The Relative Autonomy of Party Practices: A Counterfactual Analysis of Left Party Ascendancy in Kerala, India, 1934–1940

This article seeks to modify one of the dominant assumptions in the literature on political parties, namely that parties "reflect" the dominant cleavages of a given society. Instead, drawing on the distinction between the concepts of "class structure" and "class formation," the main argument of this article is that party practices contribute to the formation of "cleavages" and in the process gain ascendancy and hegemony. A party's practices are, however, relatively autonomous from the underlying structures. Through a comparative case study of the ascendancy and rise to hegemony of the precursor to the Communist Party of India (CPI) in Kerala, India, during the nationalist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, this article traces the specific manner in which the party's own strategies drew upon prevalent structural possibilities, making class a salient cleavage. The methodology of posing historical counterfactual questions is utilized to measure how much difference particular political practices (and not other possible ones, or underlying structural factors) made to this outcome.