Anjali Thomas

Georgia Institute of Technology | GT · School of International Affairs

Decentralized Governance and Accountability: Academic Research and the Future of Donor Programming. Edited by Jonathan A. Rodden and Erik Wibbels. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 310p. $100.00 cloth. - Volume 18 Issue 2 - Anjali Thomas

How do politicians with influence over public works programs balance their incentives to gain electoral support with their proclivities for rent seeking? This article argues that government elites in parliamentary systems manage this trade-off by concentrating rent-seeking opportunities in their own hands while facilitating efficient public goods p...

A key finding in the political economy literature is that political elites display partisan biases when allocating public resources. While previous studies posit that such biases are driven by politicians’ motivations to target benefits directly to certain groups of ordinary voters, this paper develops the argument that national politicians also ta...

How do politicians with influence over public works programs balance their incentives to gain electoral support with their proclivities for rent-seeking? This research argues that government elites in parliamentary systems manage this trade-off by concentrating rent-seeking opportunities in their own hands while facilitating efficient public goods...

A key finding in the political economy literature is that political elites display partisan biases when allocating public resources. While previous studies posit that such biases are driven by politicians' motivations to target benefits directly to certain groups of ordinary voters, this article develops the argument that national politicians also...

Democracy Protests: Origins, Significance and Consequences. By Dawn Brancati. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 228p. $99.99 cloth, $29.99 paper. - Volume 15 Issue 4 - Anjali Thomas Bohlken

Response to Dawn Brancati’s review of Democratization from Above: The Logic of Local Democracy in the Developing World - Volume 15 Issue 4 - Anjali Thomas Bohlken

Dynastic politics, usually presumed to be the antithesis of democracy, is a routine aspect of politics in many modern democracies. This book introduces a new theoretical perspective on dynasticism in democracies, using original data on twenty-first-century Indian parliaments. It argues that the roots of dynastic politics lie at least in part in mod...

Democratization from Above seeks to explain why some national and state governments in the developing world introduce reforms to make local governance more democratic while others neglect or actively undermine democracy at local levels of government. The study challenges conventional wisdom that local democratization is implemented as a means of gr...

“Toute Constitution est un régicide.” l’abbé Rauzan, quoted in de Wasquerel and Yvert 2002: 61 Introduction The topic of this chapter is the origins of government responsibility to parliaments, the shift of the power to appoint governments from the monarch to elected assemblies. Whereas one can adduce several reasons to study the history of parliam...

Most studies of Hindu-Muslim riots in India have tended to emphasize the effects of social, cultural, or political factors on the occurrence of ethnic violence. In this article, the authors focus on the relationship between economic conditions and riots. Specifically, this article examines the effect of economic growth on the outbreak of Hindu-Musl...

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 betwe...

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