Georgetown Press has just published a great new book on Pakistan’s political parties, edited by Yale’s own Niloufer Siddiqui, together with Mariam Mufti and Shahar Shafqat. As I say in the blub, “This wonderful book is absolutely indispensable for understanding Pakistan’s democracy, and all of the main actors and interests involved. The various authors manage very effectively to combine deep knowledge of Pakistan’s political parties, social groups, and interests, with the comparative breadth to put everything into broader theoretical perspective.” Congratulations to all!

Many congratulations to Gautam Nair on successfully defending his 2020 Yale dissertation on “The Politics of Inequality and Redistribution in Two Domains.” It’s especially interesting for those interested in the “politics of freebies,” politicians’ gifts of things like TVs, Computers, Bicycles and other goods to voters in India and elsewhere. Gautam shows how these transfers have a lot more to do with the political benefits that accrue to the parties and their leaders than to what voters actually want. It’s a great addition to the literature on clientelism and political economy.

Gautam begins as a tenure track Assistant Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School in July 2020.

Many congratulations to former Ph.D. student Paul Kenny, now at ANU, who has been  awarded the American Political Science Association’s 2018 Robert A. Dahl Award, for the untenured scholar who has produced scholarship of the highest quality on the subject of democracy. Paul won for his substantially revised dissertation, now, a great book entitled Populism and Patronage: Why Populists Win Elections in India, Asia, and Beyond (OUP, 2017). Well done Paul!

Congrats to Gareth Nellis, who is currently an EGAP postdoctoral fellow at Berkeley, for accepting an Assistant Professor position at UCSD. You can read more about Gareth’s great work on party politics in South Asia here

March 2017: Congratulations to students Pia Raffler and Steve Rosenzweig, who each will be heading to Boston to take up Assistant Professor positions this summer. Steve, who has a terrific dissertation on political violence in Kenya that has more general implications, will join the Department of Political Science at Boston University. Pia, who has a great project on governance reforms, in Uganda and elsewhere, will join the Department of Government at Harvard University. Congratulations to both, and we wish Pia, Steve and their respective families all the best with the move!

Thanks to The Telegraph (Kolkata) for naming Army and Nation: The Military and Democracy in India since Independence one of its 2015 non-fiction books of the year. In its December 2015 review it says that “The depth and richness of Wilkinson’s research help unravel the subservient role that one of the largest standing armies in the world has diligently played to a democratic polity”

ARMY AND NATION was also named Vipul Dutta’s Book of the Year in Biblio: “A comprehensive account of the organisational principles of the Indian Army and employs a unique, inter-disciplinary methodology to address key concerns of civil-military relations in India….It is a significant addition to the scholarship on not just civil-military relations but also post-colonial ‘governance’…”

Other reviews of the book by Srinath Raghavan, C. Raja Mohan, Shashank Joshi and others can be found here.

Welcome to my web page! I teach and research on comparative politics here at Yale, where I’m also associated with the Institution for Social and Policy Studies and the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies.

This is where you can find out about my research, my undergraduate and graduate teaching, and more information about the graduate and undergraduate programs and events and activities in the Yale Political Science department.