State Formation and Ideological Conflict in Multiethnic Countries

The standard narrative of what defines an ideological conflict for electoral politics is not applicable to multiethnic countries like India. We develop two alternative ideological scales, the politics of statism and the politics of recognition, which we argue frame the Indian party system. Debates around class conflict, and about divisions between church and state, cities and rural areas, and the center and the periphery, were less central to the formation of the Indian state than were the state’s role in development and its efforts to accommodate marginalized groups. An ideological divide should not merely be the province of a political elite but should also be stable over time—it must be found in partisan differences across decades and there must be a mechanism by which the ideas associated with this divide are transmitted from the elite to the voters.

Class conflict · Development economics · Economic system · Economics · Elite · Ideology · Narrative · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · Statism · Gender Studies · Law · Social and Economic Development in India · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies