Please join us for a seminar on South Asian politics co-hosted by the Saxena Center at Brown University, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, and the Mittal Institute at Harvard University.
About the seminar: What explains the meteoric rise of the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India in the last four decades, from niche regional force to dominant national party? This paper connects satellite imagery-based estimates of urban extent over time to electoral returns at the parliamentary constituency level to provide evidence that long-term urbanization has driven the rise of the BJP. Additional analysis of granular polling station-level data shows that, comparing between spatially proximate areas, the BJP receives more support in urban versus rural neighborhoods. We discuss and test potential mechanisms behind this relationship, including the role of urban party networks, social anomie, and class structure. The findings provide evidence that long-term processes of economic modernization can have unexpectedly illiberal domestic political consequences, a finding with important implications for likely political trajectories in the developing world.
Speakers:
- Aditya Dasgupta, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of the Political Economy of Agriculture and Rural Societies (PEARS) lab at the University of California, Merced
- Amreeta Das, PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Merced
Moderators:
- Ashutosh Varshney, Director of the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia, Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences, Brown University
- Feyaad Allie, Assistant Professor of Government, Harvard University