Title: Terrorism and Party Systems in the States of India
Abstract: Abstract The incidence of domestic terrorism varies dramatically across the states of India. This study demonstrates that important state-level differences in political party systems help to explain different levels of terrorist activity within the Indian states. Analysis of statistical data on terrorist attacks as well as other political, social, and macroeconomic indicators of the twenty-seven Indian states and the Delhi municipality from 1998 to 2006, determines that Indian states characterized by multiparty electoral competition, a diffusion of legislative seat distribution among parties, and minority party government are more likely to experience terrorist attacks than states with stable, two-party systems and majority party rule. These party system features increase the likelihood that terrorism will occur because they nurture the political conditions under which terrorism is likely to flourish and because they impair government ability to craft coherent and effective responses to terrorism. James A. Piazza is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His published work has appeared in the Journal of Politics, International Studies Quarterly, Terrorism and Political Violence, and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. The author wishes to thank John Szmer, Jim Walsh, Joe Young, Aaron Hoffman, Bethany Lacina, and the three anonymous manuscript referees for their comments and suggestions on this piece. Notes ∗For incidents 1 Dipak K. Gupta, "The Naxalites and the Maoist Movement in India: Birth, Demise and Reincarnation," Democracy and Security 3, no. 2 (2007): 157–88. 2 Kanti P. Bajpai, Roots of Terrorism (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2002); Vivek Chadha, Low Intensity Conflicts in India: An Analysis (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005); Gupta, "The Naxalites and the Maoist Movement in India"; Chandrika Singh, Northeast India: Politics and Insurgency (New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2004); Ashish Sonal, Terrorism and Insurgency in India: A Study of the Human Element (New Delhi: Lancer Publishers Ltd., 1994). 3 Bajpai, Roots of Terrorism; Singh, Northeast India; Lawrence E. Cline, "The Insurgency Environment in Northeast India," Small Wars and Insurgencies 17, no. 2 (2006): 126-47; Sonal, Terrorism and Insurgency in India; Ashutosh Varshney, Civic Life and Ethnic Conflict: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 4 Cline, "The Insurgency Environment in Northeast India"; Singh, Northeast India. 5 Chadha, Low Intensity Conflicts in India; Sonal, Terrorism and Insurgency in India. 6 Bajpai, Roots of Terrorism. 7 Pratul Ahuja and Rajat Ganguly, "The Fire Within: Naxalite Insurgency Violence in India," Small Wars and Insurgencies 18, no. 2 (2007): 249–74; Bajpai, Roots of Terrorism. 8 Sandy Gordon, "Policing Terrorism in India," Crime, Law and Social Change 50, nos. 1–2 (2008): 111-24; Singh, Northeast India; Sonal, Terrorism and Insurgency in India. 9 Shaun Gregory, "The ISI and the War on Terrorism," Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 30, no. 12 (2007): 1013-31; Gupta, "The Naxalites and the Maoist Movement in India"; Singh, Northeast India; Sonal, Terrorism and Insurgency in India. 10 Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India's Growing Crisis of Governability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 11Sanjib Baruah, Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005); Sumit Ganguly, "Explaining the Kashmir Insurgency: Political Mobilization and Institutional Decay," International Security 21, no. 2 (1996): 76–107; Kohli, Democracy and Discontent; Lloyd Rudolph and Suzanne Hoeber Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Steven Wilkinson, "India, Consociation Theory and Ethnic Violence," Asian Survey 40, no. 5 (2000): 767-91; Steven I. Wilkinson, Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 12 Larry Diamond, Juan Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, Democracy in Developing Countries: Latin America (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1989); Robert H. Dix, "Democratization and the Institutionalization of Latin American Political Parties," Comparative Political Studies 24 (January1992): 488–511; Edward Gibson, Class and Conservative Parties: Argentina in Comparative Perspective (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968); Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully, Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Dietrich Rueshmeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 13Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, James D. Morrow, Randolph M. Silverson, and Alastair Smith, "Political Institutions, Political Survival and Policy Success," in Governing for Prosperity, ed. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Hilton L. Root (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 59–84; Pradeep Chhibber and Irfan Nooruddin, "Do Party Systems Count? The Number of Parties and Government Performance in the Indian States," Comparative Political Studies 37, no.2 (2004): 152-87; Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini, "The Size and Scope of Government: Comparative Politics with Rational Politicians," European Economic Review 43 (April1999): 699–735. 