India

This paper tests whether a sustained, classroom-based curriculum can reduce misinformation susceptibility. In a field experiment with 13,500 students across 583 villages in Bihar, India, a four-month program improved students’ ability to distinguish true from false health claims, increased reliance on scientific information, and reduced use of unreliable news. Effects persisted four months later, generalized to political misinformation, and diffused to parents within households.

The 2016 Indian demonetization instantly rendered 86% of cash in circulation illegal tender, with new notes introduced gradually over the following months. A model is presented in which agents hold cash both to meet a cash-in-advance constraint and to facilitate tax evasion; the model generates testable predictions about the real and financial effects of a sudden cash shortage.

A theory of activation: bureaucratic responsiveness depends on resources, representation, and recognition. Material investments and the inclusion of marginalized personnel often remain passive; they improve service only when institutional recognition—organizational dynamics that make a group visible and value efforts to meet their needs—activates them.

Ongoing global debates over statues, street names, symbols, and textbooks raise questions about how different historical representations shape political life. Theoretical expectations hold that inclusive (and, conversely, exclusive) historical portrayals can alter marginalized group members’ sense of centrality to the nation, their entitlement to speak for it, and their likelihood of seeking leadership.

Political decentralization is often promoted as a cure for elite capture: the idea is that electing local officials directly will give those officials real authority and dilute the influence of unelected local powerbrokers. Alyssa Heinze tackles this claim in the context of rural Maharashtra, asking whether introducing direct elections actually disrupts entrenched elite control or simply changes how elites exert influence.

Misinformation is often explained by partisan motivated reasoning, but in contexts where religious identity is highly salient, religion itself may drive who accepts false claims. Sumitra Badrinathan and Simon Chauchard investigate whether religiosity and religious polarization help explain why some people endorse misinformation in India, and whether religiously framed corrections can change those beliefs.

This article asks why armed groups form high-end cooperation—training or intelligence sharing—even though such ties raise downstream political risks. The author develops a principal–agent theoretical logic: principals (providers of high-end support) mitigate risk by choosing agents who are skill-complementary but politically non-substitutable, while agents accept support only when it does not politically overshadow them. The study uses original network data on 53 groups in Northeast India from 1981–2021 and applies temporal exponential random graph models (TERGMs) to test the theory, producing evidence about organizational capacity differences, complementary attack portfolios, and constituency distinctiveness as correlates of high-end cooperation.

This study asks how cross-border labor migration changes migrants’ redistribution preferences, comparing migrants themselves to their left-behind family members. Using a randomized intervention that facilitated labor migration from India to the Middle East, the authors test whether moving alters support for taxation and redistribution and explore mechanisms tied to economic gains, self-reliance, and expectations of upward mobility.

Public-sector worker absence is a persistent explanation for weak public service delivery in developing countries. Emmerich Davies asks whether changes in politicians' attention over the electoral cycle—rather than only bureaucratic capacity or resources—help explain why teachers in India miss work at varying rates.

Globalization brings jobs and investment to emerging economies, but those benefits are unevenly distributed. Benjamin Helms and Junghyun Lim ask who can seize new employment in multinational and export sectors and what happens politically in the places that do not.

Personnel records were combined with vital-statistics data spanning 1910–1925 to measure mortality outcomes across 1,271 Indian towns during the 1918 influenza pandemic.

Migrants in rapidly urbanizing developing-country cities vote far less than local-born residents. Three potential explanations were tested: strong socioeconomic ties to origin regions, administrative hurdles to enrollment that hit newcomers harder, and political ostracism by antimigrant elites.

The debate around all-women police stations (AWPS) and women's access to justice continues. This article examines the impact of AWPS on Indian law enforcement outcomes, specifically testing whether they help address gender-based violence.

Contrary to expectations in matrilineal societies like those found throughout Meghalaya, women continue to face significant barriers to formal economic power and political agency.

Can tax regimes shape incentives to engage in armed conflict? This analysis links a central-government iron-ore tax reform to local violence and illegal extraction in India's Maoist belt.

This study investigates how physical proximity to ethnic outgroups influences intergroup political behavior.

India's Scheduled Areas, home to 100 million citizens and featuring reserved political offices for historically disadvantaged Scheduled Tribes, are examined systematically through a new village dataset. This study evaluates the effects on key pro-poor programs like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme.

New Delhi's housing policy intervention involved distributing home-price subsidies randomly to residents in Mumbai through a lottery system.

How does geography affect citizenship practices among the poor? Using survey data and qualitative research from northern India, this study finds an urban-rural divide. The urban poor expect less direct state response than their rural counterparts. They are more likely to use political brokers for claims.

This article investigates the use of decree power by elected governments in parliamentary systems, focusing on India as a case study. Contrary to theoretical expectations that legislative authority would prevent such moves, empirical evidence reveals frequent instances where Indian prime ministers bypass traditional legislative processes.

Can court-ordered accountability institutions improve human rights by curbing police violence? This study examines whether creating regional complaint bodies after a landmark Supreme Court ruling reduced abuses by Indian police.

In everyday policing, citizens and states interact significantly. Yet even within capable governments like India's, community experiences vary widely.

This article examines when peripheral minorities choose to identify with the state, their ethnic group, or a neighboring country. The focus is on how exposure to violence, psychological distance from the nation, and perceived national status shape tendencies toward separatism and irredentism.

Foreign policy belief systems have been studied extensively, but nearly all work focuses on Western democracies—chiefly the United States. The current security environment raises the question of whether elites in other regional powers hold foreign policy views with a similar internal structure. This article investigates that question for India, examining variance, structure, and shared elements in elite opinion.