Working Papers

Existing work emphasizes how slum residents draw on local political networks to advance their material interests. Yet, while these networks have consistently been shown to matter for access to crucial resources, we know far less about whether and how mobilization strategies vary across settlements — and how those differences shape neighborhood development over time. My book project, Negotiating Informality, Negotiating Citizenship: How Neighborhood Characteristics Shape Political Behavior in Urban Slums, addresses these gaps. To first build theory grounded in lived experiences of urban slum residents, I constructed an original interview protocol designed to elicit how residents make sense of their neighborhood characteristics, the policy challenges they face, and the political decision-making strategies they employ to address their policy needs. Using this protocol, I conducted nearly 150 in-depth interviews with slum leaders and residents from three Indian cities. Based on these interviews, I develop a theoretical framework that I then test with both survey and satellite data. I argue slum settlements vary along two key dimensions — access to formal resources (including, for example, property rights and identification documents) and strength of informal political networks (including neighborhood social cohesion and efficacy of local leadership) — that are crucial for understanding political behavior. Both dimensions uniquely contribute to residents’ vulnerability and shape political efficacy, influencing whether and how residents organize politically to demand material improvements. Critically, I argue these processes are dynamic: successful mobilization can reinforce networks and expectations of responsiveness, while failure can erode trust and participation, such that political behavior and neighborhood development shape one another through feedback processes that unfold over time.

Mobile phone ownership has surged around the world. Estimates suggest nearly 69% of the world’s population subscribes to a mobile service. At the same time, gaps between men and women’s mobile phone ownership remains substantial. In 2020, 20 million more men were digitally connected than women. This gender digital divide—which refers to disparities between women and men’s access to and use of digital technologies, is observed virtually everywhere in the world, with the largest gulfs in low- and middle-income countries. These gaps have such powerful social, political and economic implications for women’s advancement that the United Nations’ under-secretary has declared the gender digital divide, the “new face of gender inequality” The potential benefits of cellphones make the reasons for widespread equity concerns apparent. Mobile phones play an important role in boosting economic opportunity and facilitating education and healthcare service delivery, among other important benefits (OECD 2018). At the same time, such advantages are mostly accessible to individuals with regular mobile phone access—phone owners.

While extant work examines the ways the gender digital divide stymies women’s economic empowerment (Roessler et al. 2021), researchers have completely overlooked the political consequences of this divide. We examine this lacuna. Specifically, we ask: How do gender gaps in cellphone ownership influence disparities in men’s and women’s civic and political participation?

Mobile phones have proliferated across low- and middle-income countries. While research emphasizes the important social and economic implications of connectivity, we know far less about the implications for everyday civic engagement — the community participation through which residents access resources and make claims on local authorities. Drawing on twelve focus group discussions with 90 residents and community leaders across three Kenyan sites — an urban informal settlement, a peri-urban village, and a remote rural community — we examine how people access, use, and navigate mobile technology in civic life. Phones have become compelled infrastructure: a precondition for welfare, schooling, and livelihood rather than a convenience. Yet connectivity transforms civic life unevenly. Horizontally, phones accelerate collective action. Vertically, however, they change little: elected officials remain gated behind the same local intermediaries, now reachable around the clock, who broker access to the state. These gains coexist with digital insecurity—state surveillance, fraud, and household monitoring—that varies sharply across sites. Mobile connectivity, we argue, expands participation while leaving the brokered structure of local accountability intact.

Research on intergenerational occupational mobility in India rests almost entirely on father–son comparisons — in part because standard occupational schemas have no place for the modal adult woman in poor urban settlements: the housewife. We propose a revised schema that locates household work within the occupational hierarchy, validating its placement against independent markers of household standing (education, assets, and housing quality), and apply it to original survey data on 3,473 mother–daughter pairs in slum settlements in Jaipur, Bengaluru, and Patna (2016–2023), benchmarked against 3,717 father–son estimates pairs from the same settlements. Including the housewife tier transforms the measured picture of women’s mobility. Daughters of mothers employed in manual and lower-vocational status positions are ten times more likely to become housewives than to enter any higher-status occupations, making the housewife position at once women’s principal pathway of upward movement and its effective ceiling: only one in ten daughters of housewives rises above it, and while (39%) of sons surpass their fathers, fewer (22%) of daughters surpass their mothers. Caste differences in women’s upward mobility are muted within slums, where almost no one moves into higher-status formal work, but downward mobility — flowing mostly from housewife into manual and lower-status vocational jobs work — tilts against Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe women. We discuss implications for the measurement of women’s mobility and for policy.