14 Here and throughout the paper I adopt a more inclusive consideration of "party system" than what is traditionally employed by Sartori, Cox, and others. The number of significant political parties that contest elections and are represented in legislatures is usually codified into two types: two-party systems verses multiparty systems. Because I want to consider independently the relationship between two-party and multiparty systems and terrorism and the electoral outcomes and resulting legislative consequences in the Indian states, I separate out the number of significant parties that contest elections, the concentration of the vote plurality obtained by the top party, the concentration of seats in the assemblies, and the occurrence of minority party government. See Gary Cox, "Centripetal and Centrifugal Incentives in Electoral Systems," American Journal of Political Science 34, no. 4 (1990): 903–35; Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 15 Selig Harrison, India: The Most Dangerous Decades (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960); Varshney, Civic Life and Ethnic Conflict. Though, as noted by Kohli in Democracy and Discontent, communitarian strife is only one contributor to India's governability challenges in addition to corruption and weak political institutions. 16 Octavio N. Amorim and Gary Cox, "Electoral Institutions, Cleavage Structures, and the Number of Parties," American Journal of Political Science 41 (1997):149-74; V.O. Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949); Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, "Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments," in Party Systems and Voter Alignments, ed. Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan (New York: Free Press, 1967), 1–64; Peter Ordeshook and Olga Shvetsova, "Ethnic Heterogeneity, District Magnitude and the Number of Parties," American Journal of Political Science 38 (1994): 100–23. 17 For Chhibber and Nooruddin's longitudinal study, see Chhibber and Nooruddin, "Do Party Systems Count?" On key social cleavages, see Pradeep Chhibber and John R. Petrocik, "The Puzzle of Indian Politics: Social Cleavages and the Indian Party System," British Journal of Political Science 19, no. 2 (1989):191–210. It bears mentioning, though, that in their seminal work, "Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments," Lipset and Rokkan limit their argument that social cleavages explain the development of political parties and voter blocs to Western European countries. They specifically identified four main cleavages: the center verses periphery cleavage, the secular verses religious or traditional cleavage, the capital verses labor cleavage, and the urban verses rural. Chhibber and Petrocik note the limited geographical application of the original articulation of social cleavage theory and modify it in their study of India, a non-Western society. 18 Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, Silverson, and Smith assign the term "public goods" to those that are widely targeted and "private" or "club" goods to those that are narrowly targeted. Bueno de Mesquita, et al., "Political Institutions." 19 Bueno de Mesquita, et al., "Political Institutions," 64. 20 Persson and Tabellini, "The Size and Scope of Government." 21 Cox, "Centripetal and Centrifugal Incentives in Electoral Systems." 22 Sartori, Parties and Party Systems. On "polarized pluralism," Siaroff argues that this overlaps with Cox's conception of centrifugal incentives in multiparty systems that lead parties to adopt more extreme party platforms. Alan Siaroff, "The Fate of Centrifugal Democracies: Lessons from Consociational Theory and System Performance," Comparative Politics 32, no. 3 (2000): 317-32. Cox, "Centripetal and Centrifugal Incentives in Electoral Systems." 23 Joshua Muravchik links the mainstreaming of extremist political discourse to the increased frequency of terrorism in a country in non-democratic societies, particularly in the Arab world. Joshua Muravchik, "Freedom and the Arab World," The Weekly Standard 31 (December 2001). 24 Chhibber and Nooruddin, "Do Party Systems Count?" 162. 25 V. Herman and D. Sanders, "The Stability and Survival of Governments in Western Democracies," Acta Politica 12 (1977): 346–77; Mainwaring and Scully, Building Democratic Institutions; Sartori, Parties and Party Systems; P. Warwick, "The Durability of Coalition Governments in Parliamentary Democracies," Comparative Political Studies 11 (1979): 464–98. 26 Gary Cox and Matthew D. McCubbins, "The Institutional Determinants of Economic Policy Outcomes," in Presidents Parliaments and Policy, ed. Stephen Haggard and Matthew D. McCubbins (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 21–63; Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 27 Key work on the effects of party systems on fiscal policy outcomes include Thomas R. Cusack, "Partisan Politics and Public Finance: Changes in Public Spending in the Industrialized Democracies, 1955–1989," Public Choice 91, nos. 3–4 (1997): 375–95; Sergio Fabbrini, "Presidents, Parliaments and Good Government," Journal of Democracy 6, no. 3 (1995): 128–38; Bj⊘rn Volkerink and Jakob de Haan, "Fragmented Government Effects on Fiscal Policy: New Evidence," Public Choice 109, nos. 3–4 (2001): 221–42. 28 Sartori, Parties and Party Systems. 29 Chhibber and Nooruddin, "Do Party Systems Count?" 30 Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 31 Todd Sandler, "On the Relationship Between Democracy and Terrorism," Terrorism and Political Violence 12, no. 2 (1995): 97–122. 32 Charles Brockett, "Measuring Political Violence and Land Inequality in Latin America," American Political Science Review 86, no. 1 (1992): 168–76. 33 Amaresh Bagchi, "India," Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific: Fiscal Decentralization and the Mobilization and Use of National Resources for Development (Bangkok: ESCAP, 1991), 97–128; A.P. Barnabas and O.P. Bohra, Finances of the Panchayati Raj Institutions: Case Studies (New Delhi: National Institute of Public Finances and Policy, 1995); Askok K. Lahiri, "Sub-National Public Finance in Indiak," Economic and Political Weekly 35 (2000): 1539–49. 34 Farrukh Hakeem, "The Emergence of Modern Indian Policing: From Manasabdary to Constabulary," in Comparative Policing: The Struggle for Democratization, ed. M.R. Haberfeld and Ibrahim Cerrah (New York: Sage, 2007), 169-82; Wilkinson, Votes and Violence. 35 Eban Kaplan and Jayshree Bajoria, "Counterterrorism in India," Council on Foreign Relations Backgrounder (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 27 November 2008); Carin Zissis, "Terror Groups in India," press release, Council on Foreign Relations, 1 December 2008. 36 GlobalSecurity.org, "Andhra Pradesh, the Naxalite Movement," (2008), http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/naxalite.htm 37R.K. Ragavan, "The Indian Police: Problems and Prospects," Publius: The Journal of Federalism 33, no. 4 (2003): 119–33. 38 Hakeem, "The Emergence of Modern Indian Policing"; N.S. Jamwal, "Counter Terrorism Strategy," Strategic Analysis 27, no. 1 (2003): 56–78. 39 "India Resurrects Plans for Counter Terrorism Agency after Latest Bombings," The Times, 28 July 2008. 40 In their quantitative survey of Indian state-level party systems from 1967 to 2001, Pradeep Chhibber and Geetha Murali produce a similar picture of cross-state diversity: 38 percent of states had two-party systems, 27 percent were three-party systems, 20 percent had two-and-a-half-party systems, and 10 percent had one-party systems. Pradeep Chhibber and Geetha Murali, "Duvergerian Dynamics in the Indian States: Federalism and the Number of Parties in State Assembly Elections," Party Politics 12, no. 1 (2006): 5–34. 41 Chhibber and Nooruddin, "Do Party Systems Count?" 175, 179. 42 On caste-based terrorism, see Gupta, "The Naxalites and the Maoist Movement in India." 43 Ibid. 44 From 1983 to 2004, Andhra Pradesh had ten chief ministers, four of which lasted a year or less in office. Moreover, control of the state government changed hands between Congress and Telgu Dessam four times during that period, and for the Nadendla Bhaskara Rao administration, that occurred once after only thirty-one days in office from 16 August–16 September 1983. See K. Srinivasulu and Prakash Sarangi, "Political Realignments in Post-NTR Andhra Pradesh," Economic and Political Weekly 34, nos. 34–35 (1999): 2449–58. 45 "Annual Casualties of Left-Wing Extremist Violence 1968–2003," Andhra Pradesh Data Sheets, South Asia Terrorism Portal, http://www.satp.org. 46 Ahuja and Ganguly, "The Fire Within." 47 Gupta, "The Naxalites and the Maoist Movement in India." 48 "States of India Since 1947," World Statesman, http://www.worldstatesmen.org/India_states.html. 49 Wilkinson points to elections in the Indian state of Gujarat in 2002 to illustrate this counter-intuitive phenomenon in addition to those found in other countries—the Romanian national elections of 1990, electoral campaigns from 1989 to 2002 by Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, elections in the American South during the Jim Crow era, Stormont elections in Northern Ireland in the early 19th century, and state elections in Malaysia in 1969. Wilkinson, Votes and Violence, 6, 138. 50 G. Bingham Powell, "Party Systems and Political System Performance: Voting Participation, Government Stability and Mass Violence in Contemporary Democracies," The American Political Science Review 75, no. 4 (1981): 861–79. 51 To this point, he details the case of Benin in the 1960s. Donald L. Horrowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 52 I wish to thank John Szmer for raising this theoretical possibility. 53 Note that this is reflected in the operational definition of terrorism used to construct the database of terrorist incidents that was used in this study, as described in the analysis section. 54 The Terrorism Knowledge Base data was published online in open-access format until fall 2008, when it was formally put in process to be merged with the Global Terrorism Database maintained by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, www.start.umd.edu. However, all TKB-derived data on terrorist incidents used in this study is available from the author upon request. 