Explore the vast range of titles available.

Rapid urbanization is among the major processes affecting the developing world. The influx of migrants to cities frequently provokes antagonism on the part of long-term residents, manifested in labor market discrimination, political nativism, and violence. We implemented a novel, face-to-face survey experiment on a representative sample of Mumbai's population to elucidate the causes of anti-migrant hostility. Our findings point to the centrality of material self-interest in the formation of native attitudes. Dominant group members fail to heed migrants' ethnic attributes, yet for minority group respondents, considerations of ethnicity and economic threat crosscut. We introduce a new political mechanism to explain this divergence. Minority communities facing persistent discrimination view in-migration by coethnics as a means of enlarging their demographic and electoral base, thereby achieving \"safety in numbers.\" Our article sheds light on the drivers of preferences over internal migration. It also contributes insights to the international immigration literature and to policy debates over urban expansion.

Does secular party incumbency affect religious violence? Existing theory is ambiguous. On the one hand, religiously motivated militants might target areas that vote secularists into office. On the other hand, secular party politicians, reliant on the support of violence-hit communities, may face powerful electoral incentives to quell attacks. Candidates bent on preventing bloodshed might also sort into such parties. To adjudicate these claims, we combine constituency-level election returns with event data on Islamist and sectarian violence in Pakistan (1988–2011). For identification, we compare districts where secular parties narrowly won or lost elections. We find that secularist rule causes a sizable reduction in local religious conflict. Additional analyses suggest that the result stems from electoral pressures to cater to core party supporters and not from politician selection. The effect is concentrated in regions with denser police presence, highlighting the importance of state capacity for suppressing religious disorder.

Mass elections are key mechanisms for collective decision-making. But they are also blamed for creating intergroup enmity, particularly while they are underway; politicians use polarizing campaign strategies, and losing sides feel resentful and marginalized after results are announced. I investigate the impact of election proximity—that is, closeness to elections in time–on social cleavages related to religion, a salient form of group identity worldwide. Integrating data from ~1.2 million respondents across 25 cross-country survey series, I find no evidence that people interviewed shortly before or after national elections are more likely to express negative attitudes toward religious outgroups than those interviewed at other times. Subgroup analysis reveals little heterogeneity, including by levels of political competition. Generalized social trust, too, is unaffected by election calendars. Elections may not pose as great a risk to social cohesion as is commonly feared.

Rural-to-urban migration is reshaping the economic and social landscape of the Global South. Yet migrants often struggle to integrate into cities. We conduct countrywide audit experiments in India to test whether urban politicians discriminate against internal migrants in providing constituency services. Signaling that a citizen is a city newcomer, as opposed to a long-term resident, causes incumbent politicians to be significantly less likely to respond to requests for help. Standard \"nativist\" concerns do not appear to explain this representation gap. We theorize that migrants are structurally disposed to participate in destination-area elections at lower rates than long-term residents. Knowing this, reelectionminded politicians decline to cater to migrant interests. Follow-up experiments support the hypothesis. We expect our findings to generalize to fast-urbanizing democracies, with implications for international immigration too. Policywise, mitigating migrants' de facto disenfranchisement should improve their welfare.

Migrants are politically marginalized in cities of the developing world, participating in destination-area elections less than do local-born residents. We theorize three reasons for this shortfall: migrants’ socioeconomic links to origin regions, bureaucratic obstacles to enrollment that disproportionately burden newcomers, and ostracism by antimigrant politicians. We randomized a door-to-door drive to facilitate voter registration among internal migrants to two Indian cities. Ties to origin regions do not predict willingness to become registered locally. Meanwhile, assistance in navigating the electoral bureaucracy increased migrant registration rates by 24 percentage points and substantially boosted next-election turnout. An additional treatment arm informed politicians about the drive in a subset of localities; rather than ignoring new migrant voters, elites amplified campaign efforts in response. We conclude that onerous registration requirements impede the political incorporation, and thus the well-being, of migrant communities in fast-urbanizing settings. The findings also matter for assimilating naturalized yet politically excluded cross-border immigrants.

