The Patronage Network: Broker Power, Populism, and Democracy in India

As late as the mid-1960s, Indian democracy still seemed remarkably stable in comparison to almost any other former colony. For nearly 20 years after independence, the Congress party maintained stability by distributing patronage through its pyramidal network of brokers. But within a few short years, this clientelistic party system descended into crisis. The Congress party lost control of half of India's major states in 1967, and in 1969 split along factional lines into two distinct successor parties. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi then remade herself as a populist and took on the old elites. Challenged in turn by new populist forces she eventually suspended democracy itself. The contrasting stability of India's patronage democracy in the 1950s and 1960s and the sudden crisis that followed remains a puzzle that no one has fully resolved. Nor is this paradoxical process unique to India. Seemingly consolidated patronage democracies in Venezuela, Colombia, and elsewhere have experienced a comparably swift descent into party system instability and even populist authoritarianism. How can we explain this link between patronage democracy, party system crisis, and populism?;In patronage democracies, regime legitimacy is fundamentally tied to the distribution of material rewards, rather than to ideology, identity, or some other factor. As a result, party system stability depends on maintaining the vertical exchange of patronage in return for political support. Such party systems can be highly stable over time. Politicians act as brokers in the system, mediating between state and society in the provision of public goods. National parties gain political capital, and the system remains stable, as long as those subnational brokers are loyal to the national party leadership itself. However, where these political brokers are not loyal to the national leadership, the normal exchange of votes for goods under patronage democracy breaks down. Because it precipitates a conflict between center and periphery over political credit for the distribution of patronage, the division of government control between different parties at the national and subnational levels, or government incoherence, is thus highly destabilizing. Incoherence is made possible by the decentralization of political authority, as it creates the opportunity structure for party factions to break away and to come to power at the subnational level in a way not possible in more centralized systems. Government incoherence causes the patronage network linking center and periphery to become fragmented. This in turn leads to a breakdown of the clientelistic state-society linkage mechanism, and to a fundamental crisis of legitimacy for the national party system. Such party system crises open up the possibility of populist, anti-systemic alternatives. Populists thrive precisely because they run against the discredited status quo party-system.;This theoretical model is tested using a multi-level, mixed-method research design. First, it employs detailed qualitative and quantitative analyses of Indian political development from the late colonial period to the onset of the authoritarian Emergency in 1975. These sections rely on detailed process tracing to tease out the order of events and use a new dataset on the stability of the Indian party system assembled for this dissertation to conduct a series of quantitative tests. As India became de facto more decentralized with Jawaharlal Nehru's death in 1964s, Congress factions began to break away. The resulting incoherence of national and subnational government precipitated a crisis of the party system. This in turn prefigured Mrs. Gandhi's conflict with subnational political elites in the late 1960s, her populist turn in the 1970s, and eventually the breakdown of democracy in 1975.;Second, to test the external validity of the theory, the dissertation includes cross national quantitative and qualitative evidence from Latin America. This section tests the claim that the decentralization of political authority in the context of patronage democracy makes party system instability and populism more likely. Again, the autonomy of subnational political brokers proves to be a highly robust postdictor of national-subnational party system incoherence, national party system collapse, and populist success.