55 Annual Country Reports on Terrorism, 22 USC Sec. 2656f (d)(2) (2008), http://uscode.house.gov/uscode-cgi/fastweb.exe?getdoc+uscview+t21t25+2562+0++'22%20USC%20Sec.%202656f'. 56 Available from the author upon request. a MIPT: Terrorism Knowledge Database, www.tkb.org. b Derived from Election Commission of India, "Statistical Reports of Assembly Elections" (various years), http://eci.gov.in/StatisticalReports/ElectionStatistics.asp. c Derived from Census of India, "Population Projections for India and States" (New Delhi: Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, 1991 and 2001). d V.P. Menon, Integration of Indian States (New Delhi: Sangam Books Ltd, 1999). e Derived from Census of India "Population Projections for India and States" (New Delhi: Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, 1991 and 2001). f Derived from B. Mallikarjun, "Indian Multilingualism, Language Policy and the Digital Divide," Language in India 4, no. 4 (April 2004); S. Iyer, Demography and Religion in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 57 Laura Dugan, Gary LaFree, and Heather Fogg, "A First Look at Domestic and International Global Terrorism Events, 1970–1997," in Intelligence and Security Informatics, ed. S. Mehrotra (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2006), 407–19; Bruce Hoffman and Donna K. Hoffman, "The Rand - St. Andrews Chronology of International Terrorism 1994," Terrorism and Political Violence 7, no. 4 (1995): 178–229. ∗p <.05 ∗∗p <.01 ∗∗∗p <.000 58 Joe Eyerman, "Terrorism and Democratic States: Soft Targets or Accessible Systems," International Interactions 24, no. 2 (1998): 151–70. 59 Alberto Abadie, "Poverty, Political Freedom and the Roots of Terrorism," American Economic Review 96, no. 2 (2006): 50–56; James A. Piazza, "Rooted in Poverty? Terrorism, Poor Economic Development and Social Cleavages," Terrorism and Political Violence 18, no. 1 (2006): 159–77. 60 One anonymous reviewer of this manuscript pointed out the handful of recent theoretical studies linking terrorist group fragmentation—particularly divisions between moderates or political wings of movements and radicals or factions rejecting political negotiation—with the level of violence wrought by terrorist campaigns and suggested that a control measuring group fragmentation or competition be inserted into the models. See Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, "Conciliation, Counterterrorism and Patterns of Terrorist Violence," International Organization 59, no. 1 (2005): 145–67; Andrew H. Kydd and Barbara F. Walter, "Sabotaging the Peace: The Politics of Religious Violence," International Organization 56, no. 2 (2002): 263–96; Kevin Siqueria, "Political and Militant Wings within Dissident Movements and Organizations," Journal of Conflict Resolution 49, no. 2 (2005): 218–36. When a control measuring group fragmentation—operationalized-using data from the Terrorist Organization Profiles managed by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START)— was included in the models, one of the previously significant independent variables, Number of Competitive Parties Contesting Elections, loses its significance. Results for the other three independent variables remain the same. In all model iterations, the group fragmentation variable is a significant, positive predictor of terrorist attacks, in line with the literature's expectations. In the changed model, loss of statistical significance is due to a shift in the point estimate toward zero rather than an increase in robust standard error. This may suggest that the statistical models of the study are qualified by unobserved heterogeneity. I leave that open to the reader's interpretation but caution that controlling from group fragmentation in this particular study may be inappropriate. In the Indian case it is often difficult to distinguish true fragmentation of terrorist groups in the event count databases from instances of use of multiple aliases and attack attribution errors. This is a particularly acute problem for groups operating in Jammu and Kashmir, Assam, and Mizoram. Also, controlling for group fragmentation is not yet a standard practice in terrorism research, and therefore cannot be inserted into the model without sufficient theoretical treatment of arguments for and against, injecting in the process a second set of hypotheses that would be better addressed in a separate study. ∗p <.05 ∗∗ p <.01 ∗∗∗p <.000. 61 Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies. 62 James A. Piazza, "Incubators of Terror: Do Failed and Failing States Promote Transnational Terrorism?" International Studies Quarterly 52, no. 3 (2008): 469-88; Robert I. Rotberg, "Failed States, Collapsed, Weak States: Causes and Indicators." in State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror, ed. Robert I. Rotberg (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003); Ray Takeyh and Nikolas Gvosdev, "Do Terrorist Networks Need a Home?" The Washington Quarterly 25, no. 3 (2002): 97–108.
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-02-26
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 23
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