Emergency provisions allow governments to intervene swiftly, but also create opportunities for political capture. We analyze how this tension plays out in the largest federal republic in the world, India. Article 356 of the Indian Constitution (known as president’s rule) allows the union (federal) cabinet to dismiss a functioning state government and dissolve the elected state legislature, if the federally appointed state governor recommends the dismissal due to political crises, natural disasters, riots, and so forth. Using an original panel dataset of Indian states from 1952 until 2019, we find that emergency provisions allow for political capture increasing federal dominance in India. We find that: (1) the likelihood of invoking Article 356 is almost exclusively determined by the political strength of the parties in majority/coalition governments at the state level; (2) emergencies like riots and natural disasters are not significant predictors of invoking Article 356; and (3) judicial safeguards added in 1994 significantly reduced the imposition of Article 356.

This chapter investigates the motivations of recipient governments who seek out Chinese development projects. We examine how host country leaders shape the ways that Chinese development finance is allocated across subnational jurisdictions. First, we evaluate whether China’s allocation of aid and debt within countries flows to areas with higher levels of socioeconomic need. Second, we explore whether political leaders manipulate incoming financial flows from China to advance their own political interests. We do so by examining whether and when funds from Beijing favor the home provinces of political leaders. Finally, we compare and contrast the ways in which Chinese and World Bank development projects are subnationally distributed. To do so, we assign latitude and longitude coordinates to the specific locations where China implemented its de- velopment projects.Our findings indicate that Chinese development finance does not go to the geographic areas within recipient countries where it is most needed: much of it ends up in wealthier provinces. In addition, Chinese development projects favor politically privileged jurisdictions: the home provinces of political leaders receive substantially more Chinese development finance in countries with competitive elections, and even more at election time. This is a problem from a development perspective because the average home province of a political leader is significantly wealthier than the rest of the country.