Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-cnmwb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-20T17:20:16.888Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Technological Change and Political Turnover: The Democratizing Effects of the Green Revolution in India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2018

ADITYA DASGUPTA
ADITYA DASGUPTA*
Affiliation:
University of California, Merced
*
Aditya Dasgupta is an Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California, Merced, School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts, 5200 North Lake Road, Merced, CA 95343, USA (adasgupta3@ucmerced.edu).
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Can technological change contribute to political turnover? Influential theories suggest that technological change represents a form of creative destruction that can weaken incumbents and strengthen outsiders, leading to political turnover. This paper investigates a large-scale historical natural experiment: the impact of the green revolution on single-party dominance in India. Drawing on a theoretical framework based on models of contests, this paper argues that high-yielding variety (HYV) crops strengthened the incentives and capacity of a politically excluded group, in this case agricultural producers, to seek greater political representation. Exploiting the timing of the introduction of HYV crops, together with district-level variation in suitability for the new crop technology, instrumental variables analyses show that the green revolution played a pivotal role in the rise of agrarian opposition parties and decline of single-party dominance. The findings support theories linking technological change to political turnover, with important implications for the political economy of democratization.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 112 , Issue 4 , November 2018 , pp. 918 - 938
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I thank Volha Charnysh, Dipak Dasgupta, Daniel de Kadt, Devesh Kapur, Tesalia Rizzo, James Robinson, Prerna Singh, Sandip Sukhtankar, Pavithra Suryanarayan, Steven Wilkinson, George Yin, Daniel Ziblatt, Adam Ziegfeld; seminar participants at the Historical Political Economy Working Group, UC-Berkeley Contemporary India Politics Seminar, Harvard Economic History Workshop, Yale Conference on History and Politics, University of Pennsylvania Comparative Politics Workshop, and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and three anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback. Replication files are available on the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PSGCJH.

