Why Dominant Parties Decline: Evidence from India's Green

Why Dominant Parties Decline: Evidence from India’s Green Revolution* Aditya Dasgupta† Abstract Political scientists disagree whether economic growth strengthens or weakens dominant party regimes, the most common form of authoritarianism today. This paper reconciles competing arguments and develops a new theoretical explanation on the basis of a historical natural experiment: the impact of the green revolution on single-party dominance in India. In contrast to modernization theory’s focus on rising incomes, I argue that changes in the economy which provide incentives for regime outsiders to capture the state can contribute to democratization. Fixed effects and instrumental variable analyses of panel data on high-yielding variety (HYV) crop adoption connected to 22,000 state and 3,000 parlia- mentary election races between 1957 and 1987 suggest that the green revolution accounted for half of the dominant Congress party’s long-run decline. The democratizing effect of the green revolution was due to the increasing value of agricultural subsidies, which agricultural producers sought to capture by supporting agrarian opposition parties. By contrast, the green revolution caused no shift in the caste of elected MPs and income increases on their own resulting from rainfall shocks improved the dominant party’s election performance, ruling out modernization theory. The findings highlight a new class of explanations for why dominant parties decline. *For valuable feedback, I thank Sam Asher, Rikhil Bhavnani, Dipak Dasgupta, Daniel Esser, Devesh Kapur, John Marshall, Nathan Nunn, James Robinson, Prerna Singh, Steven Wilkinson, George Yin, Daniel Ziblatt, Adam Ziegfeld and seminar participants at Harvard, Yale, and the American Political Science Association Annual Meet- ing, 2013. For financial support I thank the US-India Fulbright Scholar Program and IQSS. All errors are my own. †PhD Candidate, Department of Government, Harvard University. 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138. Website: http://scholar.harvard.edu/adasgupta. Email: [email protected]. 1 1 Introduction Dominant party regimes – political systems in which a single party monopolizes political power despite competetive elections – are the most common form of authoritarianism today (Mag- aloni and Kricheli, 2010).1 A growing literature recognizes that competitive authoritarian and dominant party regimes are viable regime types in their own right as opposed to “halfway houses" on the path between authoritarianism and democracy (Brownlee, 2007; Levitsky and Way, 2010; Schedler, 2006). Given the prevalence and durability of dominant party regimes, the puzzle of of when and how dominant parties decline is among the most pressing in political science. Political scientists agree that economic growth plays a crucial role in dominant party survival and decline (e.g. Pempel (1990)). However, political scientists have suggested two directly opposing logics. On the one hand, some argue that economic growth can strengthen dominant parties by en- hancing their performance-based legitimacy (Huntington, 1991; Reuter and Gandhi, 2011). On the other hand, an influential strand of scholarship loosely based around modernization theory suggests that economic growth has a positive effect on democratization (Boix and Stokes, 2003; Lipset, 1959), and can reduce the effectiveness of clientelism (Dixit and Londregan, 1996; Robinson and Verdier, 2013), an electoral strategy upon which dominant parties are especially reliant (Greene, 2007; Magaloni, 2006). Cross-national empirical evidence on the matter is generally inconclusive.2 However, two stylized facts are clear, providing a motivation for the present study. First, dominant parties have proven to be extremely durable across the income spectrum, ranging, for example, from 1The literature sometimes makes an additional distinction between “authoritarian" dominant party regimes versus “democratic" dominant party regimes. As the distinction between authoritarian and democratic dominant party regimes is non-central to the argument made in the paper, I refer to dominant party regimes as a whole. 2Greene (2010) finds that across countries short run economic growth has a positive effect on authoritarian dominant party vote share but that per capita income levels have a negative impact in the long run. Reuter and Gandhi (2011) find that economic growth decreases the probability of elite defections from hegemonic parties but that per capita income levels have no effect. Moreover, serious concerns about endogeneity bedevil cross-national correlations between income levels and democratization (Acemoglu et al., 2008). 2 the Congress party which ruled for roughly 40 years in low-income India, to the PRI which ruled for roughly 70 years in middle-income Mexico, to the LDP which ruled high-income Japan for over five decades. Second, despite significant variation across settings in income levels, episodes of economic growth in each of these settings have corresponded to major periods of democratization. Magaloni (2006) argues that rising incomes and urbanization in Mexico contributed to the rise of the major oppposition party, PAN. Similarly, it has been argued that Japan’s ‘economic miracle’ contributed to the emergence of a multi-party system. This paper makes the case that agricultural economic growth due to the green revolution played a pivotal role in the decline of single-party dominance in India. This paper develops a new theory of when and how dominant parties decline. It argues that changes in the economy which provide incentives for regime outsiders to mobilize politically in order to capture the state contribute to democratization. The argument provides a new theoretical explanation for how economic growth may contribute to dominant party decline and democratization, in a way that differs entirely from modernization theory. It clarifies puzzling cross-national empirical patterns by showing that while income increases on their own are un- likely to lead to democratization, economic growth can contribute to dominant party decline through an alternative channel – incentives for opposition mobilization – that the existing literature has overlooked. This argument is developed and tested in the context of the historical decline of single-party dominance in India, the world’s largest democracy. India is a crucial and dramatic case for un- derstanding why dominant parties decline. Though India successfully maintained democratic electoral institutions in the decades following independence in 1947, the “dark side" of this suc- cess was that it was achieved on the basis of electoral dominance by a single party, the Indian National Congress, which won all national elections for three decades continuously until losing power for the first time in 1977. Over the course of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the Congress party gradually lost its political monopoly in state-level elections and then, by the 1990s, in 3 national-level elections as well. Today, state- and national-level politics in India are character- ized by highly competitive, indeed fragmented, multi-party political competition. To investigate the role played by economic growth in this transition, this paper analyzes a historical natural experiment: the massive increase in agricultural productivity due to the introduction of high-yielding variety (HYV) crops to India in the late 1960s, a transformation com- monly known as the “green revolution". Building on existing scholarship (Brass, 1980; Hasan, 1989b; Jaffrelot, 2003; Rudolph and Rudolph, 1987; Varshney, 1998), this paper contends that the green revolution played an important role in the decline of single-party dominance in India. However, it adds to existing scholarship in three ways. First, it develops a systematic theoretical account of competing channels through which the green revolution may have contributed to dominant party decline, each corresponding to a distinct theory of how economic growth con- tributes to democratization. In particular, it differentiates an implicit version of modernization theory based upon rising incomes that is widespread in the historical literature from an alternative, and I argue more compelling, theory which highlights capture of increasingly valuable state-controlled resources as a motive for opposition mobilization and democratization. Sec- ond, it provides empirical evidence for the causal effect of HYV crop adoption on weakening single-party dominance in India, using fixed effects and instrumental variable identification strategies based on sub-national variation in the adoption of HYV crops. Third, it tests competing theoretical channels for this democratizing effect, utilizing a variety of detailed subnational historical agricultural and political data. Theoretically, this paper identifies two plausible channels through which the green revolution may have contributed to dominant party decline. The first is an income effect, the channel typically posited by modernization theory. Since the Congress party sustained support in rural areas largely through clientelism and machine politics (Bailey, 1970; Weiner, 1967), the green revolution may have weakened the Congress party by raising incomes among farmers and lower-caste voters, making clientelism less effective (Dixit and Londregan, 1996; Robinson 4 and Verdier, 2013). It suggests as a more plausible alternative a second potential channel, a mobilization effect. Since the introduction of highly productive and input responsive HYV

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