Defection: A Ricardian view

Everyone knows that if you ask the wrong question, you will not get the right answer. Nowhere is this truer than of political parties, their members, their MPs and MLAs and, that very Indian thing, the anti-defection law.

The tradition, at least in the Westminster type of democracies, has been to focus on the moral aspects of a political party, namely, what social and economic values it stands for. Views have tended to differ on this, which is why we get two broad types of parties: Left and Right.

This would not have mattered so much if what I call “constrained morality”