Kanchan Chandra

• New York University

This article asks why some Indian districts experience chronic Maoist violence while others do not. The answer helps to explain India's Maoist civil war, which is the product of the accumulation of violence in a few districts, as well as to generate a new hypothesis about the causes of civil war more generally. The authors argue that, other things...

This chapter proposes a definition of ethnic identity that captures the conventional classification of ethnic identities to a greater degree than the alternatives. The goal of proposing this definition is to create a conceptual foundation for causal theorizing about ethnic identity. Ethnic identities, according to this definition, are a subset of c...

Why does the activated ethnic demography of some countries to change while that of others remains stable? And if change can occur, what proportion of individuals in the population have the option to change? This chapter proposes a baseline model of short-term change in activated ethnic demography through electoral politics. It is based on the intui...

This chapter shows that an ethnic identity category as defined above can be reformulated as a combination of elements from a fixed set. Based on this simple reformulation, it proposes a new combinatorial framework for thinking about ethnic identity and ethnic identity change. This framework builds on one key property of ethnic identities: the short...

This article shows that even if we stipulate a single definition of both an ethnic group and an ethnic party, there are many reasonable indicators that can be used to classify parties as ethnic, which may generate different counts of ethnic parties. It then maps the range of indicators that can be used to classify parties as ethnic, shows how previ...

This article introduces a hypothesis predicting when we should see split-ticket voting in ‘patronage democracies’ derived from a model of strategic voting for ethnic parties. It supports the model based on an examination of the behaviour of Scheduled Caste voters in the north-Indian state of Uttar Pradesh across national and regional elections in 1...

Constructivism – the principal theoretical revolution in the study of ethnic identities over the past thirty years – has established that individuals have multiple ethnic options with a choice of which one to activate in any given context, and that the ethnic identities they activate can change over time, often endogenously to political and economi...

Most tests of hypotheses about the effects of “ethnicity” on outcomes use data or measures that confuse or conflate what are termed ethnic structure and ethnic practice. This article presents a conceptualization of ethnicity that makes the distinction between these concepts clear; it demonstrates how confusion between structure and practice hampers...

Since the publication of Horowitz's Ethnic Groups in Conflict, comparative political scientists have increasingly converged on their classification of ethnic identities. But there is no agreement on the definition that justifies this classification-and the definitions that individual scholars propose do not match their classifications. I propose a...

Ethnic divisions, according to empirical democratic theory, and commonsense understandings of politics, threaten the survival of democratic institutions. One of the principal mechanisms linking the politicization of ethnic divisions with the destabilization of democracy is the so-called outbidding effect. According to theories of ethnic outbid...

Why do some ethnic parties succeed in attracting the support of their target ethnic group while others fail? In a world in which ethnic parties flourish in both established and emerging democracies alike, understanding the conditions under which such parties rise and fall is of critical importance to both political scientists and policy makers. Dra...

Comments Welcome 1 We are grateful to David Laitin, who collaborated with Kanchan Chandra on early versions of this chapter and has contributed to many of the insights here; to Steve Ansolabehere, for valuable discussions and in several cases, written comments; and participants in LICEP (Laboratory in Comparative Ethnic Processes); the WIP (Work in...

This article sheds light on the game of politics, though she focuses on the relatively specific issue of how ethnic elites are most successfully absorbed into modern political parties. This is a tricky business, because it involves attracting new elites while reassuring incumbent ones that their positions are secure. The logic of this proposition i...

KANCHAN CHANDRA tracks the rising fortunes of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in North India from its inception in the early 1980s to its successes in the 1990s by charting its growing support among the Scheduled Castes. Critical to this development was the constituency that the BSP gained among middle-class members of the Scheduled Castes who had pr...

The presumption in the theoretical literature on ethnic mobilization is that voting for ethnic parties is a purely expressive act, driven by strong psychological attachments and not subject to cost-benefit calculations. Models of strategic voting, meanwhile, make no reference to the ethnic identity of voters and parties, and have been developed and...

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Abstract will be provided by author.

Ethnic violence is fast becoming the best studied of subjects within the theoretical literature on ethnic mobilization. Many of the theories of ethnic violence that we have so far have been developed from a small number of paradigmatic cases. Sinhala-Tamil violence in Sri Lanka, for instance, is the paradigmatic case for the theories of ethnic "out...

In multi-ethnic democracies, majority rule can be a form of alien rule for ethnic minorities. Thus, Serbs in Croatia preferred a state of their own to life under a Croat-dominated government, as did Tamils in Sri Lanka, Whites in South Africa, and Kurds in Iraq, to cite only a the many examples of minorities who have protested, and sought safeguard...