Introduction

In this essay, I use a new dataset I have collected on collective mobilization and collective violence in India from 1950 to 1995 to begin to sketch an answer to three questions. First, empirically I try to establish the patterns of reported ethnic and nonethnic mobilization and violence in India since the 1950s. Is it true that ethnic mobilization and violence in India have become more common, or are scholars such as Paul Brass (1997) correct when they argue that the perceived rise in ethnic mobilization and ethnic violence is merely due to our tendency to pay too much attention to ethnic conflict compared to other kinds of conflict, and to label events as “ethnic” when they are not? Second, is it true, as scholars such as Rabushka and Shepsle (1972) and Elster et al. (1998) have argued, that mobilization around ethnic identities is inherently more dangerous than other kinds of political mobilization? By “more dangerous,” I should make it clear that I am primarily concerned with the narrow question of whether ethnic mobilization is associated with deadly violence more than other kinds of political mobilization. Third, are some types of ethnic mobilization more damaging to the stability of the state than others? Is it true, for example, that linguistic claims are less dangerous than religious or other types of ethnic mobilization, as Laitin (1999) claims?

The systematic study of citizen-politician linkage mechanisms of accountability and responsiveness is challenging because we lack good comparative and historical data on both the exchanges involved, as well as on the non-clientelistic factors that might potentially also explain the political or economic outcomes in which we're interested. There are obvious reasons for voters and politicians to hide information on clientelistic exchanges: to deter competitors, to avoid social opprobrium, as well as to avoid prosecution. So in the absence of good data social scientists have been forced to rely on often-excellent qualitative studies on specific practices in individual countries, or on indirect quantitative tracers of such practices enabled by the idiosyncratic data opportunities in a single country.

The studies assembled in this book, as well as the Introduction, primarily speak to the theoretical questions of (1) how to conceptualize alternative citizen-politician linkage mechanisms in democratic polities and (2) how to explain the empirical variation in linkage practices across polities and parties as our dependent variable. Empirically, the studies rely on qualitative cross-national assessments (e.g., contributions by Kitschelt, Levitsky, Müller, and van de Walle), on unique subnational quantitative measures not available in a cross-national framework (such as in Magaloni, Diaz-Cayeros, and Estévez, Wilkinson, Lyne, or in Scheiner), or on observation-based narratives (such as Krishna, Chandra, or Levitsky). Given this state of affairs, we need to start thinking about how to make advances in empirical research on democratic linkage mechanisms beyond the status quo.

Since the 1970s, the “Third Wave” of democratic transitions has, by greatly enlarging the number and type of democracies, raised a host of new research questions on the dynamics of democratic accountability and responsiveness. After an initial period of scholarly attention to the process of regime transition, there has recently been a major effort to explain the origin and effects of democratic institutions, such as electoral laws, federalism structure, or presidential and parliamentary systems. After more than a decade's worth of research, however, it now seems that the explanatory power of formal democratic institutions for democratic process features is more limited than many had hoped. Party systems vary tremendously even among single member district plurality electoral systems. Furthermore, institutional arguments have little to say about the substantive alignments that rally citizens around rival contenders or the strategic appeals made by leading politicians in each camp.

One important area that has not received sufficient attention is the wide variation in patterns of linkages between politicians, parties and citizens. The political science literature has, since the 1950s, been dominated by the “responsible party government” model, the logic of which forms the basis of both rational choice theories (Downs 1957) as well as historical-comparative approaches (e.g., Lipset and Rokkan 1967). This model sees politics as the result of interaction of principals (citizens, voters) and agents (candidates for electoral office, elected officials), characterized by five essential ingredients.

When India attained independence in 1947, it was already in many respects a clientelistic polity. The British had strengthened their own colonial rule by providing land and other goods to important social groups and their leaders, and they also institutionalized ascriptive criteria such as caste and religion as authoritative ways for the state to allocate jobs, positions in state-funded educational establishments, and seats in parliamentary and provincial assemblies (Wilkinson 2004). The Congress Party, far from being an “external party” of the type characterized by Martin Shefter – one bent on cleaning up the mill of patronage – had itself been transformed by more than twenty years in control of the various provincial and local assemblies set up by the British after 1919 to quiet demands for independence. Congress's control of these assemblies, characterized by one historian as “enormous pools of patronage” (Washbrook 1973), meant that the party acted more like one of Shefter's internally mobilized parties – using the state administration and state patronage to build support and reward allies – than an external programmatic party. In Calcutta, the Congress used its control of the municipal corporation after 1923 to strengthen its position, so that by independence perhaps 70 percent of the corporation's staff were party workers or their family members (Weiner 1967: 328).The considerable spending power the local and provincial assemblies eventually controlled, combined with the prospect of even greater power when the British left, also attracted many members to Congress in the decade before independence whose primary concern was less ideological than material.

A full comparative test of the electoral explanation I have developed for explaining violence in India in the preceding chapters would require a blend of large-N research and case studies, together with detailed information on electoral competition, polarizing events, and ethnic violence in many countries since the 19th century. My goals in this chapter are more limited. My aim is to identify multiethnic states where we would expect increased political competition to lead to an increase in local ethnic polarization and then to examine how the level of government in charge of the police or army responds to this polarization and the threat of violence. When electoral competition increases in an ethnically divided society, do local politicians in close seats respond by organizing demonstrations and polarizing events in order to attract swing voters? If violence results from these mobilizations, how does the state respond? Does the state response depend as in India on the level of effective party competition in the state and on whether the state relies on the votes of the group doing the attacking or those being attacked?

I examine three cases where multiethnic societies moved from uncompetitive party systems to competitive systems in a relatively short space of time: 19th-century Ireland, postindependence Malaysia, and post-Communist Romania.

Social scientists often argue that we can explain variation in mass violence by focusing on the strength or weakness of state institutions. Neil Smelser's research on England, Mexico, and the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries, for example, finds that periods in which police corruption was rife, training and equipment were poor, and local political interference high were invariably accompanied by large increases in riots. James Tong's study of violence in Ming China found that riots occurred most often in peripheral areas where the effectiveness of the Chinese state was weakest. More recently, studies of collective mobilization and violence in places as diverse as Los Angeles, the former Soviet Union, and the former state of Yugoslavia have identified state capacity, and the impact it has on individuals' decision about whether to participate in violence, as a crucial factor in determining where and when violence takes place. DiPasquale and Glaeser, for example, draw on standard economic price theory to explain the 1992 Los Angeles riots, concluding that rioting was greatest in those places where the financial gains were highest, and the state's capacity to punish individual rioters weakest.