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Dynastic politics, usually presumed to be the antithesis of democracy, is a routine aspect of politics in many modern democracies. This book introduces a new theoretical perspective on dynasticism in democracies, using original data on twenty-first-century Indian parliaments. It argues that the roots of dynastic politics lie at least in part in modern democratic institutions - states and parties - which give political families a leg-up in the electoral process. It also proposes a rethinking of the view that dynastic politics is a violation of democracy, showing that it can also reinforce some aspects of democracy while violating others. Finally, this book suggests that both reinforcement and violation are the products, not of some property intrinsic to political dynasties, but of the institutional environment from which those dynasties emerge.

Taking the possibility of change in ethnic identity into account, this book shows and dismantles the theoretical logics linking ethnic diversity to negative outcomes and processes such as democratic destabilisation, clientelism, riots and state collapse. Even more importantly, it changes the questions we can ask about the relationship between ethnicity, politics and economics.

Although the majority of elected members of Parliament in India now come from subaltern categories, they belong to parties that are dominated by the Hindu upper castes.

This article shows that even if we stipulate a single definition of both an ethnic group and an ethnic party, there are many reasonable indicators that can be used to classify parties as ethnic, which may generate different counts of ethnic parties. It then maps the range of indicators that can be used to classify parties as ethnic, shows how previous questions raised in the study of ethnic parties can be better answered by some indicators than others, and identifies new questions that can be raised by each classification in relation to the alternatives.

A great deal of new work in the field of ethnic politics has focused on improving the quality of the data we put into our measures—and critiquing the quality of the data that went into measures such as the Index of Ethnolinguistic Fractionalization (the ELF index) (Chandra 2009, Chandra and Wilkinson 2008, Cederman and Girardin 2007, Posner 2004).

This article introduces a hypothesis predicting when we should see split-ticket voting in 'patronage democracies' derived from a model of strategic voting for ethnic parties. It supports the model based on an examination of the behaviour of Scheduled Caste voters in the north-Indian state of Uttar Pradesh across national and regional elections in 1996 using multiple sources of data: an EI analysis of election results, ethnography, and survey data. These data are consistent with the model, but are not conclusive. In contrast to previous scholarship on ethnic parties, which assumes that those who support ethnic parties vote sincerely, these data show that strategic voting drives the phenomenon of split-ticket voting by Scheduled Caste voters. But they do not allow us to rule out that strategic mechanisms other than those introduced here may explain the same outcome. A stronger test requires demographic and survey data tailored to distinguish precisely between different models of strategic voting, with different predictions for the conditions under which voters split their tickets. So far, the dominant assumption of sincere voting in the work on ethnic parties has meant that these data are rarely collected. The contribution of this article is to make a sufficient case that collecting such data is important to understanding ethnicity and voting behaviour in India and other patronage democracies. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]