Crafting State-Nations: India and Other Multinational Democracies, by Alfred Stepan, Juan J. Linz, and Yogendra Yadav.

Abstract

Crafting State-Nations pools the collective expertise of three distinguished scholars who have individually—and collectively—made major contributions to the study of comparative politics. The book builds on a long-standing partnership between Alfred Stepan and Juan Linz, who have collaborated with Indian political scientist Yogendra Yadav. The concept of a “state-nation” as opposed to a French-style “nation-state” model of constitution building flows naturally from the work of each of the authors on democracy, authoritarianism, and federalism as well as their respective commitments to the study of particular regions in the world. Together the authors ask what kinds of constitutional structures and policy combinations are likely to sustain democracy in multinational settings. The answers that they offer challenge oft-expressed pessimism about federalism (or “ethno-federalism”) in multi-ethnic or multinational settings, where state and nation are not coterminous. The authors introduced the concept of a state-nation in a book chapter published in 2007 (Linz, Stepan, and Yadav 2007), and Linz and Stepan referred to the idea in a publication in 1996 but it is here with Yadav—and by exploring the Indian case in depth—that they develop a fuller theory of “state-nation” policies and their link to democratic stability.