Anjali Thomas Bohlken

Contact Information: Anjali Thomas Bohlken Wilf Family Department of Politics New York University email: at697@nyu.edu

Curriculum Vitae

Education

Ph.D. , Department of Politics, New York University, 2010 (Expected)

        Dissertation: "The Paradox of Decentralization: Internal Party Organization and the Political Logic of Decentralization in India"

Policy-makers often advocate decentralization as a means of improving governance and reducing poverty in the developing world. But why would government elites voluntarily choose to create and empower elected governments at the local level? The dissertation seeks to address this puzzle by exploiting variation within India in the extent to which state governments decentralized power to local governments. I develop the novel argument that government elites have an incentive to decentralize when features of their party's internal organization cause them to lose control of their party's network of local activists on whom they rely to gain votes. Through decentralization, government leaders are able to bypass the party organization by empowering elected local representatives who deliver them votes in return. To test the theoretical predictions linking internal party organization and decentralization, I develop new measures of two key aspects of internal party organization and collect data on these measures for 17 Indian states between 1970 and 2005 using party archives and other sources. The analysis based on these data, combined with original data on political decentralization, supports the hypothesis that government elites have an incentive to decentralize when they lose control of their party's organizational network. Multiple methods are used to develop and test the argument including game-theoretic modeling, field interviews with politicians, party officials and bureaucrats, case studies of individual states and a variety of statistical techniques including a quasi-experiment. Implications of the argument for the political and economic consequences of decentralization are also examined through the use of political and economic data at the village and household level. The findings suggest the paradox that, rather than empowering ordinary citizens, decentralization tends to increase elite control over local politics. From a policy perspective, the results contain an important lesson for those who advocate decentralization as a means of increasing local independence or as a way to strengthen democracy.

Dissertation Committee: Kanchan Chandra (co-chair), David Stasavage (co-chair), Neal Beck and Adam Przeworski                 
M.A., Department of Politics, New York University, 2006

A.B. Government, Dartmouth College, 2000

Other

ICPSR Summer Program, University of Michigan, 2005 (Coursework in Bayesian Statistics)

Research

Interests:

Comparative Politics (Governance, Political Accountability, Intra-Party Politics, Politics of South Asia)
Political Economy (Political Economy of Development, applied formal theory)
Political Methodology (Causal Inference, Bayesian Methods)

Publications and Working Papers:

"Coups, Elections and the Predatory State", Forthcoming, Journal of Theoretical Politics
   
Even in the absence of elections, incumbents face threats to their survival which could induce them to reduce self-interested rent-seeking behavior. I compare the differences in incentives for incumbents to reduce rent extraction when they face a threat of being overthrown as opposed to when they face competitive elections. The key difference between the situations is that while voters do not gain office as a result of removing the incumbent, groups which overthrow the government assume power as a result of their actions. The results show that the threat of a coup sometimes leads incumbents to extract less than they do under elections. When the value of holding office in the future is sufficiently high, however, the threat of a coup cannot discipline the incumbent at all. I also find that incumbents facing both electoral and coup threats are either as likely, or under certain conditions, less likely to be overthrown than incumbents facing just a coup threat. The results are consistent with existing empirical evidence on the influence of regimes on economic performance and on the occurrence of coups. 

 "Ethnic Violence and Economic Growth: An Empirical Investigation of Hindu-Muslim Riots in India" (with Ernest Sergenti), Forthcoming, Journal of Peace Research.  

(Click here for a link to an article in Vox by Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel that discusses the paper)

While several recent works on the occurrence of Hindu-Muslim riots in India have emphasized social, cultural, and political explanations, we focus on examining the economic causes of these riots.  We examine the effect of economic growth on the outbreak of Hindu-Muslim riots in 15 Indian states between 1982 and 1995.  Controlling for other factors, we find that just a 1% increase in the growth rate decreases the expected number of riots by over 5%.  While short-term changes in growth influence the occurrence of riots, we find no evidence of a relationship between the levels of wealth in a state and the incidence of ethnic riots.  These results are robust to controlling for a number of other factors such as economic inequality, demographic variables, political competition, temporal lags, spillover effects from adjacent states, state fixed effects, and year effects. We employ instrumental variables methods, using rainfall changes as an instrument for growth, to address concerns about reverse causality and omitted variables bias.

``Conceding Control?: The Political Economy of Decentralization in India''. Working Paper.

"Could ‘People’s Empowerment’ have Political Advantages?: Using Regression Discontinuity Design to Assess the Political Benefits of Decentralization in India''. In Progress. 

"The Origins of Parliamentary Responsibility" (with Adam Przeworski and Tamar Asadurian). Working Paper.

"Democracy, Autocracy and the Individual Influence of Rulers". Working Paper.

Conference Presentations

``Could ‘People’s Empowerment’ have Political Advantages?: Using Regression Discontinuity Design to Assess the Political Benefits of Decentralization in India''
-Poster to be presented at the 2009 Annual Conference of the Society for Political Methodology, New Haven, CT. (Funded Presenter)

``Conceding Control?: The Political Economy of Decentralization in India''
       -Paper Presented at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association Conference, Chicago, IL.
       -Poster presented at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association Conference, Toronto.

``Individual Leaders and Economic Growth: Natural Experiments and the Identification of Local versus Average Treatment Effects''
        -Poster Presented at the 2008 Annual Conference of the Society for Political Methodology, Ann Arbor, MI. (Funded Presenter)

"Coups, Elections and the Predatory State"
        -Presented at the 2008 Annual Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL.

"Democracy, Autocracy and the Individual Influence of Rulers" 
        -Presented at the 2007 Annual Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL.       

"The Elusive Ballot Box: "Democratic Filters", 1776-2004" (with Tamar Asadurian, Carolina Curvale, Sunny Kaniyathu)
        - Presented at the 2006 Annual Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association

"Ethnic Violence and Economic Growth: An Empirical Investigation of Hindu-Muslim Riots in India" (with Ernest Sergenti)
       - Presented at the 2005 Annual Conference of the American Political Science Association
       - Presented at the 2005 meeting of the Laboratory in Comparative Ethnic Politics (LiCEP), San Diego, CA