal distribution may better represent the data than the normal distribution. In this paper, I re-visit the key attributes of the normal and lognormal distributions, and demonstrate through an empirical analysis of the 'number of political parties' in India, how logarithmic transformation can help in bringing a lognormally distributed data closer to a normal one. The paper also provides further empirical evidence to show that many variables of interest to political and other social scientists could be better modelled using the lognormal distribution. More generally, the paper emphasises the potential for improved description and empirical analysis of quantitative data by paying more attention to its distribution, and complements previous publications in Practical Research and Assessment Evaluation (PARE) on this subject. Accessed 4,840 times on https://pareonline.net from December 21, 2017 to December 31, 2019. For downloads from January 1, 2020 forward, please click on the PlumX Metrics link to the right.

India uses the single member plurality system (SMPS) to elect members of the lower house of its national (federal) parliament and the state assemblies. The electoral system has remained stable despite its inherent disproportionality, India's highly heterogeneous population and, more recently, a fragmented party system. Using a comprehensive data set covering all national and some state assembly elections during the period 1952–2017, this article evaluates how SMPS has performed in India in comparison to its expected benefits, and whether there is a case for reform of the electoral system. The article finds that SMPS neither provides effective representation nor is likely to lead to stable single party governments in India – a situation that could be termed 'the worst of both worlds'. It also highlights that a combination of rational-choice behaviour on the part of key actors as well as historical and institutional reasons has ensured the continuation of SMPS in India. The article concludes that it is time for India to seriously consider reforming its electoral system.

The 2014 Indian general election was notable due to a single party – the Bharatiya Janata Party – winning a majority of seats in Lok Sabha for the first time since 1984. The Congress, the other main national party, suffered its worst ever defeat. This election was viewed by some as signalling the advent of a phase of a BIP-dominated party system in India. In this article, I revisit the results of this election, and of the subsequent state assembly elections, to analyse if they signal a substantial change in the political landscape and party system in India. I argue that although the Congress decline has continued, and the BJP has won many recent state assembly elections, it is premature to conclude that the Indian party system has shifted to a BJP-dominated one. Further, given India's first-past-the-post electoral system and a diffused political environment, where state and regional parties continue to be strong in many parts of the country, achieving a legislative majority remains a difficult proposition for a single party.

The 2014 Indian general election marked a single party – the Bharatiya Janata Party, winning a majority of seats in Lok Sabha, the first time since the 1984 election. The Congress, the other main national party, suffered its worst ever defeat. This election was termed by some as a 'critical election' signalling the advent of a new phase of a 'BJP dominated' party system in India. In this paper, I revisit the results of this election, and of the subsequent state assembly elections to analyse if these signal a substantial change in the political landscape and the party system in India. I argue that although Congress' decline has continued, and the BJP has won many recent state assembly elections, it is premature to conclude that the Indian party system has shifted to a 'BJP dominated' one. Further, given India's first-past-the-post electoral system, and a diffuse political environment where state and regional parties continue to be strong in many parts of the country, achieving a legislative majority remains a difficult proposition for a single party.

At the time of India's independence in 1947, few expected it to survive as a democracy due to the presence of an ethnically diverse, and largely poor and illiterate population. However, India has survived as a functioning democracy, and successfully held 16 general (parliamentary) elections to democratically elect its national governments. The 16th general election was announced on 5th March 2014 to elect the members of the Lok Sabhae lower house of the Indian Parliament and the principal legislative body. The Congress-led UPA (United Progressive Alliance) coalition government had been in power since 2004, but struggled due to issues of corruption, indecision and lack of good governance in its second term after the 2009 election. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

Existing research on party aggregation focuses on the national level, relating it to changes in the federal distribution of powers. I argue that party aggregation also affects sub-national party systems, and therefore that study of party aggregation needs to extend beyond the national level. A comparative analysis reveals that party aggregation at the Indian sub-national (state) level does not respond uniformly to changes in the federal distribution of powers. While federal centralization has positive and significant effects on the number of parties in Indian states, the effects of federal decentralization are relatively less important. Furthermore, Indian states that are highly dependent on the national government have fewer parties and a higher degree of party aggregation. I conclude that existing analysis of party aggregation is simplistic, and that we need to develop a more comprehensive set of explanatory factors by which to study this phenomenon and to extend research in this area to the sub-national level.