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"Thachil, Tariq"
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Elite parties, poor voters : how Social Services win votes in India
\"This book analyzes how the paradox of the poor often voting against their material interests emerged in India\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
How Clients Select Brokers: Competition and Choice in India's Slums
Conventional models of clientelism often assume poor voters have little or no choice over which local broker to turn to for help. Yet communities in many clientelistic settings are marked by multiple brokers who compete for a following. Such competition makes client choices, and the preferences guiding such choices, pivotal in fueling broker support. We examine client preferences for a pervasive broker—slum leaders—in the context of urban India. To identify resident preferences for slum leaders, we conducted an ethnographically informed conjoint survey experiment with 2,199 residents across 110 slums in two Indian cities. Contra standard emphases on shared ethnicity, we find residents place heaviest weight on a broker's capability to make claims on the state. A survey of 629 slum leaders finds client-preferred traits distinguish brokers from residents. In highlighting processes of broker selection, and the client preferences that undergird them, we underscore the centrality of clients in shaping local brokerage environments.
Journal Article
Do Rural Migrants Divide Ethnically in the City? Evidence from an Ethnographic Experiment in India
Despite rapid urbanization across the Global South, identity politics within rural-urban migrant communities remains understudied. Past scholarship is divided over whether village-based ethnic divisions will erode or deepen within diverse poor migrant populations. I assess these divergent predictions through an 'ethnographic survey experiment' (N=4,218) among unique samples of poor migrants in India. Contra conventional expectations, I find intra-class ethnic divisions are neither uniformly transcended nor entrenched across key arenas of migrant life. Instead, I observe variation consistent with situational theories predicting ethnic divisions will be muted only in contexts triggering a common identity among migrants. I pinpoint urban employers and politicians as these triggers. Poor migrants ignore ethnic divisions when facing these elites, who perceive and treat them in class terms. However, migrants remain divided in direct interactions with each other. These bifurcated findings imply poor migrants may be available for both class-based and ethnic mobilization in the city.
Journal Article
Elite Parties and Poor Voters: Theory and Evidence from India
Why do poor people often vote against their material interests? This article extends the study of this global paradox to the non-Western world by considering how it manifests within India, the world's biggest democracy. Arguments derived from studies of advanced democracies (such as values voting) or of poor polities (such as patronage and ethnic appeals) fail to explain this important phenomenon. Instead, I outline a novel strategy predicated on an electoral division of labor enabling elite parties to recruit the poor while retaining the rich. Recruitment is outsourced to nonparty affiliates that provide basic services to appeal to poor communities. Such outsourcing permits the party to maintain programmatic linkages to its elite core. Empirically, I test this argument with qualitative and quantitative evidence, including a survey of more than 9,000 voters. Theoretically, I argue that this approach is best suited to elite parties with thick organizations, typically those linked to religious social movements.
Journal Article
Improving Surveys Through Ethnography: Insights from India’s Urban Periphery
How can ethnographic research improve surveys? I illustrate the benefit of sustained qualitative research on survey design and implementation with reference to my own study of a neglected urban population: internal migrants. Such migrants are an important part of expanding South Asian and African cities. The informality and circular mobility of these populations prevent researchers from accessing them through traditional residence-based surveys. Scant existing knowledge weakens our ability to design theoretically precise and contextually appropriate survey instruments for these understudied communities, particularly cognitively demanding survey experiments to assess political attitudes. I argue that ethnographic fieldwork can help researchers address insufficient access and weak ecological and construct validity. I substantiate these arguments with data and insights from 15 months of fieldwork among circular urban migrants in India. First, I show how ethnography can help design context-sensitive sampling strategies that mitigate concerns of inadequate coverage, high non-response, and inefficiency. Second, I show how ethnography can be used to improve the ecological and construct validity of survey-based experiments. Finally, I show how such ethnographic innovations can be applied beyond the study population that inspired them. Sustained qualitative fieldwork can thus improve survey-based research on political behavior on neglected communities across the global south.
Journal Article
Embedded Mobilization: Nonstate Service Provision as Electoral Strategy in India
How do elite parties win over poor voters while maintaining their core constituencies? How can religious parties expand their electoral base? This article argues that social service provision constitutes an important electoral strategy for elite-backed religious parties to succeed in developing democracies. The study demonstrates how the upper caste, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won unexpected support from lower-caste voters in India, due to services provided by its grassroots affiliates. Using a combination of original survey data and extensive interviews, the author tests whether services win votes and identifies the mechanisms by which they do so. Beneficiaries of services were found to be far more likely to support the party, even when accounting for piety, income, and ideological orientation. The author argues that service provision as an electoral strategy cannot be conceptualized as being predicated purely on material exchange. It should instead be understood as a socially embedded tactic especially well suited to helping elite parties with organizational resources, but without pro-poor policy agendas, win over underprivileged electorates.
Journal Article
Cultivating Clients: Reputation, Responsiveness, and Ethnic Indifference in India's Slums
Studies of clientelism overwhelmingly focus on how brokers target voters with top-down benefits during elections. Yet brokers also receive requests from voters for assistance between elections, initiating the processes through which they cultivate clients. Why are brokers responsive to the requests of some voters and not others? We provide the first study of broker preferences when evaluating client appeals. Theories emphasizing brokers as vote monitors anticipate they will prefer co-partisans and coethnics, whose reciprocity they can best verify. Theories emphasizing brokers as vote mobilizers anticipate they will prefer residents who will maximize their reputations for efficacy. We test these expectations through a conjoint experiment with 629 Indian slum leaders, ethnographic fieldwork, and a survey of 2,199 slum residents. We find evidence of reputational considerations shaping broker responsiveness. We find mixed support for monitoring concerns, highlighted by an absence of the strong ethnic favoritism assumed to dominate distributive politics in many developing countries.
Journal Article
The Strategic and Moral Imperatives of Local Engagement: Reflections on India
[...]India is not merely the geographic subject of our own work; it also is a hub for a vibrant social science community in its own right.[...]local audiences often are better poised to provide particular criticism than our US peers.[...]local media can be especially important in raising the profile of a scholar’s research agenda and bringing it to the attention of local policy makers.[...]local publications and presentations provide a means through which our scholarly research contributes to local intellectual discussions among professors, students, and everyday readers.
Journal Article
Rethinking the Study of Electoral Politics in the Developing World: Reflections on the Indian Case
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.
Journal Article