Poverty Eradication and Democracy in the Developing World

human development, democracy

Recognizing the tradeoffs we make

David Laitin defies a famous binary classification of scholars between hedgehogs and foxes. The late Isaiah Berlin’s work, following Tolstoy’s, gave this distinction considerable currency in the social sciences. The hedgehog knows one thing very well; and the fox knows quite a few things, if not each in great detail. Hedgehogs work on one given topic/theme/theory for an entire lifetime, adopting a cumulative research program, attempting to resolve one puzzle at a time, as they advance. Think of Arend Lijphart’s lifelong pursuit of the idea of consociational democracy

Ethnic Diversity and Ethnic Strife: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

The objective of this paper is to present an overview of ethnicity, ethnic strife and its consequences, as seen from the perspective of the disciplines of economics, political science, social anthropology and sociology. What exactly is ethnicity--how is it to be defined, characterized and measured? What exactly are the causal links from ethnicity so defined to its presumed consequences, including tension and violence? What are the feedback loops from the consequences of ethnic divisions back to these divisions themselves? How can policy, if at all, mitigate ethnic divisions and ethnic conflict? Finally, what role does interdisciplinarity have in helping to understand ethnicity and ethnic strife, and how can interdisciplinary collaboration be enhanced? These are the questions which this paper takes up and deals with in sequence.Ethnicity, Conflict, Interdisciplinary Approaches, International Development, International Relations/Trade,

“There are phases when India falls remarkably short of the standards you would expect democracies to follow” – Ashutosh Varshney

Last Friday Professor Ashutosh Varshney spoke at LSE on Indian Democracy. Before his presentation Sonali Campion interviewed him about India’s electoral vibrancy as well as its liberal deficits, and why these have become more marked under the current BJP-led government. They also discussed the contrasts between Indian and American elections in light of the US presidential vote

Ideas, interests and institutions in policy change : transformation of India's agricultural strategy in the mid-1960's

"October 1988."Series from publisher's informationIncludes bibliographical reference

Crosscutting cleavages and ethno-communal violence: Evidence from Indonesia in the post-Suharto era

Recent literature has shown that crosscutting social cleavages reduce the likelihood of civil war. This article argues that the same logic does not apply to lower-scale group violence such as riots, which differ in such a way that crosscutting social cleavages should often have the opposite effect, increasing both the frequency and scale of riots. We test this argument by analysing Muslim-Christian violence in the post-Suharto era, combining a new subnational data set of ethno-income and ethnogeographic crosscuttingness with a new and comprehensive subnational data set of violence in Indonesia. Our findings suggest that high ethno-income crosscuttingness, when combined with a high degree of urban anonymity and close living quarters, is a potent setting for inter-group communal violence. We conclude with a discussion of how context matters in understanding the effect of macrostructural variables such as crosscuttingness on violence

Hindu-Muslim Violence in India: A Postscript from the Twenty-First Century

The importance of religious conflict today can hardly be overstated. The appalling situation in Syria—stemming from the activism of the Islamic State (ISIS)—is just one cruel reminder of the utter devastation that religious extremism can wreak. The tragic humanitarian crisis in Myanmar involving the displacement of the Rohingya Muslims has strong religious overtones, as do the attacks on Muslims and Christians by Buddhist nationalist groups in Sri Lanka