Scholar

My academic scholarship spans three major areas in the study of politics:

• Origins of democracy and state capacity,

• When dominant parties lose,

• Nationalism and democracy.

One line of scholarship theorises the origins of democracy and state capacity across the developing world.

My 2013 book, ‘The Promise of Power: The Origins of Democracy in India and Autocracy in Pakistan,’ (Cambridge University Press), was based on my doctoral dissertation, which won the 2013 Gabriel Almond prize, given by the American Political Science Association for the best dissertation in comparative politics.  The book, also nominated for the 2013 Luebbert Best Book Prize, examines why India was able to create a democracy that has largely persisted until the present day, whereas another large and structurally similar post-colonial state, Pakistan, has not.  Building on a wide variety of primary source material and years of field research, I argue that India is an empirical outlier in creating a post-colonial democracy, in spite of broadly theorized economic requisites for democracy, because it gained independence with an unusually strong nationalist party (in coalitional, organizational, and ideational terms) and an inclusive nationalist ideology. Together, high levels of organizational and ideational development brokered democratic stability in India while the comparative absence of such capacity put Pakistan on the path of regime instability that is more typical of the post-colonial world in the decade following independence.

One line of my scholarship theorises the circumstances under which dominant political parties lose power.

Scholars have long argued that democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.  But why do some parties repeatedly win elections for decades, even when elections are fair and free?  In a 2015 Party Politics article, “How Opposition Parties Sustain Single-Party Dominance: Lessons From India,” (co-authored with Adam Ziegfeld), I supplement the conventional wisdom that features of the dominant party primarily explain its electoral success with a theoretical emphasis on opposition parties, and specifically, whether they are able to coordinate seats across electoral districts.  In the world’s largest democracy, we show that opposition coordination is just as important as incumbency advantage in sustaining single party dominance.  In a 2016 book chapter, “Colonial Competition and Subnational Democratization in India: Challenges to Congress’ Maintenance of National Power” (co-authored with Adam Ziegfeld) in Illiberal Practices: Territorial Variants Within Large Federal Democracies (Laurence Whitehead and Jacqueline Brehrend, eds, Johns Hopkins University Press), we show that democratic norms regarding party competition are especially likely to be undermined in ‘brown areas’ of states, or regions which were never fully (institutionally or ideologically) integrated into the state. In a 2020 Comparative Politics article, "Social Cleavages, Party Organization, and the End of Single-Party Dominance: Insights from India" (co-authored with Adam Ziegfeld), we further shed light on when party opposition is likely to coordinate, namely first, when opposition parties possesses a longstanding and robust party organization and, second, when there is a single salient social cleavage. These conditions encourage a previously fragmented opposition to consolidate behind a single large party capable of challenging the dominant party. Related to this vein of research is my chapter ‘Political Parties in India’ in The Routledge Handbook of Political Parties, (with Indrajit Roy), 2023.

Together, this line of research advances our conceptual and empirical understanding of when opposition parties can prevail against well-established dominant parties, especially of the type that tended to emerge in post-colonial states through their nationalist movements.  My work underscores the pivotal role played by opposition parties’ideological unity and organizational resources. 

My most recent line of work charts out new understandings of nationalism and its relationship to democracy.

The empirical and normative duality of nationalism has long been observed, since both Adolf Hitler and Mahatma Gandhi invoked nationalisms that led in one case to the destruction of democracy and in another case to its creation.  Yet there has been little comparative work on nationalism’s effects, as we show in our 2021 article *“Nationalism: What We Know and What We Still Need to Know,”* (co-authored with Harris Mylonas, Annual Review of Political Science).  This article argues that nationalism scholarship is problematically Euro-centric, frequently based on single case studies, and siloed across both methodological approaches and disciplines.  The article centrally featured this article in an hourlong 2022 podcast episode, ‘The Nature of Nationalism’ by the Canadian Broadcasting Company.  Forthcoming in 2023 is also a book (co-authored with Harris Mylonas) entitled Varieties of Nationalism in Cambridge University Press’ Elements series.  In this book, we distil five dimensions along which nationalism varies and call for a more integrative as well as non-ethnic definitions of nationalism.

