Democracy and Diversity:
India and the American Experience

This project consists of an Indo-US comparative politics exchange in which four Indian and four American scholars will spend a month each in each other's countries, writing papers on some aspect of the other country's democracy that is relevant to their own state.  Dr. E. Sridharan spent a month in the US in Oct-Nov 2000, researching the decentralized character of the two major American political parties and comparing them to the internal structure and functioning of Indian political parties. Other Indian scholars who are slated to participate in the project are Dr. Neera Chandhoke, Department of Political Science, Delhi University; Dr. Peter de Souza, Goa University, and Dr. Mool Chand Sharma, Faculty of Law, Delhi University. The four American participants in the project are Dr. Alfred Stepan, Columbia University, who visited India in November 2000; Dr. Arend Lijphart, University of California, San Diego; Dr. Nathan Glazer, Harvard University; and Dr. Juan Linz, Yale University. The project will be implemented over eighteen months from October 2000 to March 2002, and is expected to result in an edited volume.