Governance in the gullies : democratic responsiveness and leadership in Delhi's slums

The authors use detailed ethnographic evidence to design and interpret a broad representative survey of 800 households in Delhi's slums, examining the processes by which residents gain access to formal government and develop their own informal modes of leadership. While ethnically homogeneous slums transplant rural institutions to the city, newer and ethnically diverse slums depend on informal leaders who gain their authority through political connections, education, and network entrepreneurship. Education and political affiliation are more important than seniority in determining a leader's influence. Informal leaders are accessible to all slum dwellers, but formal government figures are most accessed by the wealthy and the well-connected.City Development Strategies,National Governance,Housing&Human Habitats,Urban Environment,Urban Services to the Poor

Shares, Coalition Formation and Political Development: Evidence from Seventeenth Century England

A key challenge for developing societies is to build coalitions across disparate interests in favour of beneficial policies. This paper documents the role of a financial innovation-- shares--in aligning disparate interests in favour of representative government during England's Civil War (1642-48). Using novel micro-data, the paper shows that shareholding was a major determinant of support for political reform by members of parliament. The paper suggests that shares allowed a broad spectrum of investors to benefit from new opportunities overseas. However, overseas rights belonged chiefly to the executive. Thus the introduction of shares aligned incentives in favour of political reforms and overseas policies crucial for growth.

Trade, Institutions and Religious Tolerance: Evidence from India

This paper analyses the incentives that shaped Hindu and Muslim interaction in India's towns from the rise of Islam to the rise of European intervention in the 17th century; it argues that differences in the degree to which medieval Hindus and Muslims could provide complementary, non-replicable services and a mechanism to share the gains from exchange has resulted in a sustained legacy of religious tolerance. Due to Muslim-specific advantages in Indian Ocean shipping, incentives to trade across ethnic lines were strongest in medieval trading ports, leading to the development of institutional mechanisms that further supported inter-religious exchange. Using new town-level data spanning India's medieval and colonial history, this paper finds that medieval trading ports were 25 percent less likely to experience a religious riot between 1850-1950, two centuries after Europeans disrupted Muslim dominance in overseas shipping. Medieval trading ports continued to exhibit less widespread religious violence during the Gujarat riots in 2002. The paper shows that these differences are not the result of variation in geography, political histories, wealth, religious composition or of medieval port selection, and interprets these differences as being transmitted via the persistence of institutions that emerged to support inter-religious medieval trade. The paper further characterises these institutions and the lessons they yield for reducing contemporary ethnic conflict.

Maintaining peace across ethnic lines: New lessons from the past

This policy overview draws upon two studies, one theoretical and one empirical, to explore lessons from medieval Indian Ocean trade for supporting ethnic tolerance in contemporary settings. The overview begins by sketching a model of inter-ethnic trade and violence in environments where there are “local and “non-local ethnic groups. The model suggests that three conditions are necessary to support peaceful coexistence between these groups over time: complementarities between groups, a high cost to replicate or expropriate the source of another group’s complementarity, and a mechanism to share the gains from inter-group exchange. The article then describes how these conditions were satisfied among Hindu and Muslim traders in medieval Indian ports from the rise of Islam to European ascendance in the 17th century. The article characterizes the institutions that emerged to bolster religious tolerance in these towns during the medieval period and that continued to support religious tolerance two centuries after the decline of Muslim dominance in overseas trade. Finally, the article draws lessons from the theory and India’s institutional legacy to understand why ethnic tolerance fails and how tolerance may be fostered in contemporary settings.Ethnic conflict, peace, institutions