Although there is a large body of comparative literature on party discipline and cohesion in legislatures, little attention has been paid to the examining the causes that lead to the establishment of formal rules that regulate individual deputies’ ability to defect from their party. This is an...

Successive national governments in India have invoked an emergency constitutional provision to impose direct central rule in states over 100 times since 1950. However, such central government usurpation of state governance has declined since the mid-1990s. This essay demonstrates how India's...

This paper examines how increased voter ethnicization, defined as a greater preference for the party representing one's ethnic group, affects politician quality. If politics is characterized by incomplete policy commitment, then ethnicization reduces average winner quality for the pro-majority...

Indian parties and the party system in India are only partly consolidated resp. institutionalised, according to the usual criteria, distilled from the experience of Western parties. This is so in spite of the long tradition of Indian parties, their large membership base, organisational...

Delivery of public goods varies significantly across the Indian states. This article argues that differences in state government expenditures are largely the result of differences in their party systems. Using macroeconomic data from 1967 to 1997 as well as postelection voter surveys, we...