Kanchan Chandra
Biographic Data
| ID | 327443 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kanchan Chandra |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kanchan |
| FAMILY NAME | Chandra |
| SIGNATURE | CHANDRA K |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1835-3707 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 804 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Exchange: What Can We Learn from Two Decades of Everyday Nationalism?
In their landmark article on nationalism in the everyday, Jon E. Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss (2008a, 537) set out an ambitious research agenda which endeavored to observe “the actual practices through which ordinary people engage and enact (and ignore and deflect) nationhood and nationalism in the varied contexts of their everyday lives.” The authors’ focus on decentering elite perspectives and questions about the origins of nations in the stud…
The Future of Multiracial Democracy: Majoritarianism Without Majorities
By the paradox of "majoritarianism without majorities," the author argues that ethnic majoritarianism, in the form of nationalist movements and the institutionalization of majoritarian privilege, has become a defining feature of twenty-first-century democracy even though ethnic majorities do not exist as self-aware political communities. These majorities are merely census labels imposed on a conglomeration of minorities. This essay argues that th…
Building machines that learn and think with people
How Religious Are “Religious” Conflicts
Despite significant advances in our understanding of the politics of religious ideology and identity across time and space, scholars disagree on how to conceptualize “religious” conflicts and “religious” actors, and how to infer religious motivations from actors’ behavior. This Forum brings together scholars with diverse research agendas to weigh in on conceptual, methodological, and ethical questions surrounding the study of contemporary religio…
Why Ethnic Subaltern-Led Parties Crowd Out Armed Organizations: Explaining Maoist Violence in India
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 equal, the emergence of subaltern-led parties at the critical juncture before armed organizations en…
Caste, Representation, and Enduring Inequality
Although the majority of elected members of Parliament in India now come from subaltern categories, they belong to parties that are dominated by the Hindu upper castes
Democratic Dynasties: State, Party and Family in Contemporary Indian Politics
Dynastic politics, usually presumed to be the antithesis of democracy, is a routine aspect of politics in many modern democracies. This book introduces a new theoretical perspective on dynasticism in democracies, using original data on twenty-first-century Indian parliaments. It argues that the roots of dynastic politics lie at least in part in modern democratic institutions - states and parties - which give political families a leg-up in the ele…
Carter Johnson, Partition and Post-War Violence Case Study of Moldova and Pridnestrovie
Partition advocates argue that ethnic groups must be separated completely in order to prevent renewed violence but Moldova is an exception with its large “stay-behind” minority and a lack of renewed violence. This chapter uses Moldova to develop partition theory, presenting an institutionalized explanation that focuses on the interaction between state-building and minority collaboration in a post-war context. The chapter argues that strong state …
Books by Our Readers
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Constructivist theories of ethnic politics
Taking the possibility of change in ethnic identity into account, this book shows and dismantles the theoretical logics linking ethnic diversity to negative outcomes and processes such as democratic destabilisation, clientelism, riots and state collapse. Even more importantly, it changes the questions we can ask about the relationship between ethnicity, politics and economics
What is an ethnic party
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 previous questions raised in the study of ethnic parties can be better answered by some indicators than o…
Making Causal Claims About the Effect of “Ethnicity”
An investigation into the effects of which “ethnicity” may be a cause is among the fastest-growing research agendas in comparative politics today. But causal claims about the effect of ethnicity in the discipline have so far been made without reference to concepts. As comparative political scientists, we talk about what ethnicity does while saying little about what ethnic identity is . We agree roughly on which identities we classify as ethnic. B…
Patrons, Clients and Policies: Patterns of Democratic Accountability and Political Competition
Measuring Identity: A Guide for Social Scientists
The concept of identity has become increasingly prominent in the social sciences and humanities. Analysis of the development of social identities is an important focus of scholarly research, and scholars using social identities as the building blocks of social, political, and economic life have attempted to account for a number of discrete outcomes by treating identities as causal factors. The dominant implication of the vast literature on identi…
Why voters in patronage democracies split their tickets: Strategic voting for ethnic parties
Measuring the Effect of “Ethnicity
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 the ability to test theories; and it presents two new measures of ethnic practice—ECI (the ethnic c…
What Is Ethnic Identity and Does It Matter
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 definition that captures the conventional classification of ethnic identities in comparative politic…
Ethnic Parties and Democratic Stability
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 outbidding, the politicization of ethnic divisions inevitably gives rise to one or more ethnic parties. The eme…
Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India
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. Drawing on a study of variation in the performance of ethnic parties in India, this book builds a theor…
