Party organisation and the success of regional parties at the sub-national level in India.

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The primary aim of the ESRC post-doctoral fellowship is to consolidate my PhD research. The proposed research is based on a simple research question: why are regional parties successful in some parts of a country, but not others. The most common answer to this question is based on political and economic decentralisation and/or the presence of regionally-based ethnic cleavages. Existing research shows that when regions have regional parliaments with control over important political and economic issues, regional political elites are more likely to form regional parties and regional voters are more likely to vote for them. Similarly, others have argued that when regions have a strong regional identity, regional elites and voters are more likely to support regional parties. Acknowledging the importance of these explanations, I argue that an unhitherto explored explanation to the proposed research question is based on party organisation. I argue that when national parties give their regional branches autonomy, regional parties find it hard to succeed. This is because the regional branch is able to absorb any underlying regionalism present amongst the regional elites and voters. This is the case even if the region has political and economic authority over important issues, and/or a strong regional identity. To demonstrate that party organisation matters, I use empirical evidence and data from India, the world's largest democracy. India is also a good test case empirically and methodologically speaking. First, a study on regional party success is particularly relevant in India because close to 240 million citizens cast their votes for a regional party in 2014. Through my research, I aim to explain why some Indians vote for regional parties, where others do not. Methodologically speaking, India is a federal country with growing political and economic decentralisation for all the Indian states. Moreover, most Indian states are formed on the basis of a regional identity. Despite these characteristics, some Indian states are dominated by regional parties where others have political competition restricted to national parties. I argue that this variation across the Indian federation is because of the variation in the level of regional branch autonomy within the national parties. In regions where national parties have given autonomy to their regional branches, regional parties find it hard to succeed. In contrast, where none of the main national parties give autonomy to their regional branches, regional parties are more likely to succeed.There exists no data that systematically measures the level of regional branch autonomy within national parties in India. To this end, I began manually coding the level of regional branch autonomy within the two main national parties-the Congress Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-for two Indian states, namely Gujarat and Maharashtra. However, due to limitations of time, resources, and research skils, I was not able to complete the coding exercise during my PhD. The fellowship will allow me to complete the coding exercise for all the major Indian states in the post-1989 period. Unlike the manual coding exercise I undertook during my PhD, I wish to employ Quantitative Textual Analysis in R to code the level of regional branch autonomy. The automated coding exercise will result in a panel dataset of regional branch autonomy within the two national parties for the 15 Indian states in the post-1989 period. The dataset will then be used as a (1) primary dependent variable to understand why some national parties give more autonomy to their regional branches in some Indian states, but not others. (2) It will also be used a primary independent variable to see whether high regional branch autonomy for national parties at the regional level is causally related to less support for regional parties.