Research

Book Project

Status Aspirations: Decoding the right-wing populist appeal for poor minorities in India, United States and Brazil

Once in power, how do economically center-right Right-wing Populist leaders attract poor and minority voters to their social coalition?

My dissertation project explores how right-wing populists appeal to marginalized voters in unequal societies, with the cases of Narendra Modi in India, Donald Trump in the United States and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. In the absence of vastly expanded redistributive or affirmative action programs, what makes poor and minority voters in these countries choose to re-elect these Populists after a first term? What do these populists claim to have done for the poor and the marginalized in countries with gaping social inequalities, and why is their account convincing to blacks, hispanics, lower castes, poor voters at the bottom of social hierarchies?

I focus on both top down factors (what populists say they did in office for poor and minorities) as well as bottom up imperatives (what voters believe they did in office and why).

For three years, I interviewed hundreds of low income voters in the three countries, analyzed observational data, qualitatively and quantitatively coded campaign speeches with the help of research assistants, ran survey experiments and analysed observational data. I am in the process of consolidating this in a book project.

Status Aspirations, Populism and the Politics of Inequality

Together, these two papers investigate the political behavior and attitudes of low-status and high-status groups in unequal societies - including how an individual's social status shapes self-concept and its consequent impact on political behavior.

Status_Gains_Final_Oct_2026.pdf

When National Status Feels Personal: Subjective Status Gains Among Low-Status Citizens

Under Review

Available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7557058

Why do national status appeals matter to citizens who occupy disadvantaged positions in domestic social hierarchies? Existing research on status politics emphasizes the political consequences of threatened standing among historically privileged groups. I develop a complementary account: claims of collective national ascent can raise citizens' perceived social standing. I test this argument in a field survey experiment with 2,240 low-income non-Muslim respondents in Uttar Pradesh before India’s 2024 national election. An intervention centered on recent achievements portraying India as rising in international standing increased respondents’ self-perceived social status. Substantial effects are evident among respondents occupying disadvantaged positions in caste, gender, and income hierarchies, including Scheduled Castes, Other Backward Classes, women, and the poorest respondents in the sample, although effects are not systematically larger for these groups. The intervention did not increase incumbent support on average. Instead, its electoral effect varied with respondents’ pre-treatment expectations about their own financial future. The findings expand theories of status politics beyond status threat, showing that, within a low-income population, membership in a national collective portrayed as rising can become personally status-enhancing for citizens occupying disadvantaged social positions, while identifying an important limit on when national-ascent appeals yield electoral rewards.

Social Privilege and Perceived Economic Position: Rank Inflation in the U.S. and India

Under Review

How does social privilege shape perceptions of economic standing? Using nationally representative data from the United States and India, two democracies structured by durable hierarchies of race and caste, I show that socially dominant groups (white Americans and upper-caste Indians) place themselves higher on the economic ladder than minorities with comparable incomes and report greater financial satisfaction. I term this pattern rank inflation. Mediation analyses demonstrate that subjective economic standing partly explains stronger anti-redistributive attitudes among high-status groups. The findings suggest that economic self-perception is shaped not only by material resources but also by inherited social status, extending beyond class identification to perceptions of relative income and financial satisfaction. The results clarify how social identity conditions perceived economic standing and highlight that survey measures of relative income and financial well-being may reflect the imprint of social hierarchy as much as material position.

Preprint available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/408392915_Social_Privilege_and_Perceived_Economic_Position_Rank_Inflation_in_the_US_and_India

Research on Aspiration and Opportunity

Together, these two papers describe how a desire for and expectations of social mobility influence what policies people expect from the state using observational data from United States and experimental data from India.

Status Aspirations and right-wing populism

Working paper, Presented at APSA Conference, Sep 2026

Taking Minorities Along, but only when times are good!

Working Paper, Online survey experiment

Climbing Blind: Attitudes and political preferences of Aspirational Minorities

Work in progress

Political Economy under Populism: Institutions, Information and Business

Loud or Loyal? Business Response to Populism in Power

Manuscript. Presented at the Annual American Political Economy (CAPE) Research Conference, July 2026

Populist leaders in power reshape the strategic environment in which firms operate, including through impact on market institutions relevant for business operations. This article develops a framework of business response to populists in power, and draws out implications for how populists alters how power is distributed between business and the state. Drawing on contemporary cases, the article illustrates the distinction between dominant mechanisms: discretionary institutional control versus politicization under continuing institutional constraints.

Narrative Capture or Narrative Delegitimation?

Working paper, available on request

Why do some populist incumbents capture media and oversight institutions, while others engage primarily on rhetorical attacks against them (for instance, calling media organizations "fake news")? The paper shows how the political economy of changing media business models, amongst other constraints, in turn enables diverging institutional pathways that influence the content and coverage of political information in democracies.

Capacity-Enhancing Transparency: Public Complaint Disclosure and Regulatory Capacity at the CFPB

Working Paper

How can transparency strengthen regulation without expanding formal authority? This paper examines the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s public consumer complaint database and argues that transparent disclosure can operate as a capacity-enhancing form of regulation. By making complaint data publicly available, the CFPB transformed individual grievances into a shared informational infrastructure. This infrastructure enhanced internal regulatory intelligence, enabled distributed analysis by external actors, and reshaped firm and consumer behavior through public visibility. Together, these effects plausibly strengthened the Bureau’s ability to detect emerging problems, prioritize supervisory attention, and shape market conduct, even without new rules or sanctions. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative case study, the paper shows how transparency can generate informational effects that strengthen regulatory capacity over time. The findings extend scholarship on transparency and policy feedback by demonstrating how disclosure reshapes the informational and behavioral environment in which regulation operates, offering a distinct pathway through which states can regulate markets under resource constraints.

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