# Political Economy Workshop (Gov 3007) #### calendar\_today Date and Time **October 26, 2015** 12:00PM - 02:00PM EDT #### pin\_drop Location **CGIS Knafel K354** Aditya Dasgupta will present his job market paper “Why Dominant Parties Decline: Evidence from India’s Green Revolution”.Abstract for: “Why Dominant Parties Decline: Evidence from India’s Green Revolution”Political scientists disagree whether economic growth strengthens or weakens dominant party regimes, the most common form of authoritarianism today. This paper reconciles competing arguments and develops a new theoretical explanation on the basis of a historical natural experiment: the impact of the green revolution on single-party dominance in India. In contrast to modernization theory’s focus on rising incomes, I argue that changes in the economy which provide incentives for regime outsiders to capture the state can contribute to democratization. Fixed effects and instrumental variable analyses of panel data on high-yielding variety (HYV) crop adoption connected to 22,000 state and 3,000 parliamentary election races between 1957 and 1987 suggest that the green revolution accounted for half of the dominant Congress party’s long-run decline. The democratizing effect of the green revolution was due to the increasing value of agricultural subsidies, which agri- cultural producers sought to capture by supporting agrarian opposition parties. By contrast, the green revolution caused no shift in the caste of elected MPs and income increases on their own resulting from rainfall shocks improved the dominant party’s election performance, ruling out modernization theory. The findings highlight a new class of explanations for why dominant parties decline. See also:- [ Workshops, Seminars & Classes ](/event-type/workshops-seminars-classes) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#) Save: [ Add to calendar calendar\_today ](https://www.iq.harvard.edu/node/1428981/event-feed.ics) Copy link link