Party organizations create formal internal positions to manage work and outreach, and party workers use them to pursue advancement. Yet their consequences for hierarchy remain underexplored. We examine how party workers who hold formal positions differ from those who do not using two original surveys from India. In our first survey of 736 workers in one state, position holders are less supportive of intra-party democracy reforms, including internal primaries and the removal of nomination fees. Interviews suggest that position-holders value party organization control and centralization because their own advancement depended on it. In our national survey of 717 workers across 21 states and 17 parties, position holders report greater ambition, party attachment, and political satisfaction. Women and ethnic minorities are as likely as privileged groups to hold these positions, unlike in candidacy and elected office. Formal positions thus emerge as an underexplored threshold of loyalty and gatekeeping within party hierarchy.
How Internal Constraints Shape Electoral Collaboration Between Interest Organizations and Political Parties
Interest organizations within civil society that are traditionally nonpartisan sometimes mobilize voters for political parties. Prior research explains why these collaborations occur, but pays less attention to the internal constraints that shape them. Organizations must maintain their community credibility and limit overt partisanship, while parties must avoid perceptions that their rank-and-file or party brand is being pushed aside. We focus on how both sides manage these constraints through the specific forms their collaboration takes. We argue that each actor strategically chooses modes of electoral engagement that help balance internal pressures. We test this in India through multi-site shadowing during an election campaign and two pre-registered survey experiments, one with 730 interest organization representatives and another with 736 party workers. Our findings reveal how these calibrated alliances emerge in response to internal constraints, where organizations emphasize interest alignment to maintain an altruistic reputation, while parties emphasize instrumental alignment to justify collaboration as electorally useful.
Decentralizing Democratic Erosion: Local Election Delays in the World's Largest Democracy
Democratic erosion is typically studied as a national process, visible in attacks on elections, courts, and opposition actors. We call attention instead to local-level democratic erosion, particularly the suspension of elected local government in ways that attract far less public scrutiny while reshaping citizens' everyday democratic experience. We examine this process through the case of local election delays in India, where millions of citizens have gone years without elected local representatives despite the country's reputation for decentralized democracy. We argue that local-level democratic erosion is a deliberate strategy that consolidates elite political control while avoiding the public scrutiny that more visible forms of erosion would invite. Drawing on five original surveys of 8,076 respondents, including voters, opposition party workers, civil society representatives, and village council presidents, as well as approximately 70 semi-structured interviews, we present three findings. First, most respondents were unaware their local bodies were unelected. Second, pre-registered vignette experiments show citizens are not apathetic, but rather perceive that local democratic erosion produces meaningful costs. Third, a pre-registered information experiment demonstrates that learning about one's local body's unelected status significantly increases reported propensity to mobilize for democratic restoration.
When Coalitions Overreach: Voter Limits on Coalition-Based Electoral Mobilization by Interest Organizations
Coalition building is central to classic accounts of social movement success. We ask whether the logic carries into electoral mobilization when interest organizations seek to influence partisan politics under restrictive conditions. We argue that organizations carry coalition repertoires from movement politics into elections because coalition work expands reach beyond direct constituencies, helps coordinate groups with uneven capacities, separates partisan campaigning from organizational work, and builds on organizations' reputations as altruistic actors. However, voters evaluate these efforts through a different logic. They place greater weight on particularistic ties and local embeddedness, and become more skeptical of altruistic intent when outreach is conducted through broad coalition labels. We test this argument in India through interviews, campaign observations, and three survey experiments with organizational representatives and voters. We show that organizations adopt coalition based electoral mobilization, but voters impose an overlooked limit on coalition building by withholding trust from coalition outreach in elections.
The Politics of Indigenous-Reserved Seat Vacancies in India's Village Councils