Specifically, we use a natural experiment to estimate the effect of Islamist (as opposed to secular nationalist) incumbency on religious violence and attitudes toward religious minorities. Since the restoration of democracy in the late 1990s, Indonesia has undergone extensive decentralization. Voters cast ballots for a party or a party-affiliated candidate.6 Each party's vote total is divided by a quota number, which is the total number of votes cast in the constituency divided by the total number of seats to be assigned. [...]we assess the impact of electing an additional Islamist legislator on the incidence and lethality of religious violence over the course of their term in office, as recorded in two independent data sources: the National Violence Monitoring System (NVMS) – an events database derived from hand-coded newspaper reports (Barron, Jaffrey and Varshney 2016) – and the Village Potential Statistics Survey, also known as PODES, which is a national census of village leaders. For our second set of outcomes, we investigate effects on religious intolerance, drawing on a full battery of questions from two waves of the Indonesian Family Life Survey.9 These questions ask how respondents would ‘feel’ about several hypothetical scenarios concerning religious out-groups: the extent to which they would object to having religious out-groups move into their village/neighborhood, rent a room on their property, marry a close relative or construct a place of worship locally.

In the study of electoral politics and political behavior in the developing world, India is often considered to be an exemplar of the centrality of contingency in distributive politics, the role of ethnicity in shaping political behavior, and the organizational weakness of political parties. Whereas these axioms have some empirical basis, the massive changes in political practices, the vast variation in political patterns, and the burgeoning literature on subnational dynamics in India mean that such generalizations are not tenable. In this article, we consider research on India that compels us to rethink the contention that India neatly fits the prevailing wisdom in the comparative politics literature. Our objective is to elucidate how the many nuanced insights about Indian politics can improve our understanding of electoral behavior both across and within other countries, allowing us to question core assumptions in theories of comparative politics.

This dissertation presents three essays on the origins, functioning, and consequences of weak party-system institutionalization in India, the world's largest democracy. • Political parties are thought to play a key role in countering the centrifugal tendencies of federalism. Yet we possess little systematic evidence about how nationalized parties work to shape electoral outcomes in developing states with federal systems. In such contexts, do powerful, resource-rich incumbents at the national level strategically mobilize votes for their parties in subnational elections? In the first paper of this dissertation, I theorize that incumbents' propensity to help co-partisans running in lower-tier races hinges on internal party organization, and above all factionalism. Where parties are cleaved along factional lines, incumbents decline to support the election of co-partisan candidates aligned with rival intra-party factions. Incumbents anticipate that doing so will undercut their own promotion prospects and likelihood of re-selection. Where internal feuding is muted, however, incumbents face clear-cut incentives to aid the election of co-partisans running in provincial races. Leveraging experimental and quasi-experimental methods, as well as new data on the linkages between India's national and state elections for the period 1977-2008, I find strong evidence to support these predictions. The paper advances our understanding of political accountability in multi-level electoral systems. It also contributes to the literature on the incumbency advantage, and illuminates the principal-agent dilemma at the heart of internally divided parties. • Why are party systems well-institutionalized in some settings, and chronically weak in others? Focusing on the phenomenon of electoral volatility, the dissertation's second paper argues that unstable party systems are more likely to arise in regions where nationally dominant parties monopolize political competition at the onset of mass-franchise democracy. Dominant parties crowd out political opposition. Hence the eventual break down of a dominant party entails the severing of all—or nearly all—party-voter linkages locally. In the resulting vacuum, politicians face uncertainty about the electoral prospects of newly emergent parties. This, I argue, leads to a collective action dilemma wherein candidates defect from expanding parties and sort instead into smaller, fragmentary ones. Consequently, stable party systems fail to take hold. Subnational evidence from India buttresses the theoretical propositions. The success of the once-dominant Congress Party during the country's inaugural elections (1951-2) robustly predicts greater electoral volatility in the decades following the decline of one-party dominance in the 1970s. Differential patterns of nationalist mobilization during the colonial period provide additional leverage on the paper's core claims. Overall, the findings imply a striking paradox: dominant parties that help \"bind the nation together\" during democracy's initial stages sow the seeds of long-run political instability. • Ethnic group conflict is among the most serious threats facing young democracies. The paper's final paper investigates whether the partisanship of local incumbent politicians affects the incidence and severity of ethnic violence. Using a novel application of the regression-discontinuity design, it shows that as-if random victory by candidates representing India's Congress party in close state assembly elections between 1962 and 2000 reduced Hindu-Muslim rioting. The effects are large. Simulations reveal that had Congress lost all close elections in this period, India would have experienced 11 percent more riots. Additional analyses suggest that Congress candidates' dependence on local Muslim votes, as well as apprehensions about religious polarization of the electorate in the event of riots breaking out, are what drive the observed effect. The findings shed new light on parties' connection to ethnic conflict, the relevance of partisanship in developing states, and the puzzle of democratic consolidation in ethnically-divided societies.