I am currently working on a book monograph examining the relationship between founding national narratives and democracy and have published several articles in this domain. In a 2017 co-authored article with Dan Slater, “The Content of Democracy: Nationalist Parties and Inclusive Ideologies in India and Indonesia,” in Parties, Movements and Democracy in the Developing World (Nancy Bermeo and Deborah Yashar, eds, published in Cambridge University Press’ Studies in Contentious Politics), we use in-depth case studies of Asia’s steadiest democracies to argue that inclusive nationalisms can be a resource that helps protect democracy.  In my 2018 solo-authored article, “India’s Nationalism in Historical Perspective: The Democratic Dangers of Ascendant Nativism,” in Indian Politics & Policy Journal, I discuss how the changing nature of India’s nationalism is likely to lead to democratic backsliding in the form of diminished civil liberties for second-class citizens. In a 2021 Perspectives in Politics article (co-authored with Dan Slater), “Nationalism, Authoritarianism and Democracy: Historical Lessons from South and Southeast Asia,” we distil specific mechanisms through which inclusive definitions of ‘we the people,’ as articulated in regime-founding moments, have supported the functioning of democracy. In a 2022 solo-authored chapter entitled “Nations Under Gods or Gods under Nations: The Role of Islam in Asia” (Pauline Jones and Melani Cammett, eds. Oxford Handbook of Muslim Societies) I show that a putative Islamic democratic deficit is crucially mediated through nationalism.  Specifically, when new nations are defined through religion, this legitimates religious leaders’ intervention in national politics, thus making stable politics more difficult.  Religious definitions of nationhood also arm political entrepreneurs with narrative and symbolic material to deprive minorities of their rights. In my chapter contribution to the 2022 Cambridge University Press book, Majorities, Minorities and the Future of Nationhood, Koopmans and Orgad, ed., I argue that states should actively invest in crafting inclusive national identities and provide specific policy suggestions for investing in the politics of inclusive memory.  Forthcoming in 2023 is a chapter on how India’s changing national narrative has directly contributed to its democratic backsliding in The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (Larry Diamond, Sumit Ganguly, Dinsha Mistree, eds., University of Michigan Press) and an article, “The Consequences of Nationalism on Democracy” in Nations and Nationalism with Daphne Hailikiopoulou, Marc Helbling, Matthias vom Hau and Andreas Wimmer.

Together, this third line of research meaningfully develops our conceptualization of nationalism and advances our understanding of the relationship between nationalism and democracy.  Alongside some of the world’s leading scholars of democracy and nationalism, I have more carefully delineated how to conceptualize what nationalism is as well as the circumstances under which the rise of nationalism fuels democratic breakdown.

Additional articles have further developed theoretical insights into the origin and functioning of democracy in the developing world. In my 2013 solo-authored article in Comparative Politics (April 2013) “Explaining Democracy’s Origins:  Lessons from South Asia,” I expand my theoretical take on the origins of democracy across the developing world, showing how indigenous elites’ relative power position in colonial regimes and the magnification of this power through organisational capacity has the potential to travel beyond the cases under study.  My 2016 solo-authored article, “The Nationalist Origins of Political Order in India and Pakistan” in States in the Developing World (Miguel Centeno, Atul Kohli and Deborah Yashar, eds. Cambridge University Press), is the first empirical chapter in a book seeking to understanding of the origins of state capacity in the developing world.  In this chapter, I argue that state capacity is domain-specific and limited directly by the nature of social support of its governing coalition.  And that, for the majority of countries in the world which are post-colonial, is fundamentally shaped by its nationalist movement. In my 2016 article ‘Enduring Challenges to Democracy’ in Pakistan’s Democratic Transition, (Ishtiaq Ahmed and Adnan Rafiq, eds. Routledge Studies in South Asian Politics), I show how the low organizational capacity of its political parties and subsequent military intervention into civilian politics continue to be the same factors which hinder the consolidation of Pakistan’s democracy in the present day.  In my 2014 solo-authored “Renewed Hope in Pakistan?” (Journal of Democracy ), I show how discrete organizational developments in Pakistan may challenge the ‘five-step dance’ which has characterized the country’s regime politics since colonial independence, in which the military may henceforth decide to rule behind a thin facade of civilian rule.  My work on Pakistan’s democracy resulted in my 2020 solo-authored book chapter contribution, “Why Pakistan’s Democracy Fails” in How Democracies End: From Athens to Putin’s Russia (Christoph Nonn, ed.) on the systematic underpinnings of low party capacity and military intervention.   In my solo-authored 2013 chapter of “The Historical Inheritance of India’s Democracy,” (Routledge Handbook of Indian Politics, Atul Kohli and Prerna Singh, eds), I argue that India’s ongoing democratic stability is explained by its dominant parties’ class coalition while also showing that the nature of this coalition limited the domains in which India’s Congress government was able to undertake social reforms.  Upon the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, I co-authored a 2022 article (with Wolff, J., Elitzer, D., Petherick, A., and Tyner, K.) “COVID-19 and Authoritarianism: Two Strategies of Engaging Fear” in Global Justice: Theory Practice Rhetoric.  This article highlighted the democratic dangers of using fear to justify broad new limitations on civil rights because such rights restrictions tend to remain even when initiating crises end.

Collectively, this first line of work theorizes the challenges facing developing country states as they seek to spearhead social and economic development through democratically-accountable governments. While democratization is a well-furrowed field of study in political science, theories of democratization have overwhelmingly drawn on the experiences of Europe and the Americas.  I show how these Euro-centric insights about the origins of state capacity are far less relevant to the post-colonial world, where state-building and nation-building typically emerged in a mutually constitutive fashion during the middle of the twentieth century.  In short, my research has deepened the way that political science understands the structural basis of state capacity and democracies in the developing world, with particular empirical attention to Asia.

The Promise of Power published by Cambridge University Press.