Abstract
Democracy is largely considered as the best form of the government and political parties are backbone of democratic system. Political parties are supposed to take part not only in government formation and running the government but also in performing serious roles in ensuring political participation of people in various other democratic processes and achieving all constitutional goals of the nation-state. There are different types of political parties globally. State and national parties are two main types of recognised parties in India. Although the national parties played the dominant role in union as well as state level election for many decades in India, the rise of the state parties is also phenomenal. During last one decade, state parties have weakened in several north Indian states and few states do not have a significant presence of state parties at all. However, the state parties are playing key role in government formation at state (assembly) level in Bihar for the last three decades continuously. Bihar has been witnessing state parties in coalition format also. Within this larger background,this paper tries to explore why state parties are popular and continue to exist in the stateof Bihar. This is a qualitative study and semi-structured interview schedule was used to collect primary data from the selected districts of the state of Bihar. This study has used thematic analysis for the analysis of the field data. The findings not only help in understanding the larger socio-political scenario of the state of Bihar but also help to understand the future prospects of the state parties in the state of Bihar as well as in India.