In 1992, the 73rd Amendment to the Indian Constitution created 250,000 village democracies (called Gram Panchayats) covering 800 million citizens. It mandated regular elections, deliberative spaces, and...
Large Language Models (LLMs) are quickly becoming ubiquitous, but the implications for social science research are not yet well understood. This paper asks whether LLMs can help us analyse large-N qualitative...
Governments across the world have increasingly devolved powers to locally elected leaders. This paper studies the consequences of local democracy, exploiting a natural experiment in Karnataka, India. Local...
Despite growing awareness of the various limitations of electoral democracy, there is a relative lack of evidence on effective policy interventions to improve the performance of elected officials and motivate...
The qualitative analysis of open-ended interviews has vast potential in economics but has found limited use. This is partly because the interpretative, nuanced human reading of text and coding that it...
This paper argues that Economics can learn from Cultural Anthropology and Qualitative Sociology by drawing on a judicious mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to become more “reflexive.” It argues...
What major insights have emerged from development economics in the past decade, and how do they matter for the World Bank? This challenging question was recently posed by World Bank Group President David...
The World Bank Group Global Knowledge and Research Hub in Malaysia is experiencing a year of transitions: firstly, moving into our next phase of operations, beginning July 1, 2020; and second, undergoing...
Malaysia has focused on civil service reforms to improve the efficiency of public service delivery. This Research and Policy Brief argues that this method needs to be supplemented with an approach that...
Participatory livelihoods projects are a popular model for anti-poverty projects in India. Such projects are implemented in several states of India through various partners - that include the national...
Caste is a persistent driver of inequality in India, and it is generally analyzed with government-defined broad categories, such as Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe. In everyday life, however, caste...
To what degree can vulnerability to extreme weather events be mitigated by access to a rural livelihoods program, particularly with regard to the impacts on women? This paper addresses this question through...
India's fast-growing cities face three key challenges in improving public health outcomes. The first is the persistence of weak links in the chain -- notably, slums badly underserved with basic civic services...
The resurgence of deliberative institutions in the developing world has prompted a renewed interest in the dynamics of citizen engagement. Using text-as-data methods on an original corpus of village assembly...
Deliberative institutions have gained popularity in the developing world as a means by which to make governance more inclusive and responsive to local needs. However, a growing body of evidence suggests...
This paper examines the relationship between caste and gender inequality in three states in India. When households are grouped using conventional, government-defined categories of caste the paper finds...
This paper analyzes four years of qualitative data observing a large participatory anti-poverty project in India as it scales up from its first phase (covering 400,000 households) to its second (covering...
The impact of micro-credit interventions on existing credit markets is theoretically ambiguous. Previous empirical work suggests the entry of a joint-liability lender may lead to a positive impact on the...
This paper traces the evolution of deliberative institutions in India to understand the role of deliberation in democratic life, as well as the ways in which deliberative bodies influence, and are influenced...
It is widely acknowledged that top-down support is essential for bottom-up participatory projects to be effectively implemented at scale. However, which level of government, national or sub-national, should...