Migrants and Machines: How Political Networks Form in Urbanizing India (with Adam Auerbach)
Princeton University Press, Studies in Political Behavior. Purchase here: Princeton (U.S.), Amazon and Midland Books (India).
As the Global South rapidly urbanizes, millions of people have migrated from the countryside to urban slums, which now house one billion people worldwide. The transformative potential of urbanization hinges on whether and how poor migrants are integrated into city politics. Popular and scholarly accounts paint migrant slums as exhausted by dispossession, subdued by local dons, bought off by wily politicians, or polarized by ethnic appeals. Migrants and Machine Politics shows how slum residents in India routinely defy such portrayals, actively constructing and wielding political machine networks to demand important, albeit imperfect, representation and responsiveness within the country’s expanding cities.
Awards:
2024 Sartori Book Award, Qualitative and Mixed-Methods Section, APSA.
2024 Best Book Award (co-winner), Experiments Section, APSA.
2024 Honorable Mention, Luebbert Award, Comparative Politics Section, APSA.
Listen to these podcasts on the book:
with Sneha Annavarapu, New Books Network.
with Milan Vaishnav, Grand Tamasha.
Reviews/Press: Hindustan Times, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, LSE Review of Books, Pacific Affairs.
