Partisanship, contingency, and ideology in the developing world (with Ankita Barthwal)
Partisanship plays an important role in advanced democracies, but has received less attention in the developing world, where party–voter linkages are more transactional and unstable. Self-reported party attachment abounds in these contexts too, but we know little about what motivates such attachment. Drawing on interviews and original survey data from India, this paper explores the meaning and motivations behind partisanship in a context rife with clientelist exchanges. We find high levels of partisan attachment using both self-reported measures and affect-based partisanship scores. A priming experiment reveals a strong effect on partisanship in getting respondents to reflect on parties’ ideological positions. Priming on community-based favoritism produces an effect only among voters who report having received direct benefits from the government. These findings indicate the importance of taking both contingent accountability and ideological commitments into account when studying partisanship in the developing world.

Divided Votes: Fragmentation and Incongruent Coordination in Plurality Elections (with Pradeep Chhibber and Sanjeer Alam)
Voters often fail to coordinate on the top contenders in plurality elections. This research note demonstrates the value of within-district analysis to better understand such coordination failure. Drawing on original precinct-level data from the 2009 and 2014 Indian national elections, covering election returns in some 500,000 polling stations that have been manually linked to census villages, we find evidence of district-level fragmentation being a product not only of local-level fragmentation but also of incongruent voting across the district. This incongruence may partly be a product of different voting preferences across India’s large and diverse districts, but we also provide evidence that it results from incongruent coordination—voters coordinating on the wrong top candidates. Our findings remind us of the dangers of inferring individual-level intentions from highly aggregated data and point to an interesting research agenda on different forms of coordination failure in plurality elections.

Politician quality in the developing world: evidence from Indian village councils (with Ananish Chaudhuri, Vegard Iversen, and Pushkar Maitra)
Recent research suggests that politicians in advanced democracies, particularly those in higher tiers of representation, are more qualified than ordinary members of the public. While negative stereotypes abound, there is little systematic evidence on the quality of politicians in developing countries. We address this knowledge gap using unique experimental and survey data on village-level politicians in West Bengal, India. A comparison of first-time officeholders and ordinary citizens points to mostly positive selection, showing that politicians are more educated, motivated, public-service minded, and honest, but also have lower cognitive ability. We find no trade-off between more inclusive representation and politician quality. Our results highlight the need for a multidimensional understanding of politician quality that also captures the murkier sides of politics.

Political Determinants of the News Market: Novel Data and Quasi-Experimental Evidence from India (with Julia Cagé and Guilhem Cassan)
Information conveyed through news media influences political behavior. But to what extent are media markets themselves shaped by political determinants? We build a novel panel dataset of newspaper markets in India from 2002 to 2017 to measure the impact of changes in electoral importance on how news markets develop over time. We exploit the announcement of an exogenous change in the boundaries of electoral constituencies to causally identify the relationship between the (future) electoral importance of news markets and the change in the number and circulation of newspapers. Using both an event-study and a staggered difference-in-differences approach, we show that markets that became more electorally important experienced a significant rise in both circulation and the number of titles per capita. Both supply and demand seem to drive the increase, but we estimate that the former explains almost all the variation in the short run and around 50% in the long run. Finally, we document how effects vary with prior levels of political competition and newspapers’ characteristics, and discuss implications for voting behavior and democratic accountability.

Electoral Switching in Indian Elections (with Pavithra Suryanarayan)
This paper focuses on an understudied aspect of party system institutionalization: the strength and stability of linkages between parties and candidates. Using original data on rerunning patterns of candidates across 3,872 constituencies in 26 Indian states 1974–2007, we look at an important manifestation of weak party-candidate linkages: candidates switching parties from one election to the next. In this paper, we seek to describe and explain the great variation in electoral switching across the Indian states. Whereas parties and candidates face incentives to change alliances opportunistically in response to short-term factors such as a weak economy, we should expect more such behavior in contexts of weakly organized parties and weak party-voter linkages. We provide evidence for this by using constituency-level estimates of the organizational capacity of parties, the intensity of social cleavages, and economic shocks. Our findings suggest that electoral switching is a useful micro-level measures of party system institutionalization.