ISAS Working Papers

This paper is an attempt to compare and analyse the distribution of types, and the relationship between types and duration, of coalition and/or minority governments in India with those in long-standing democracies against the findings of the theoretical and comparative literature on coalition governments. Written in the context of (a) six consecutive hung parliaments since 1989, and the emergence since 1996 of very large coalitions of 9-12 parties; (b) the extreme paucity of systematic scholarly work on coalition politics in India, the focus of this paper is on the limited issue of coalition government types and duration, in comparative perspective.1 I also examine the use of an alternative definition of a coalition government that might be more meaningful in understanding party behaviour in the Indian context, and perhaps other large-coalition contexts.