In this overview article, we summarize recent research in progress that examines the potential and limitations of non-violent civil disobedience through the lens of the evolution of an iconic success: India's struggle for democratic self-rule. We present a theoretical framework that highlights...

I examine how the historical legacies of inter-ethnic complementarity and competition interact with contemporary electoral competition in shaping patterns of ethnic violence. Using local comparisons within Gujarat, a single Indian state known for both its non-violent local traditions and for...

This paper illustrates a practical framework for understanding and predicting political economy risk for project managers operating in a variety of developing country settings, including non-democracies, ethnically diverse environments and societies undergoing political transition. In doing so,...

Can combat experience foster organizational skills that engender political collective action? We use the arbitrary assignment of troops to frontline combat in World War II to identify the effect of combat experience on two channels that change local ethnic composition and future political...

The failure to align the incentives of self-interested groups in favor of beneficial reform is often considered a major cause of persistent underdevelopment around the world. However, much less is known about strategies that have been successful at overcoming such political economy challenges....

The role of deliberation among citizens to determine and forge agreement on policy is often seen as a crucial feature of democratic government. This paper provides the first large-N empirical evidence on the credibility of voice in a deliberative democracy in an non-laboratory setting, using a...

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...

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...