Party Constitutionalisation and Democratic Backsliding: Rethinking the Global Framework with a Case Analysis from India

Within the scholarship codifying the relationship between political parties and the state, ‘party constitutionalisation’ comprises the processes by which parties are incorporated within the text of a state’s constitution. Older, traditional Western constitutions considered political parties only “intermediary organizations” in a democracy and did not codify them. However, newer constitutions in Europe post the Second World War saw waves of rapid party constitutionalisation and regularisation, and similar amendments soon followed in older constitutions as well. Research conducted especially in the context of West European and North American democracies has looked at the effects of such party constitutionalisation on democratic legitimacy. States that have seen previous democratic collapse tend to have stronger party law legislation, while comparative analyses show that in non-democratic states, such laws are used by ruling parties to limit opposition, whereas in more substantive democracies, they help curb antidemocratic party practices. There is however a substantial research gap in this area with regard to the Global South. This paper will conceptualize ways to analyse the effects of party legislations on democratisation in states of the Global South. However, instead of simply borrowing the framework established now through the works of van Biezen, Gauja, Karvonen and others, I will attempt to reconceptualise the debate. First, this paper will analyse why the West European framework is not transferable to states that have a less strictly regulated party legislation framework, and how the historical context of party constitutionalisation affects its impact on democratisation. Second, I will use the case of India as a multiparty parliamentary democracy with a semi-regularised legislative framework on parties to offer a politics-in-practice based framework for understanding how the ways in which parties interact with the laws that govern them affect the levels of democracy. Finally, the paper will conclude with possible potential this approach offers, to rethink global frameworks for party-state relations. In a post-digitised global network on liberal democracies, where multiple states both in the Global North and the Global South have experienced varying degrees of democratic backsliding in the recent years, this paper will understand how parties operate not merely as electoral or ideological competitors, but as co-producers of representative claims in a purportedly liberal, parliamentary democracy, and how this affects democratisation.