Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in
India. By Kanchan Chandra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004. 368p. $80.00.
In the post-9/11 world where the “clash of
civilizations” has moved beyond classroom debates to the public
realm, it is refreshing, and challenging, to see a study that does not
give ethnicity an easy ride. The title of this book is slightly
misleading, though, because even while it concedes that appeals for
political support on the basis of ethnic categories based on
“race, caste, tribe or religion” (p. 2) are frequently
made, sometimes with considerable success, it asserts that such tactics
do not always succeed. When they do, it is not necessarily because of
their putative appeal to sentiments but, instead, because both ethnic
candidates and their supporters, rather than being swayed by appeals to
their nonrational selves, are actually driven by sophisticated
calculations of expected gain. Their utility calculus takes the size of
the ultimate prize as well as the probability of winning it into
account when they choose to align themselves with one set of
politicians as opposed to another. Kanchan Chandra's parsimonious
and general model explains why ethic parties in India, riding on Hindu
or, for that matter, Tamil nationalism, succeed in some contexts but
not in others.