The essays in the three-volume series, Explaining Indian Democracy: A Fifty-Year Perspective, 1956-2006, span over five decades of the Rudolphs' scholarship on politics in India. This work brings out the distinctiveness of Indian democratic experience through a contextual political analysis.

The Realm of Institutions, the second of the three volumes, presents the Rudolphs' work on state formation and institutional change. By comparison with the Eurocentrism and essentialism of most work on state formation, these essays contrast state formation processes in Asia and India with those in the West. The authors address topics such as changing forms of representation, contestations over civil-military relations and sovereignty, transformations of the federal system and changes in the legitimacy and effectiveness of political institutions.