On the structure of the political party system in Indian states, 1957–2018

J. Stephen Ferris and Bharatee Dash

Constitutional Political Economy, 2023, vol. 34, issue 1, No 1, 35 pages

Abstract: Abstract We develop and test an equilibrium model of party structure to account for the large and ever-changing number of political parties that contest Indian state elections. The analysis finds that the number of parties increases with the voting density of state constituencies, the heterogeneity of the state’s electorate, state per capita income and literacy levels, falls with average age while responding to a set of constitutional and legislative rules designed to affect party and electoral performance. The model is also applied to entry and exit, allowing the empirics to highlight those factors that affect party turnover rather than aggregate party numbers. The model explains better the number of parties than ENP, the effective (vote share weighted) number of parties, implying that the variability in the fringe of smaller parties has not substantially affected the vote shares received by the larger more established parties. Affirmative action, primarily in the form of increases in the proportion of seats reserved for members of special castes is associated with a reduction in both party numbers and ENP consistent with speeding the integration of scheduled castes into broader based political parties.

Keywords: Number of political parties; ENP; Indian states; Entry and exit of political parties; BIMAROU and Non-BIMAROU states; Fixed effects Poisson panel estimation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D73 H70 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10602-021-09358-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Working Paper: On the Structure of the Political Party System in Indian States, 1957-2018 (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:copoec:v:34:y:2023:i:1:d:10.1007_s10602-021-09358-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/10602/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10602-021-09358-2

Access Statistics for this article

Constitutional Political Economy is currently edited by Roger Congleton and Stefan Voigt

More articles in Constitutional Political Economy from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().