References

REFERENCES

Acemoglu, Daron, and Robinson, James A.. 2006. “Economic Backwardness in Political Perspective.” American Political Science Review 100 (1): 115–31.Google Scholar
Acemoglu, Daron, Johnson, Simon, and Robinson, James A.. 2005. “The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth.” The American Economic Review 95 (3): 546–79.Google Scholar
Acharya, Avidit, Blackwell, Matthew, and Sen, Maya. 2016. “The Political Legacy of American Slavery.” The Journal of Politics 78 (3): 621–41.Google Scholar
Angrist, Joshua D., and Pischke, Jörn-Steffen. 2008. Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricist's Companion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Ansell, Ben, and Samuels, David. 2010. “Inequality and Democratization: A Contractarian Approach.” Comparative Political Studies 43 (12): 1543–74.Google Scholar
Bates, Robert H. 1974. “Ethnic Competition and Modernization in Contemporary Africa.” Comparative Political Studies 6 (4): 457–84.Google Scholar
Boix, Carles. 2015. Political Order and Inequality. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Brass, Paul R. 1965. Factional Politics in an Indian State: The Congress Party in Uttar Pradesh. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Brass, Paul R. 1980. “The Politicization of the Peasantry in a North Indian State.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 7 (4): 395–426.Google Scholar
Conley, Timothy, Hansen, Christian, and Rossi, Peter. 2012. “Plausibly Exogenous.” Review of Economics and Statistics 94 (1): 260–72.Google Scholar
Damodaran, Harish. 2008. India's New Capitalists: Caste, Business, and Industry in a Modern Nation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Deutsch, Karl W. 1961. “Social Mobilization and Political Development.” American Political Science Review 55 (3): 493–514.Google Scholar
Dixit, Avinash, and Londregan, John. 1996. “The Determinants of Success of Special Interests in Redistributive Politics” Journal of Politics 58 (4): 1132–55.Google Scholar
Duncan, Ian. 1988. “Party Politics and the North Indian Peasantry: The Rise of the Bharatiya Kranti Dal in Uttar Pradesh.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 16 (1): 40–76.Google Scholar
Evenson, Robert E., and Gollin, Douglas. 2003. “Assessing the Impact of the Green Revolution, 1960 to 2000.” Science 300 (5620): 758–62.Google Scholar
Foundation, Ford. 1969. “Accelerating Development in West Godavari District.” Technical report.Google Scholar
Frankel, Francine R. 1975. India's Green Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Harriss, Barbara. 1977. “Marketing Scarce Chemical Inputs: An International Comparison.” In Green Revolution? ed. Farmer, B. H.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 256–67.Google Scholar
Harriss, John. 1982. Capitalism and Peasant Farming: Agrarian Structure and Ideology in Northern Tamil Nadu. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Harrison, Selig. 1956. “Caste and the Andhra Communists” American Political Science Review 50 (2): 378–404.Google Scholar
Hasan, Zoya. 1989. Dominance and Mobilisation: Rural Politics in Western Uttar Pradesh, 1930–1980. New Delhi: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Iyer, Lakshmi. 2010. “Direct Versus Indirect Colonial Rule in India: Long-Term Consequences.” The Review of Economics and Statistics 92 (4): 693–713.Google Scholar
Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2003. India's Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Jayachandran, Seema. 2006. “Selling labor low: Wage Responses to Productivity Shocks in Developing Countries.” Journal of Political Economy 114 (3): 538–75.Google Scholar
Jensenius, Francesca Refsum. 2013. Power, Performance and Bias: Evaluating the Electoral Quotas for Scheduled Castes in India. PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.Google Scholar
King, Gary, Pan, Jennifer, and Roberts, Margaret E.. 2013. “How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression.” American Political Science Review 107 (2): 326–43.Google Scholar
Kohli, Atul. 1990. Democracy and Discontent: India's Growing Crisis of Governability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kuran, Timur. 1988. “The Tenacious Past: Theories of Personal and Collective Conservatism.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 10 (2): 143–71.Google Scholar
Lipton, Michael. 1977. Why Poor People Stay Poor: A Study of Urban Bias in Development. London: Temple Smith.Google Scholar
Mokyr, Joel. 1992. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
North, Douglass C., and Weingast, Barry R.. 1989. “Constitutions and Commitment: the Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England.” The Journal of Economic History 49 (4): 803–32.Google Scholar
North, Douglass. 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Olson, Mancur. 1982. The Rise and Decline of Nations. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Pierskalla, Jan H., and Hollenbach, Florian M.. 2013. “Technology and Collective action: The Effect of Cell Phone Coverage on Political Violence in Africa.” American Political Science Review 107 (2): 207–24.Google Scholar
Przeworski, Adam. 2000. Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950–1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Reddy, G. Ram. 1989. “The Politics of Accommodation: Caste, Class and Dominance in Andhra Pradesh.” In Dominance and State Power in Modern India: Decline of a Social Order, eds. Frankel, Francine and Rao, M.S.A.. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 265–321.Google Scholar
Rud, Juan Pablo. 2012. “Electricity Provision and Industrial Development: Evidence from India.” Journal of Development Economics 97 (2): 352–67.Google Scholar
Rudolph, Lloyd I., and Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber. 1987. In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Sanghi, Apurva, Kavi Kumar, K.S., and McKinsey, James W. Jr. 1998. “India Agriculture and Climate Dataset.” World Bank.Google Scholar
Schumpeter, Joseph Alois. 1942. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. London: George, Allen, and Unwin.Google Scholar
Simmons, Joel W. 2016. The Politics of Technological Progress. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Skaperdas, Stergios. 1996. “Contest Success Functions.” Economic Theory 7 (2): 283–90.Google Scholar
Stone, Ian. 2002. Canal Irrigation in British India: Perspectives on Technological Change in a Peasant Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Varshney, Ashutosh. 1998. Democracy, Development, and the Countryside: Urban-Rural Struggles in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Vaugier-Chatterjee, Anne. 2009. “Two Dominant Castes: The Socio-Political System in Andhra Pradesh.” In Rise of the Plebeians? The Changing Face of Indian Legislative Assemblies, eds. Jaffrelot, Christophe and Kumar, Sanjay. London: Routledge, 277–309.Google Scholar
Weiner, Myron. 1967. Party Building in a New Nation: The Indian National Congress. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Wilkinson, Steven. 2007. “Explaining Changing Patterns of Party-Voter Linkages in India.” In Patrons, Clients and Policies, eds. Kitschelt, Herbert and Wilkinson, Steven I.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 110–40.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Dasgupta Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PSGCJH
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Dasgupta supplementary material

Dasgupta supplementary material 1

Download Dasgupta supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 2.1 MB
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.