If it impossible to conceive of democracies sans elections, why is it impossible to imagine elections without the flood of money in politics? How does every general election in India get more expensive than the last one? Stepping into the mucky terrain to find out what enables the average Indian vote to have a price, Costs of Democracy opens readers' eyes to the opaque and enigmatic ways in which money flows through the political heart of the world's largestdemocracy.

• Table of Contents
  List of Tables
  List of Figures
  Acknowledgments
  List of Abbreviations
  
  Introduction
  Devesh Kapur and Milan Vaishnav
  1. Political Finance in a Developing Democracy: The Case of India
  Eswaran Sridharan and Milan Vaishnav
  2. Money in Elections: The Role of Personal Wealth on Election Outcomes
  Neelanjan Sircar
  3. Builders, Politicians, and Election Finance
  Devesh Kapur and Milan Vaishnav
  4. Navigating Fiscal Constraints: Dalit Parties and Coalition Politics in Tamil Nadu, India
  Michael A. Collins
  5. Money and Votes: Following Flows through Mumbai and Bihar
  Lisa Björkman and Jeffrey Witsoe
  6. What Costs So Much in Indian Elections? Intuitions from Recent Electoral Campaigns in Mumbai
  Simon Chauchard
  7. Whose Money, Whose Influence? Multi-level Politics and Campaign Finance in India
  Jennifer Bussell
  Conclusion: Implications for Research and Policy
  Devesh Kapur, Eswaran Sridharan, and Milan Vaishnav
  Index
  About the Editors and Contributors

Milan Vaishnav is a Senior Fellow in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His primary research focus is the political economy of India, and he examines issues such as corruption and governance, state capacity, distributive politics, and electoral behaviour. He is the author of When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics (Yale University Press/HarperCollins India 2017) and co-editor (with Devesh Kapur and Pratap Bhanu Mehta) of Rethinking Public Institutions in India (Oxford University Press 2017). Previously, he worked at the Center for Global Development, where he served as a postdoctoral research fellow; the Center for Strategic and International Studies; and the Council on Foreign Relations. He has taught at Columbia, Georgetown, and George Washington universities. He holds a PhD in political science from Columbia University.
Devesh Kapur is the Madan Lal Sobti Professor for the Study of Contemporary India and Director, Center for Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania; and Non-Resident fellow at the Center for Global Development, Washington, D.C. He is the coauthor of The World Bank: Its First Half Century; Public Institutions in India: Performance; and Design and Against the Odds: The Rise of Dalit Entrepreneurs. His three books on international migration examine the effects at a global level (Give us your Best and Brightest: The Global Hunt for Talent and Its Impact on the Developing World); and on the country of emigration (Diaspora, Democracy and Development: The Impact of International Migration from India on India published by Princeton University Press which received the 2012 Distinguished Book Award of the International Studies Association).