Why Ethnic Parties Succeed

Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India

Kanchan Chandra

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780521814522
• eBook ISBN: 9781108635523
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why do some ethnic parties succeed in attracting the support of their target ethnic group while others fail? In a world in which ethnic parties flourish in both established and emerging democracies alike, understanding the conditions under which such parties rise and fall is of critical importance to both political scientists and policy makers. Drawing on a study of variation in the performance of ethnic parties in India, this book builds a theory of ethnic party performance in 'patronage democracies'. Chandra shows why individual voters and political entrepreneurs in such democracies condition their strategies not on party ideologies or policy platforms, but on a headcount of co-ethnics and others across party personnel and among the electorate.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Why Ethnic Parties Succeed
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps, Figures, and Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• A Note on Terminology
• Acknowledgments
• 1: INTRODUCTION
• PART I: Theory
• PART II: Data
• Appendix A: Elite Interviews
• Appendix B: Ethnographies of Election Campaigns
• Appendix C: Content Analysis
• Appendix D: Description of Survey Data
• Appendix E: Description of the Ecological Inference (EI) Method
• Appendix F: Method Used to Estimate Ethnic Voting Patterns
• Bibliography
• Index