Party types and electoral performance across states, 1980–2016

The proliferation of political parties in India has produced interesting scholarship exploring its causes and consequences. It has been linked with democratic stability or instability (Chandra 2005; Nooruddin 2011; Palshikar, Suri and Yadav 2014), federalisation (Arora 2003; Ziegfeld 2012), ethnic mobilisation and democratic upsurge (Chandra 2004; Varshney 2000; Yadav 2000), political entrepreneurship (Wyatt 2010), increased ideological incoherence or convergence over time (Hasan 2010; Palshikar, Suri and Yadav 2014; Yadav and Palshikar 2009), party organisation (Chhibber, Jensenius and Suryanarayanan 2014), legislative behaviour (Ayyangar and Jacob 2015), inequality (Huber and Suryanarayanan 2016), provision of public goods (Chhibber and Nooruddin 2004; Thachil and Teitelbaum 2015) and human development outcomes (Joshi 2012). Even when pragmatism and flux have reduced inter-party differences in ideology and intra-party democracy, and weakened organisational structure (Hasan 2010), one aspect of differentiation has endured, namely the distinction between national and subnational parties. This chapter takes up this distinction and focuses on subnational parties—which account for the vast majority of India’s parties—across states and time in the electoral domai