Date:
Location:
"Capability, Connectivity, Co-Ethnicity: The Origins of Political Brokerage in India’s Urban Slums"
Speaker:
Tariq Thachil, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Vanderbilt University.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Government, Harvard University.
Contacts:
Jessie Bullock
jbullock@g.harvard.edu
Andrew Leber
andrewmleber@g.harvard.edu
Shannon Parker
shannonparker@g.harvard.edu
Faculty Advisors:
Dan Smith, Faculty Associate. Assistant Professor, Department of Government, Harvard University.
Yuhua Wang, Assistant Professor, Department of Government, Harvard University.
Abstract:
How do the political brokers essential to clientelistic politics emerge? Studies of clientelism largely take brokers as a static given and do not address how they initially amass the following of voters that make them attractive to political elites. We address this question by studying a pervasive broker across developing world cities—informal slum leaders. We find brokers emerge through bottom-up selection by slum residents. To identify the resident preferences guiding this selection, we conducted an ethnographically-informed conjoint survey experiment with 2,199 residents across 110 slums in two Indian cities. We find that shared ethnicity—which dominates scholarship on political selection in South Asia and Africa—is often matched or trumped by non-ethnic indicators of a broker’s connectivity to state bureaucracies and capacity to make public claims. These findings shed important light on the origins of patron-client hierarchies and the political changes engendered by urbanization across the developing world
