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This paper uses original public opinion data of 607 households and 6 political leaders to assess how clientelism, in its many forms, influences dyadic policy representationâ??the degree to which leaders and citizens have shared policy positionsâ??in the area of social welfare policy. Results indicate a positive and significant relationship between the receipt of a clientelist benefit and dyadic policy representation. When citizens report experience with clientelism they are more likely to share the policy positions of their elected leader. This paper discusses the theoretical implications of this finding on the quality of democratic life in Bangalore. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some religious parties become ideologically moderate and others tend toward extremism? The question is important for at least two reasons. First, religious parties are influential in many middle- and low-income as well as in advanced industrial democracies. For example, Christian Democratic parties may have recently declined in influence but nevertheless remain key political actors in many European countries as well as in more distant Chile. In Islamic Turkey, the Justice and Development Party (JDP) triumphed in the 2002 elections and is currently the ruling party. In predominantly Hindu India, the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) leads the ruling coalition government. In Catholic Chile, the Christian Democratic Party (PDC) was the largest party in the country until recently, and is currently a junior partner in the ruling center-left coalition. Second, the dual tendencies of moderation/extremism among religious parties are important to understand because, on the one hand, while moderate religious parties may contribute to democratic stability, on the other hand, their turn toward extremism has the potential to undermine democracy. Despite their continuing influence in many countries, the study of religious parties has attracted relatively less attention than class-based parties. Much of the research on religious parties is limited to case studies of Christian Democratic, Islamic or Hindu parties. Comparative studies are largely limited to comparisons between different Christian Democratic or Islamic parties. This paper, in contrast, is comparative in scope and examines three different religious parties--Catholic, Islamic, and Hindu--in three relatively stable democracies. All three parties in question--the PDC, the JDP, and the BJP--have experienced and exhibit varying degrees of moderation/extremism. The following hypotheses are tested to account for moderation/extremism among religious parties: 1) Institutional context; 2) electoral politics; 3) party factions and party unity; 4) party rules and leadership; and 5) political learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postcolonial political discourse is an expression of the discrepant relationship between indigenous cultural experience and a political lexicon whose intelligibility derives from the historico-cultural experience of the West. This discrepancy goes to the heart of concerns raised by liberal political philosophy about the cultural preconditions necessary for liberal political values but calls for an exploration of the relationship between language, culture and politics. To investigate the issue, I will present a study of a nineteenth-century Gujarati novel that deals with the transition of a community to the new political order that Independence in India purported to install. Sarasvatichandra is self-professedly an instruction manual, written in the form of a social novel to educate the citizens-to-be. In the end, the novel fails in its project of translation and its language completely breaks down, with the last of its four volumes being merely a series of fragments written in three different languages. This failed project opens up questions of representation and cultural translation and allows us to reflect on what the categories of modern politics could mean in a postcolonial context. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]