Irfan Nooruddin’s research while affiliated with Georgetown University and other places

This essay examines support for globalization in developing countries, challenging the prevailing intellectual and policy consensus that globalization predominantly benefits less developed countries (LDCs). While globalization has been linked to economic growth and poverty reduction, rising inequality and discontent in both developing and developed countries raise critical questions about its long-term sustainability. In developed nations, populist leaders channel discontent with job precarity and wage pressures to criticize globalization, often portraying developing countries as the beneficiaries of global markets at the expense of blue-collar workers in richer nations. Conversely, in LDCs, scepticism about globalization is growing, particularly as income disparities widen and employment insecurity rises. We report three key findings: citizens in developing countries become more disillusioned with globalization over time, especially low-skilled workers and younger generations. This disenchantment mirrors the backlash seen in wealthy nations, suggesting that without substantial reforms to global trade systems, support for openness may erode across both developing and developed countries. A collapse of the international economic order, with negative global consequences, including supply chain disruptions and slower economic growth, is a potential outcome. The essay highlights the need for a reassessment of globalization’s role in developing economies to prevent further political and economic instability.

Women form a large part of the voting public in India. In the 2009 Indian National Election post-election survey, 82% of all adult women surveyed reported voting, but only 32% said that they were interested in politics. The paradox between high female turnout but low levels of interest has been noted in multiple developing country contexts, but the phenomenon is under-theorized. We suggest the reason is that women’s ideas (interest in politics) are discouraged and suppressed by societal patriarchal norms enforced in the household, but women’s bodies (their votes) are valued in competitive elections. We illustrate our argument using matched samples from two rounds (2009 and 2014) of the Indian National Election Survey and an original post-election survey in 2019. We find that women are consistently less likely to report either an interest in politics, or an opinion on political issues, if their spouse or an adult family member observes the interview. Our findings suggest that women’s political agency is systematically under-estimated by researchers, and that women are more likely to assert themselves politically in survey contexts, if given the privacy to do so.

Liberal democracy is facing renewed challenges from a growing group of states undergoing democratic backsliding. While entrenched autocrats have long resented and contested the established liberal order, we know far less about how newer backsliding states behave on the international stage. We argue these states, who joined prominent western liberal institutions prior to their backsliding, will use their established membership in these organizations both to protect themselves from future scrutiny regarding adherence to liberal democratic values and to oppose the prevailing western liberal norms that increasingly conflict with their evolving interests. Using voting data from the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) from 2006-2021, we show that backsliding states are more likely to vote against targeted resolutions that name and shame specific countries. We supplement this analysis with detailed data from the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) and combine regression analysis and a structural topic model (STM) to show that backsliding states are more critical in their UPR reports when evaluating advanced western democracies, and more likely to emphasize issues that align with their own interests while de-emphasizing ones that might threaten government power and control over citizens.

How do conflicts within a country's borders affect its behavior beyond them? We argue that fighting insurgencies at home shapes a country's human rights posture at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC). States often suppress insurgencies using methods that violate their international human rights commitments. They are therefore hesitant to condemn other countries’ alleged violations for fear of reciprocal condemnation of their own actions. This is especially true in countries with greater media freedom where the media is more likely to hold the state accountable for human rights violations, and to highlight its apparent hypocrisy internationally. Such states, we argue, are more likely to vote against or abstain from resolutions that target individual states for human rights transgressions. We test this claim with a global statistical analysis of country voting patterns at the UNHRC from 1973 to 2017. Our results yield new insights into the determinants of countries’ voting behavior in multilateral human rights fora.

There is a widespread perception that we are witnessing a period of democratic decline, manifesting itself in varieties of democratic backsliding such as the manipulation of elections, marginalization and repression of regime opponents and minorities, or more incremental executive aggrandizement. Yet others are more optimistic and have argued that democracy is in fact resilient, or that we are observing coinciding trends of democratic decline but also expansion. This forum highlights key issues in the debate on democracy's decline, which center on conceptual and measurement issues, agreement on the phenomenon but not its nature or severity, the importance of international factors, the emphasis we should put on political elites versus citizens, and the consequences of backsliding for global politics. Staffan I. Lindberg provides an empirical perspective on the scope and severity of democracy's decline, and argues that polarization and misinformation are important drivers for this current wave of autocratization. Susan D. Hyde highlights the detrimental consequences of reduced support for democracy by the international community, which has affected civil society organizations—important arbiters of democracy—especially severely. Challenging some of these conclusions, Irfan Nooruddin claims that any gains for democracy after the end of the Cold War were short-lived, failing to sustain democracy because of an overemphasis on elections and a disregard for structural factors. Finally, Larry M. Bartels argues that we need to look to political elites and not citizens if we want to protect democracy in the United States and elsewhere, which has important implications for how we study democracy and its challenges.

President Trump and Prime Minister Modi often invoked their two nation’s claims as “oldest and largest” democracies to trumpet the naturalness of the US-India alliance. Shared democratic values was the glue that supposedly bound the two countries together. This contribution argues that the cynical and opportunistic invocation of democratic values by both governments damaged the cause of democracy globally. Both have attacked the independence of the press, civil society, and judiciary; and democratic backsliding and religious intolerance has worsened in both countries. The legitimacy of America’s democratic credentials, already battered by Trump, is irreparably tainted by its embrace of Modi’s India. The victim of this illiberal consensus is democracy internationally.

Civil conflict increases incumbents’ vulnerability, expands their coercive capacity, enervates public good provision, and stifles public opposition. Consequently, we expect that elections held during civil conflict will feature more incumbent-perpetrated election violence. We test our argument with disaggregated data on election violence, generating two principal findings. First, elections held during civil conflict are more likely to feature violent coercion by incumbents. Second, this effect does not depend on the conflict's intensity or political salience, but is endemic to conflict-affected societies as a class. This raises questions about the nature of elections in conflict-affected societies and the relationship between forms of political violence.