Over fourteen months of field research studying manufacturing firms in South Asia - spread across three industries in fifteen cities in India and Pakistan - uncovered a remarkably consistent pattern of diversity in firm-level industrial strategy. Such a pattern cut across states and provinces, industries and national boundaries, thus presenting a challenge to state-centric explanations of firm behavior. Through interviews with more than two hundred firms, two categories of strategy emerged in every research site and in every sector. Some firms exhibited paternalistic relationships with their workers, conservative modes of financing and tended to see the state as a protector of indigenously developed norms. Other firms deployed professional institutions for the management of workers, liberal modes of financing including high levels of leverage, and tended to see that state as a promoter of international norms.

I argue that instead of strategies being derived as responses to government policy or market conditions, manufacturers in South Asia formulate relationships with other actors in the economy based on their perspective on the character of the economy and the means and ends of industrial production. Those who perceive the economy through technocratic perspectives tend to see the economy as a space ruled by universal norms and practices, and thus establish more systematic relationships with workers, finance and the state. Those who maintain embedded perspectives tend to see the economy as constituted by dense networks of individual relationships, and thus establish more personalistic relationships with workers and the state while building up finance internally. These perspectives often endure within firms over time, as second- and third-generation manufacturers follow the guidelines of the firm's founder. They do not correlate with a particular size of firm, industry or location, but do however correlate with the education and work experience of manufacturers and the strength of institutions within the firm over time.

Such cleavages in industrial strategy and manufacturers' perspectives reflect a broader division within South Asian society of the means and ends of economic development, one that was distilled and legitimated during national resistance against imperial rule. Some among the nationalist movement, who forwarded a vision of development based on socialistic economic planning, saw development as a rationalistic process of industrial catch-up, with the state as the central actor in disciplining and transforming society. Others held that development lay in the rejection of western norms and values, and a return to a mythical pre-colonial society of traditional hierarchies and economic relations submerged in moral frameworks, where the state would serve as a protector of this organic society. These positions in the nationalist movement both reflected and consolidated divisions among indigenous society, divisions that are operative more than six decades later in the technocratic and embedded perspectives among manufacturers in contemporary South Asia. The continued existence of such dual modes of capitalist strategy and practice also represents a portrait of the South Asian state that - far from disciplining society into a unitary institutional framework or being prevented from doing so by capture - actively maintains and supports multiple modes of doing business. Based on the study of Indian regulatory documents, I suggest that this is because the state tries to forward several different developmental interests, from increasing exports to creating employment, simultaneously, rather than maintaining a singular focus on maximizing economic growth.

Why do some political families flourish, and others decline quickly? While the presence of political families has been a long-standing feature of many countries, crucial questions about the nature of political succession and the underlying conditions that make it possible remain under-studied. This dissertation focuses on the aspects of the local political economy, and networks that control it, to propose a theory of dynastic perpetuation in India and elsewhere. Specifically, I argue that the diversification of economic resources and political power are key factors that determine the strength and longevity of political families. To test this theory, I map the familial connections of the winners and the runners-up from all elections held in Uttar Pradesh (India) between 1974 to 2019. The analysis shows that politicians from dominant castes and those with greater economic endowment are more likely to form successful political families. In addition to this, I take a closer look at dynamism within political families by classifying them into three distinct groups – families that have been in power for a long period of time, the old political families that have declined in power and status, and new and rising political families. I show that families that successfully diversify their political and economic portfolios are more likely to perpetuate themselves. This diversification strategy, which in part comes from the political family’s access to local political economy networks, allows them to project influence even during electorally leaner periods. While most successful political families remain largely confined to their local constituencies, I show how some families manage to scale up their network and influence, while retaining their local power base, through a case study. Finally, I suggest that understanding the rise and decline of political families is key to reflecting on the changing nature of representative democracy in India and elsewhere. And as long as the local state remains beholden to the control of elite networks, political families are likely to flourish, under different guises.

This dissertation project seeks to understand the political dynamics of ruling parties under strong presidencies at the legislative recruitment stage with a regional focus on South Korea. The first paper introduces my main argument regarding how strong presidencies can determine the form and function of ruling party reforms such as legislative primaries. I argue that under strong presidential systems, wherein the executive abides by formal rules but is still willing to push her de facto power to its constitutional limits, ruling party elites - especially those who do not belong to the president's faction - can counteract presidential discretion by voluntarily democratizing the candidate selection process. I provide empirical evidence of these dynamics from South Korea during 2008-2016. The second paper formalizes the conditions under which ruling party elites endogenously choose to implement legislative primaries as a means to prevent the president from interfering in the party nomination process and provides implications of ruling party reforms on voter welfare. Whereas the first two papers study the contexts under which competing factions within the ruling party are able to agree upon the party's nomination processes and outcomes, the third paper examines a case of a failed coordination. The paper draws upon empirical evidence from the 2008 South Korea Legislative Election, where some party elites chose to defect from the ruling party and successfully formed a transitory electoral alliance.

