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MINORITY GOVERNMENTS IN INDIA: The Puzzle of Elusive Majorities. Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series, vol. 19. By Csaba Nikolenyi. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. xvi, 175 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$125.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415-77826-8.
For the majority of its post-independent history, the Indian National Congress has largely governed New Delhi. Since 1989, however, no single party has been able to capture a parliamentary majority. A series of minority national governments, mostly ruled by enormous multiparty coalitions, have emerged in their place. This is a real puzzle given that India has a first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral regime which, following Duverger's Law, regularly produces single-party majority governments and two-party systems in other Westminsterstyle democracies. What explains this puzzling transformation in the world's largest democracy? Minority Governments in India presents a parsimonious original explanation, employing social choice theories and sophisticated regression analyses, to answer this important question. It makes several valuable contributions to our understanding of modern Indian politics, coalition governments and comparative electoral systems. Yet the argument leaves several questions unanswered that warrant greater attention.
The merits of the book are threefold. First, it presents an original explanation that integrates the Indian case within the wider, theoretically driven comparative literature, its principal goal. Nikolenyi argues that the...