¹ Taylor, Michael and Herman, V. M., “Party Systems and Government Stability,” American Political Science Review, 65 (03 1971), 28–37 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lowell, A. Lawrence, Governments and Parties in Continental Europe, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1896), pp. 70–74 Google Scholar.

² See esp. Taylor and Herman; Blondel, Jean, “Party Systems and Patterns of Government in Western Democracies,” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 1 (06 1968), 180–203 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dodd, Lawrence C., “Party Coalitions in Multiparty Parliaments: A Game-Theoretic Analysis,” American Political Science Review, 68 (09 1974), 1093–1117 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ The methodologically most sophisticated analysis of cabinet instability in Fourth Republic France is, of course, that done by MacRae, Duncan Jr., Parliament, Parties, and Society in France: 1946–1958 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1967)Google Scholar.

⁴ Taylor and Herman, pp. 34–37.

⁵ Dodd, pp. 1111–12.

⁶ However, the approach taken in this article derives exclusively from the Lowell, Blondel, Taylor-Herman tradition rather than from the game theory tradition which Dodd combines with the former in his study.

⁷ Key, V. O. Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Knopf, 1949)Google Scholar and American State Politics: An Introduction (New York: Knopf, 1956)Google Scholar.

⁸ The term “segmented pluralism” comes from Lorwin, Val R., “Segmented Pluralism: Ideological Cleavages and Political Cohesion in the Smaller European Democracies,” Comparative Politics, 3 (01 1971), 141–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Two important collections of such studies are in Weiner, Myron, ed., State Politics in India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Weiner, Myron and Field, John O., eds., Electoral Politics in the Indian States in four volumes, of which see esp. Vol. 4, Party Systems and Cleavages (Delhi: Manohar Book Service, 1975)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ However, see Brass, Paul R., “Political Participation, Institutionalization, and Stability in India,” Government and Opposition, 4 (Winter 1969), 23–53 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Taylor and Herman, p. 29, and Blondel, p. 190.

¹² As in the Taylor and Herman study, all legislative structure variables are held constant during the entire period of a legislature between elections even though more than one government may form and terminate in the life of a single legislature and even though conditions inside the legislature itself may change between elections. In the case of governments that endure through more than one election, the value assigned to each independent variable is “a weighted average of its values in the periods before and after the election, the weights corresponding to the lengths of those periods.” Taylor and Herman, p. 29.

¹³ Ibid., pp. 30–31.

¹⁴ All three of these variables were first used systematically as measures of different types of party systems by Rae, Douglas W., The Political Consequences of Electoral Laws (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), Ch. 3Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Taylor and Herman, pp. 35–36.

¹⁶ It can be argued that the West European Communist parties, despite their revolutionary rhetoric, have also operated in terms of the rules of the parliamentary game and that they have been kept out of governments because of the real or alleged fears of their opponents concerning the dangers of Communist participation. Whatever the true explanation of the European situation, my point here is that the Indian Communist parties have played the parliamentary game and have not been totally excluded as coalition partners in state governments.

¹⁷ Taylor and Herman, p. 31.

¹⁸ Sartori, Giovanni, “European Politicai Parties: The Case of Polarized Pluralism,” in Political Parties and Political Development, ed. La Palombara, Joseph and Weiner, Myron (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 137–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “The Typology of Party Systems-Proposals for Improvement,” in Mass Politics: Studies in Political Sociology, ed. Allardt, Erik and Rokkan, Stein (New York: Free Press, 1970), pp. 322–52Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Dodd, p. 1110.

²⁰ Brass, Paul R., “Coalition Politics in North India,” American Political Science Review, 62 (12 1968), 1174–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²¹ For example, the five-party coalition government of Govind Narayan Singh in Madhya Pradesh in 1967–69 was classified as ideologically polarized because it contained Center elements (the BKD and defectors from the Congress) and parties on the Right (Jan Sangh) and on the Left (SSP) as well as a regional party, the KVD of the Rajmata of Gwalior. However, the 13-party coalition government of Ajoy Kumar Mukherjee in West Bengal in 1969–70 was classified as ideologically nonpolarized because all parties in the coalition were Center, Left, or regional parties, but none were parties of the Right.

²² On the Fourth Republic, see esp. MacRae, Chs. 4–7, and the interesting critique of MacRae's argument in Wood, David M., “Responsibility for the Fall of Cabinets in the French Fourth Republic, 1951–1955,” American Journal of Political Science, 17 (11 1973), 767–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ Epstein, Leon D., Political Parties in Western Democracies (New York: Praeger, 1967), 334–40Google Scholar.

²⁴ Candidates in Indian elections are required to pay a security deposit which they forfeit if they poll less than one-sixth of the vote in single-member constituencies and less than one-twelfth in double-member constituencies.

²⁵ It would, of course, be desirable to develop a formal indicator of intraparty factionalism in the Congress legislature parties and in Congress governments to correlate with duration, but the fluidity of factional alignments in the Congress is such that an indicator of this sort could be constructed only in approximate form and only after extensive documentary research.

²⁶ In assigning points to government terminations in this way, I have adapted an idea developed by Leon Hurwitz for classifying types of government formation in “An Index of Democratic Political Stability: A Methodological Note,” Comparative Political Studies, 4 (04 1971), 41–68 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the larger study of which this article is a part, I plan to apply Hurwitz's Index of Government Persistence to the Indian states as an alternative measure of government stability to that of duration in days.

²⁷ For analyses of the relationships between party systems and social structures in these three states, see Bailey, F. G., “Politics and Society in Orissa (India),” Advancement of Science, 19 (05 1962), 25–28 Google Scholar; Brass, Paul R., “Ethnic Cleavages and the Punjab Party System, 1952–1972,” in Party Systemsand Cleavages, pp. 7–69 Google Scholar; and Hardgrave, Robert L. Jr., “The Kerala Communists: Contradictions of Power,” in Radical Politics in South Asia, ed. Brass, Paul R. and Franda, Marcus F. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973), pp. 134–38Google Scholar.

²⁸ Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs, Committee on Defections: Proceedings of the Committee and Papers Circulated to the Members (New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1969), pp. 48–49 Google Scholar.

²⁹ Ibid., esp. pp. 67–73. See also Kashyap, Subhash C., The Politics of Defection: A Study of State Politics in India (Delhi: National Publishing House, 1969)Google Scholar.