How do welfare programs shape the economic and political behavior of recipients? This dissertation is a series of three empirical articles that examine the effects of two programs in India. The first paper finds that a subsidized housing program increases the educational attainment and employment prospects of beneficiaries' children. The second finds that this same program increases everyday local level political participation to improve public goods and services. The third paper finds that a national rural employment guarantee decreases participation in state-level elections among the target beneficiary group. Overall, the dissertation finds that welfare programs can alter beneficiaries' economic and political behavior in important and unexpected ways, thereby providing a vast open agenda for future research.

Many countries make special institutional arrangements to guarantee the political representation of minorities. This is usually justified as a way of reducing ethnic tensions and improving the quality of democratic representation. In addition, it is often assumed that minority representatives will act in the interest of their group. India has had reserved seats for the Scheduled Castes (SCs, the former `untouchables') in their state assemblies since independence. Reserved constituencies are single member districts where only SCs can run for election, while the whole population votes for them irrespective of their caste group. In this dissertation I explore the effects of these quotas between 1974 and 2007. I am able to control for the selection bias inherent in quotas being non-randomly assigned in the 1970s by matching more than 3,000 constituencies on pre-treatment variables from 1971. Using unique new data at the constituency-level for 15 Indian states, I show that the quotas have been effective at guaranteeing the political presence of SCs and integrating them into main-stream politics. Contrary to the bias often reported against SC politicians, they are not much different from other politicians: they represent similar parties, have similar rerunning patterns, and hold many cabinet positions. In fact, rather than being spokespersons of the SC community, SC politicians seem to be agents of their parties rather than agents of their group. The presence of SC politicians seems to have had positive effects on caste bias in society at large, though, with voters in reserved areas reporting less caste discrimination than voters in non-reserved areas. Considering how strong the social boundary of untouchability used to be in Indian society, this can be seen as a huge achievement in itself. But the integration of SC politicians, and the fact that they are answerable to mostly non-SC voters, also means that their presence has not done much to improve the substantive representation of SC interests. This can therefore serve as a reminder that there are clear trade-offs in institutional design and that an electoral system might work well to reduce social bias and prevent conflict without improving the substantive representation of minority groups.

ATP binding cassette (ABC) transporters are a family of proteins whose activity is vital to cell detoxification, protection against xenobiotics and oxidative stress, and maintenance of homeostasis of endogenous compounds. Subtle changes in endogenous expression level of these transporters can have significant clinical implications. In particular, the impact of such variation on the role of ABC transporters in transport of pharmaceutical agents is of interest; inter-individual differences in expression of ABC transporters can result in changes in exposure to pharmaceutical agents or their metabolites, leading to altered drug efficacy or drug-induced toxicities. Variation in gene expression can be caused by a number of factors that modulate the "normal" activity during transcription or translation. In this study, mechanisms that regulate mRNA or protein expression of ATP-binding cassette transporters were characterized in human tissues. First, the impact of DNA sequence variation on mRNA expression across individuals was evaluated in the human kidney. Several expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) were identified for ABC transporters in the kidney, and one eQTL for ABCG2 (BCRP) was validated in an in vitro reporter-gene assay. Next, the role of alternative splicing in regulation of transporter expression was explored using transcriptome sequencing data from multiple individuals in several human tissues. Examples of splicing events that were found to modulate transporter expression across individuals include alternate 5 prime untranslated regions (5' UTRs) in the genes ABCC5 and ABCA8. Further, a splicing event in the gene ABCC6 was identified that produces a premature termination codon, triggering the nonsense mediated decay process; this event may be responsible for regulating inter-tissue expression of ABCC6. Finally, transcription factor regulators of ABC transporters were identified by searching for transcription factor binding motif enrichment in sets of genes co-expressed with ABC transporters in several human tissues. A number of potential transcriptional regulators of transporters were identified.

Under what conditions do political parties use pre-electoral violence as a campaign strategy in Bangladesh? Pre-electoral violence has been a consistently regular precursor to each and every election in Bangladesh, with the most recent national election on January 5, 2014, being one of the bloodiest and most undemocratic. However, not all constituencies in Bangladesh experience the same level of pre-electoral violence. There are some like Dhaka - 8 that saw approximately 150 episodes of violence prior to the 2014 elections, while others like Gopalgonj - 3 saw none. What explains this variation? In this paper, I argue and demonstrate using a negative binomial regression model as well as case study and interview data that the ways in which individuals interface with the state (either through the bureaucracy on their own or through the use of local leaders) and the level of information parties have on voter preferences impact the level of pre-electoral violence in constituencies across Bangladesh.

