This week, in partnership with the Hindustan Times, we kick off a five-part series on our  new book, Costs of Democracy: Political Finance in India. Each day this week, HT will publish a column drawing on our new volume, highlighting the brilliant analyses several of our authors have put together.

For the inaugural piece, Devesh Kapur and I provide an introduction that summarizes the key takeaways of the book and reminds readers why adequately regulating political finance is fundamental to a healthy democracy.

Here’s a glimpse:

Distortions in electoral finance can undermine that legitimacy and threaten democracy itself. In our view, there can hardly be a worthier, yet more underexplored, line of research for scholars to pursue, and for the public to understand.

You can read the full piece here.

The first review of “Costs of Democracy” is out–and it’s from Gilles Verniers of Ashoka University in this week’s India Today magazine. Few people study India’s electoral politics as closely as Gilles so it’s a real pleasure to see a review of the book with his byline. Here’s a brief excerpt:

The implications are far-reaching and critical to the functioning and meaning of India’s democracy. Money acts as an important filter of who gets to become a representative. Money affects the ability of political actors to act independently, as it chains them to a system of obligations without oversight. By using empirical evidence to shed light on an opaque phenomenon, this book contains the best that academia has to offer to a broad audience of concerned citizens.

You can read the review in full here. More information on the book, including ordering details, can be found here.