Towards a Comparative Subnational Perspective on India

Suraj Jacob

Studies in Indian Politics, 2015, vol. 3, issue 2, 229-246

Abstract: The article surveys the comparative subnational literature on India and suggests some promising paths forward. One, careful selection of sub-state regions can improve the legitimacy of inter-state comparisons and increase the validity of causal claims regarding state-specific governance and political economy. Two, there is greater scope for intra-state comparisons that control for state-specific factors and thereby identify more local, context-specific factors that drive political and other outcomes. Three, the roles and limitations of both causal and non-causal research designs need to be better understood in the subnational context. Four, for serious comparison, it is imperative to explore only a few carefully selected primary units of analysis. While this highlights the importance of the traditional comparative case study approach, the implied qualitative/quantitative dichotomy is false: methods based on inferential statistics can and should be usefully nested in a causal comparative case study framework. Five, greater emphasis on process tracing can improve insights from subnational comparisons.

Keywords: Subnational comparisons; states; comparative method; research design; process tracing; nested analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2321023015601744 (text/html)

Related works:
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:sae:indpol:v:3:y:2015:i:2:p:229-246

DOI: 10.1177/2321023015601744

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Studies in Indian Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().