The Gabriel A. Almond Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best doctoral dissertation in the field of comparative politics.
Citation from the Award Committee:
Feyaad Allie’s dissertation “Power, Exclusion, and Identity: The Politics of Muslim Marginalization in India” was selected unanimously from a very strong field of candidates as the winner of the 2024 Gabrial A. Almond Award. Allie explores the roots of Muslim exclusion in India, as well as the reasons why this political exclusion is so difficult to overcome even when Muslim candidates are elected. Whereas much other work on representation in contemporary India focuses on democratic backsliding at the systemic level, Allie centers the experience of Muslims, who, unlike other marginalized groups have failed to see political gains in recent decades. Even as the Muslim share of population has grown, Allie shows, their representation in elected office has declined. Moreover, where Muslims have broken through and won elected office, they are rarely able to retain it in subsequent elections. This argument challenges our understanding of the challenges facing democracy in contemporary India, arguing that its problems are more deeply historically rooted, and predate the recent dominance by the BJP.
Allie’s theory explains not only when Muslim candidates get nominated, but also which parties are more likely to nominate them, which Muslim candidates are most effective, and which parties among those that do are most likely to win. This last element of the argument, which introduces the idea that parties vary in their ability to signal that Muslim candidates will be constrained from favoring their in-group, generates some especially precise predictions that Allie is able to test with fine-grained data about candidates and party leader characteristics. An especially interesting feature of the dissertation is its argument about the dilemma that faces Muslim politicians once in office. Because winning election as a Muslim requires gaining support from Hindu voters, these politicians must balance pressures from the Muslim community for descriptive representation with pressures to deliver for the Hindu voters that supported them. Muslim victory therefore both motivates Hindu nationalist politicians to mobilize Hindu identity against them in subsequent elections, and divides Muslim voters among various sub-identities competing for attention from the Muslim incumbent. The resulting “representation trap” rooted in the reactions of both marginalized and dominant groups explains why breakthrough victories by Muslim politicians do not result in longer-term representation.
The committee was impressed with the empirical research Allie conducted. The project draws on significant in-depth qualitative fieldwork, a massive data effort to code the religious identity of Indian politicians in all national and state-level elections since 1962, and a survey of Hindu and Muslim voters with various embedded experiments. The resulting analysis provides important insight into the causes of political exclusion, the consequences of breakthrough by marginalized groups (based on a regression discontinuity design), and the long-term trends in Muslim representation. Thus, the dissertation as a whole provides a novel and compelling explanation for the political exclusion of the world’s largest minority group, and rigorous evidence of a variety of types that support its findings. Its framework also points to insights that can help to understand dominant group consolidation and marginalized group divisions in other contemporary multi-ethnic democracies. In combining an important research question, creative theories, and careful multi-method empirical analysis, Allie makes important contributions to our understanding of Indian politics, and the dynamics of democratic inclusion more generally.
Feyaad Allie is an Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard University. His research centers on democracy, identity, and intergroup relations with a regional focus on South Asia, primarily India. Feyaad is currently working on a book project that examines the causes and consequences of political inclusion, with Muslims in India as the primary case. In other work, he studies the drivers of majority-minority tensions and political party responses to majoritarianism. Feyaad’s research is mixed methods in nature, drawing on administrative data, original surveys, and in-depth elite and voter interviews during fieldwork. Feyaad earned his PhD in Political Science from Stanford University and his BA in Government from Dartmouth College.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Dr. Hillel David Soifer (Chair) of Temple University, Dr. Sarah L. Henderson of Oregon State University, and Dr. Lynette H. Ong of the University of Toronto.