Can gender-based "enclaves" facilitate women's access to justice? I create an unprecedented dataset based on millions of police-reports from 2015, and leverage the manner in which institutions called all-women police stations were opened in Haryana state, India. I find that the creation of enclaves in law enforcement does not increase registered crime. In fact, the intervention lowers the case load at standard stations by justifying the deflection of gendered crimes, reduces responsibilities for policewomen, and increases travel cost for victims seeking redress. The institutions formalize the "counseling" of victims by encouraging reconciliation with abusers at the expense of case registration. Broadly, I argue that 'representation as separation' may fail to generate positive outcomes for victims and administrators.

In a second paper, I highlight the patterns of exclusion faced by women in law enforcement. By classifying India's Penal Code, and leveraging an instrument, I demonstrate that policewomen are tasked with specific cases, especially non-heinous gendered crimes that the bureaucracy prefers to address informally. Nevertheless, female supervisors are able to mitigate such occupational segregation; they allocate policewomen diverse tasks, and they play a causal role in assigning female investigators more cases.

In a third paper, Sharon Barnhardt and I examine whether the link between representation and perceived legitimacy of public officials is moderated by the roles women are seen to perform within an agency. With the help of a novel video-based experiment, we find that context matters: policewomen are seen as more legitimate when tackling non-gendered cases compared to gendered crimes - especially by other women. The findings contribute to scholarship on gender and the conditions under which representation can improve trust in public officials.

This dissertation seeks to understand whether and how regulatory compliance can be achieved in areas of state weakness. The existing literature suggests that, absent a strong and capable state, compliance with law should be irregular, particularly when legal norms differ from social norms. It also generally assumes that the law is widely known and understood and that all parties are similarly situated to comply with it, assumptions that are untenable in areas of state weakness and where poverty is widespread. Utilizing a natural experiment along the open India-Nepal border, I examine compliance with three different regulations—those related to conservation, education and child labor. My large-N survey and qualitative data indicate that in areas of state weakness inaccurate legal knowledge and widespread poverty are significant barriers to widespread regulatory compliance, but that states that design and implement their regulations pragmatically can work around these obstacles and achieve widespread compliance at relatively little cost. In the cases I examined, regulatory pragmatism involves avoiding bureaucratic principal-agent problems and designing for legal knowledge dissemination via delegated enforcement or through local leaders. It also involves taking steps to reduce the cost of compliance for the poor so that they can afford to both comply and meet their own basic needs. The implications of these findings are potentially far-reaching. They suggest that regulatory pragmatism can guide weak or under-funded states to effective legal design and implementation choices in a variety of contexts. As a result, these states should be able to generate large-scale compliance in the absence of significant state capacity.

After being elected through quotas, how do female politicians navigate post-colonial and male-led bureaucracies, which continue to exert inordinate control over resource allocation for policy implementation? Despite a booming literature in the effects of gender quotas, we know little about how governance outcomes are shaped by interactions between politicians and bureaucrats, especially given bureaucratic cultures tend to be dominantly governed by men. In hierarchical administrative settings, village politicians need sub-district and district-level bureaucrats to implement policies, but these politicians do not have direct authority over the bureaucrats they rely on. When politicians cannot reward or sanction bureaucrats, what governs bureaucratic behavior and importantly, does it bias against women in politics?

I fill this gap by theorizing that where bureaucrats have more power than politicians, bureaucrats’ gender biases and career incentives lead them to help politicians who bureaucrats perceive to have the most political capital to support bureaucrats' own career goals–men from ethnic majority groups. Within the administrative hierarchy, mid-level bureaucrats seek to build a positive reputation amongst high-level political and bureaucratic principals to secure desirable job transfers. Bureaucrats' explicit and implicit biases about women's low competence, low ability to mobilize citizens, and poor networks with high-level politicians lead them to discriminate against female politicians. I show that this dynamic leads to female politicians experiencing nearly 8 percentage points higher bureaucratic resistance—where bureaucrats refuse to help them with requests—than men.

I provide support for this theory with interviews conducted during five months of fieldwork in the Indian states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. I then provide both descriptive and causal evidence of explicit and implicit bureaucratic bias against female politicians using a conjoint experiment, an implicit association test, and descriptive data from a survey of mid-level, sub-district bureaucrats in the state of Telangana (n=253). Next, I provide evidence from a phone survey of village-level politicians (n=1,016) in Telangana to show that female politicians are significantly less likely to report receiving help from these bureaucrats than male politicians. Lastly, I turn to a natural experiment that tests the size of the real-world resource penalties that women politicians incur because of bias. While I do not find significant gender differences across men's and women's constituencies for the outcomes I study for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, I use survey data to suggest policy areas where these penalties may exist for future research.

While the growing literature on gender and politics elucidates how voters and political parties act as gatekeepers to women's political advancements, this dissertation project provides the first theoretical and empirical account of how bureaucrats can undermine the success of female politicians. It further demonstrates the detrimental consequences of the bureaucracy not only on women’s career trajectories, but also on the constituencies they govern.