Journal Articles

Ethnic Parties and Public Spending: New Theory and Evidence From the Indian States

---

Social scientists largely see ethnic politics as inhibiting public goods provisioning within developing democracies. Such parties are thought to uniformly rely on distributing excludable benefits to co-ethnics, rather than on providing public goods to all. We argue that ethnic parties can vary substantially in how they mobilize support and behave in office. Much of this variation depends on the breadth of the identity they activate. Although “narrow” ethnic parties do indeed entrench patronage politics, the rise of more “encompassing” ethnic parties can actually improve levels of voter autonomy, expand the effective size of winning coalitions, and increase spending on broadly available public goods. We develop and test this argument with evidence from the Indian states, including a nationally representative survey of 20,000 Indian voters and a panel data set of 15 major states over four decades.

---

Availability

No copy data

Detail Information

Series Title

Comparative Political Studies

Call Number

-

Publisher

Thousand Oaks : Sage Publications., 2015

Collation

-

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

0010-4140

Classification

NONE

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

Volume 48, Issue 11 September 2015, P. 1389-1420

Subject(s)

Political economy
Democratization and regime change
Politics of growth/development
Corruption and patronage

Specific Detail Info

-

Statement of Responsibility

-

Other version/related

File Attachment

Comments

---

You must be logged in to post a comment