Even though the Bharatiya Janata Party managed to cross the half-way mark for the second successive time in the 2019 elections, the coalition era of India's politics is well and truly entrenched, arising partly from the high degree of fragmentation in the Indian party system. Parties spend enormous amounts of time and energy in working out the minute details of pre-poll alliances, and are driven y a range of factors - the network brought by the alliance partner, the local caste dynamics, and concerns about perception. We're joined by Dr. Christiane Andersen to talk about the findings in her doctoral work which explores this question and offers some surprising results on what makes parties chose each other in a pre-poll alliance.

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