Street Theatre as Democratic Politics in Ahmedabad

Preventive War and Democratic Politics

I define the concept of preventive war, distinguish it from preemption and other sources of better-now-than-later logic, and examine numerous conceptual issues that confound theoretical and empirical analyses of prevention. I then consider the argument that democracies rarely if ever adopt preventive war strategies because such strategies are contrary to the preferences of democratic publics an...

Democratic Politics and Economic Reform in India

Fast thinking: Implications for democratic politics

Amajor programmeof research on cognition has been built around the idea that human beings are frequently intuitive thinkers and that human intuition is imperfect.Themodernmarketing of politics and the time-poor position ofmany citizens suggests that ‘fast’, intuitive, thinking inmany contemporary democracies is ubiquitous. This article explores the consequences that such fast thinking might hav...

Ethnicity and Democratic Politics In India Caste as a Differential Mobilizer in Bihar

Students of comparative development have found the Indian caste system of great interest as a social structure of salience in the modernization process. Indeed, it has served as an institution of upward social mobility, political mobilization and participation, and interest aggregation in recent decades. It has been suggested that, in its mobilizing role, caste works as a medium for transmittin...

Rational moralists: The role of fairness in democratic economic politics

In this paper, we empirically test for the influence of fairness considerations on the willingness to redistribute income in private and in democratic decisions. In contrast to standard explanations of income redistribution, our theory takes into account that prices shift decisively as we move from the sphere of private contributions to politics. At the polls, it is nearly costless to observe s...