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Countries around the world use various means to ensure that underrepresented groups gain legislative representation, including reserved seats and quotas for political party lists. Despite the fact that such measures are political interventions, the literature has mostly ignored their impact on electoral competition. We argue that reserved seats reduce the number of viable candidates and increase the extent to which competition revolves around major parties. Moreover, these effects should be most pronounced in lower-level elections, where candidates can more easily run outside major-party labels. Drawing on a rich collection of electoral data from India, we find that the effective number of candidates is lower in electoral districts with reservations, while vote shares for independent candidates are lower and vote shares for major parties are higher. These effects are largest in local elections and smallest in national elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional models of clientelism often assume poor voters have little or no choice over which local broker to turn to for help. Yet communities in many clientelistic settings are marked by multiple brokers who compete for a following. Such competition makes client choices, and the preferences guiding such choices, pivotal in fueling broker support. We examine client preferences for a pervasive broker—slum leaders—in the context of urban India. To identify resident preferences for slum leaders, we conducted an ethnographically informed conjoint survey experiment with 2,199 residents across 110 slums in two Indian cities. Contra standard emphases on shared ethnicity, we find residents place heaviest weight on a broker's capability to make claims on the state. A survey of 629 slum leaders finds client-preferred traits distinguish brokers from residents. In highlighting processes of broker selection, and the client preferences that undergird them, we underscore the centrality of clients in shaping local brokerage environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical research is challenging when studying informal spaces like urban slums, where extant scholarship is limited, government data are sparse or absent, and populations change rapidly due to eviction, environmental shocks, and the everyday churn of migration. Moreover, written materials and political ephemera generated within slums are rarely preserved in accessible state archives, limiting the usefulness of conventional archival research. In such contexts, the discovery of informal archives—unmapped, non-systematized collections of materials kept by individuals and groups in the spaces under study—can contribute to the reconstruction of local histories. This article draws on 20 months of fieldwork in India’s urban slums to offer insights on the collection and use of informal archival materials. These materials afford an intimate look at how the urban poor organize and make claims on the state. Their analysis, however, involves inferential challenges. Researchers must consider how processes of production, preservation, and provision shape the content of gathered historical materials and thus the inferences that can be drawn from them. Beyond urban slums, informal archives are likely to be useful sources of historical data for a range of studies in comparative politics, especially those that focus on informal institutions and local quotidian politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary How do slum dwellers organize and demand development from the state? The politics of urban slums has primarily been examined through the lens of clientelism. In contrast, associational activity has gone relatively understudied in these spaces, reserved instead as a focus of inquiry for middle-class neighborhoods. Drawing on twenty months of fieldwork and an original survey of 1,925 residents across 80 settlements in the north Indian cities of Jaipur, Rajasthan and Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, I find that local associations are prevalent features of political life in India’s slums. These associations—colloquially referred to as katchi basti vikas samitiyaan , or slum development committees—afford residents a degree of organizational formality in otherwise informal spaces. They provide a medium for making individual and collective claims on the state. While patron–client networks do pervade slums, this study demonstrates that vertical ties co-exist with horizontal associations, producing a multi-dimensional space in which residents mitigate risk and demand development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines patterns of voter turnout and electoral competition in India's urban parliamentary constituencies. It places the 2014 Lok Sabha elections in historical context, drawing on constituency-level data from national elections since 1977 to explore broad changes and continuities in electoral competition, party structures, and voter turnout, with particular focus on comparisons between urban and rural India. The purpose of the article is descriptive, seeking to fill a gap in the literature on electoral competition in urban India. I find evidence that India's urban constituencies have recently, on average, been less competitive and participatory than non-urban constituencies, though this has not been a consistent trend since the mid-1970s. This article concludes with a brief outline for a research agenda on electoral politics in urban India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• During India's Covid-19 lockdown, we conducted a phone survey of 321 slum leaders across 79 slums in two Indian cities. • Slum leaders persisted as problem-solvers during the lockdown and focused their efforts on requesting government relief. • Slum leader education and partisan ties correlate with their pandemic-time ability to gather information and make claims. • Disparities in household access to piped water fragment how difficult it is for residents to practice social distancing. Slum settlements have received significant attention for their vulnerabilities to the spread of Covid-19. To mitigate risks of transmission, and alleviate economic distress associated with containment measures, public health experts and international agencies are calling for community-driven solutions that harness local participation. In slum settlements, such approaches will encounter the informal slum leaders present across cities of the Global South. How are slum leaders positioned to address the health and livelihood threats of the pandemic within their neighborhoods? What problem-solving activities, if any, have they performed for residents during the pandemic? What factors shape success in those efforts? To answer these questions, we conducted a phone survey of 321 slum leaders across 79 slum settlements in two north Indian cities. The survey was conducted in April and May 2020, at the height of India's stringent national lockdown in response to the virus. Our survey reveals striking continuities with pre-pandemic politics. First, slum leaders persist in their problem-solving roles, even as they shift their efforts towards requesting urgently needed government relief (particularly food rations). Second, slum leaders vary in their reported ability to gather information about relief schemes, make claims, and command government responsiveness. The factors that inform the effectiveness of slum leaders during 'normal times', notably their education and degree of embeddedness in party networks, continue to do so during the lockdown. Slum leader reliance on partisan networks raises concerns regarding the inclusiveness of their efforts. Finally, slums are not uniformly challenged in maintaining social distancing. Pre-pandemic disparities in infrastructural development fragment the degree to which residents must depart from social distancing guidelines to secure essential services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]