Ethnic Bargains, Group Instability, and Social Choice Theory
This article makes two arguments: first, it argues that theories connecting ethnic group mobilization with democratic bargaining are based, often unwittingly, on primordialist assumptions that bias them toward overestimating the intractability of ethnic group demands. Second, it proposes a synthesis of constructivist approaches to ethnic identity and social choice theory to show how we who study ethnic mobilization might build theories that rely …
Elite Incorporation in Multiethnic Societies
Research Article| September 01 2000 Elite Incorporation in Multiethnic Societies Kanchan Chandra Kanchan Chandra Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Asian Survey (2000) 40 (5): 836–865. https://doi.org/10.2307/3021179 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citati…
The Transformation of Ethnic Politics in India: The Decline of Congress and the Rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party in Hoshiarpur
The politics of ethnicity-caste, religion, and language-has been central to politics in twentieth-century India. However, as the dominant Indian National Congress declines in favor of a number of smaller parties, the manner in which ethnic identities are being invoked in the political arena is being transformed. The key aspect of this transformation is not, as it is usually understood, the replacement of a single multiethnic party with a collecti…
Problems and issues on child labour in India
What Is Ethnic Identity and Does It Matter
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 definition that captures the conventional classification of ethnic identities in comparative politic…
Ethnic Parties and Democratic Stability
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 outbidding, the politicization of ethnic divisions inevitably gives rise to one or more ethnic parties. The eme…
Measuring the Effect of “Ethnicity
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 the ability to test theories; and it presents two new measures of ethnic practice—ECI (the ethnic c…
Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India
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. Drawing on a study of variation in the performance of ethnic parties in India, this book builds a theor…
What is an ethnic party
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 previous questions raised in the study of ethnic parties can be better answered by some indicators than o…
Ethnic Bargains, Group Instability, and Social Choice Theory
This article makes two arguments: first, it argues that theories connecting ethnic group mobilization with democratic bargaining are based, often unwittingly, on primordialist assumptions that bias them toward overestimating the intractability of ethnic group demands. Second, it proposes a synthesis of constructivist approaches to ethnic identity and social choice theory to show how we who study ethnic mobilization might build theories that rely …
Why voters in patronage democracies split their tickets: Strategic voting for ethnic parties
The Transformation of Ethnic Politics in India: The Decline of Congress and the Rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party in Hoshiarpur
The politics of ethnicity-caste, religion, and language-has been central to politics in twentieth-century India. However, as the dominant Indian National Congress declines in favor of a number of smaller parties, the manner in which ethnic identities are being invoked in the political arena is being transformed. The key aspect of this transformation is not, as it is usually understood, the replacement of a single multiethnic party with a collecti…
Why Ethnic Subaltern-Led Parties Crowd Out Armed Organizations: Explaining Maoist Violence in India
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 equal, the emergence of subaltern-led parties at the critical juncture before armed organizations en…
Building machines that learn and think with people
How Religious Are “Religious” Conflicts
Despite significant advances in our understanding of the politics of religious ideology and identity across time and space, scholars disagree on how to conceptualize “religious” conflicts and “religious” actors, and how to infer religious motivations from actors’ behavior. This Forum brings together scholars with diverse research agendas to weigh in on conceptual, methodological, and ethical questions surrounding the study of contemporary religio…
Elite Incorporation in Multiethnic Societies
Research Article| September 01 2000 Elite Incorporation in Multiethnic Societies Kanchan Chandra Kanchan Chandra Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Asian Survey (2000) 40 (5): 836–865. https://doi.org/10.2307/3021179 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citati…
Problems and issues on child labour in India
Elite Incorporation in Multiethnic Societies
Research Article| September 01 2000 Elite Incorporation in Multiethnic Societies Kanchan Chandra Kanchan Chandra Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Asian Survey (2000) 40 (5): 836–865. https://doi.org/10.2307/3021179 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citati…
The Transformation of Ethnic Politics in India: The Decline of Congress and the Rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party in Hoshiarpur
The politics of ethnicity-caste, religion, and language-has been central to politics in twentieth-century India. However, as the dominant Indian National Congress declines in favor of a number of smaller parties, the manner in which ethnic identities are being invoked in the political arena is being transformed. The key aspect of this transformation is not, as it is usually understood, the replacement of a single multiethnic party with a collecti…
Ethnic Bargains, Group Instability, and Social Choice Theory
This article makes two arguments: first, it argues that theories connecting ethnic group mobilization with democratic bargaining are based, often unwittingly, on primordialist assumptions that bias them toward overestimating the intractability of ethnic group demands. Second, it proposes a synthesis of constructivist approaches to ethnic identity and social choice theory to show how we who study ethnic mobilization might build theories that rely …
Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India
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. Drawing on a study of variation in the performance of ethnic parties in India, this book builds a theor…
Ethnic Parties and Democratic Stability
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 outbidding, the politicization of ethnic divisions inevitably gives rise to one or more ethnic parties. The eme…
What Is Ethnic Identity and Does It Matter
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 definition that captures the conventional classification of ethnic identities in comparative politic…
Measuring the Effect of “Ethnicity
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 the ability to test theories; and it presents two new measures of ethnic practice—ECI (the ethnic c…
Making Causal Claims About the Effect of “Ethnicity”
An investigation into the effects of which “ethnicity” may be a cause is among the fastest-growing research agendas in comparative politics today. But causal claims about the effect of ethnicity in the discipline have so far been made without reference to concepts. As comparative political scientists, we talk about what ethnicity does while saying little about what ethnic identity is . We agree roughly on which identities we classify as ethnic. B…
Patrons, Clients and Policies: Patterns of Democratic Accountability and Political Competition
Measuring Identity: A Guide for Social Scientists
The concept of identity has become increasingly prominent in the social sciences and humanities. Analysis of the development of social identities is an important focus of scholarly research, and scholars using social identities as the building blocks of social, political, and economic life have attempted to account for a number of discrete outcomes by treating identities as causal factors. The dominant implication of the vast literature on identi…
Why voters in patronage democracies split their tickets: Strategic voting for ethnic parties
What is an ethnic party
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 previous questions raised in the study of ethnic parties can be better answered by some indicators than o…
Constructivist theories of ethnic politics
Taking the possibility of change in ethnic identity into account, this book shows and dismantles the theoretical logics linking ethnic diversity to negative outcomes and processes such as democratic destabilisation, clientelism, riots and state collapse. Even more importantly, it changes the questions we can ask about the relationship between ethnicity, politics and economics
Carter Johnson, Partition and Post-War Violence Case Study of Moldova and Pridnestrovie
Partition advocates argue that ethnic groups must be separated completely in order to prevent renewed violence but Moldova is an exception with its large “stay-behind” minority and a lack of renewed violence. This chapter uses Moldova to develop partition theory, presenting an institutionalized explanation that focuses on the interaction between state-building and minority collaboration in a post-war context. The chapter argues that strong state …
Books by Our Readers
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Democratic Dynasties: State, Party and Family in Contemporary Indian Politics
Dynastic politics, usually presumed to be the antithesis of democracy, is a routine aspect of politics in many modern democracies. This book introduces a new theoretical perspective on dynasticism in democracies, using original data on twenty-first-century Indian parliaments. It argues that the roots of dynastic politics lie at least in part in modern democratic institutions - states and parties - which give political families a leg-up in the ele…
Caste, Representation, and Enduring Inequality
Although the majority of elected members of Parliament in India now come from subaltern categories, they belong to parties that are dominated by the Hindu upper castes
Why Ethnic Subaltern-Led Parties Crowd Out Armed Organizations: Explaining Maoist Violence in India
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 equal, the emergence of subaltern-led parties at the critical juncture before armed organizations en…
How Religious Are “Religious” Conflicts
Despite significant advances in our understanding of the politics of religious ideology and identity across time and space, scholars disagree on how to conceptualize “religious” conflicts and “religious” actors, and how to infer religious motivations from actors’ behavior. This Forum brings together scholars with diverse research agendas to weigh in on conceptual, methodological, and ethical questions surrounding the study of contemporary religio…
The Future of Multiracial Democracy: Majoritarianism Without Majorities
By the paradox of "majoritarianism without majorities," the author argues that ethnic majoritarianism, in the form of nationalist movements and the institutionalization of majoritarian privilege, has become a defining feature of twenty-first-century democracy even though ethnic majorities do not exist as self-aware political communities. These majorities are merely census labels imposed on a conglomeration of minorities. This essay argues that th…
Building machines that learn and think with people
Exchange: What Can We Learn from Two Decades of Everyday Nationalism?
In their landmark article on nationalism in the everyday, Jon E. Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss (2008a, 537) set out an ambitious research agenda which endeavored to observe “the actual practices through which ordinary people engage and enact (and ignore and deflect) nationhood and nationalism in the varied contexts of their everyday lives.” The authors’ focus on decentering elite perspectives and questions about the origins of nations in the stud…
Political science (20 works) · Law (18 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Politics (15 works) · Ethnic group (14 works) · Law (11 works) · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies (11 works) · Political economy (9 works) · South Asian Studies and Conflicts (8 works) · Democracy (7 works)