[Reader-list] Talk by Charles R. Hankla on 'Party Systems and Public Goods: The Dynamics of Good Governance in the Indian States'

[Praveen Rai]

Centre for the Study of Developing Societies

invites you to a talk





*Party Systems and Public Goods: *

*The Dynamics of Good Governance in the Indian States*

by *Charles R. Hankla*





*Peter Ronald deSouza* will Chair

Monday, 27 July 2015, 4 pm
                                          RSVP

CSDS Seminar
Room,
                        Tel:
011 23942199

29 Rajpur Road, Delhi
110054
             Fax:
011 23943450

Please join us for tea at 3.30 pm

                              email: jaya at csds.in

Understanding when governments provide public goods to their citizens is
among the most important projects in political science and one institution
that seems to be highly influential in this regard, particularly in
parliamentary democracies, is the party system. The talk will focus on two
key elements of party systems-the effective number of parties and electoral
volatility. The contention is that intermediate levels of party system size
and stability are ideal for public goods provision; when these levels are
too low, the system is not competitive enough to incentivize service
provision, but when they are too high, the system is too fragmented and
unstable to produce long-run beneficial outcomes.

The speaker argues that the best outcomes will be observed, when the
benefits of competition are balanced against the risks of fragmentation and
instability. The argument will be put to test in the talk with a panel
model of public goods provision in 29 Indian states and territories,
measured by education spending, social financing, food grain distribution,
and revenue accumulation.

*Charles R. Hankla* is associate professor of political science at Georgia
State University in Atlanta.  He received his PhD in 2005 from Emory
University, and also holds degrees from Georgetown University and the
London School of Economics.  In the spring and summer of 2013, he was a
visiting scholar at Sciences Po Lille in France.

His research is in the fields of comparative and international political
economy with a particular interest in political institutions, budgeting,
trade policy, and industrial policy. It includes cross-national,
quantitative studies and also field-work based analyses of India and
France.  His research work has been published in journals like the *American
Political Science Review*, *International Studies Quarterly*, *Comparative
Political Studies*, *Comparative Politics*, and *Publius*.



*Peter Ronald deSouza* is Professor at the Centre for the Study of
Developing Societies.


Praveen Rai
Academic Secretary
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29, Rajpur Road
Delhi - 110054
Phone: 91-11-23942199
http://www.csds.in/praveen.rai