Tariq Thachil

 I am Professor of Political Science, Madan Lal Sobti Chair for the Study of Contemporary India, and Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India. I am a scholar of comparative politics, focusing on political parties and political behavior, identity politics, urbanization and migration, with a regional focus on India. My first book examines how elite parties can use social services to win mass support, through a study of Hindu nationalism in India, and was published by Cambridge University Press (Studies in Comparative Politics) in 2014. This project won the 2015 Gregory Luebbert Award for best book in comparative politics, and the 2015 Leon Epstein Award for best book on political parties, from the American Political Science Association.

My second book (co-authored with Adam Auerbach), Migrants and Machine Politics, was published with Princeton University Press (Studies in Political Behavior) in 2023. It focuses on the political consequences of urbanization, drawing on qualitative and quantitative data collected across years of fieldwork in informal settlements in north India. This book won the 2024 Sartori Book Prize for Qualitative and Mixed-methods, and was co-winner of the 2024 Book Prize from the Best Experimental Research Section Book Award, from the American Political Science Association.

My current research focuses on governance challenges within India’s small towns, dramatically understudied spaces that house nearly half of the country’s urban population. A second stream of research focuses on understanding the politics and policymaking around environmental crises, focusing on air pollution in India.

My articles have appeared in American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics, World Politics, and other outlets, and have won the 2018 Heinz Eulau Prize for best article published in the American Political Science Review, and 2020 American Journal of Political Science Best Article Award.

I have taught and will teach classes on Democracy and Development in India, Comparative Politics, and Identity Politics.