The election of Donald Trump as the next President of the United States has sent shockwaves throughout the country and the world. It is too soon to fully comprehend what has happened, why it has happened, and what it means.

Be that as it may, I put down some of my initial thoughts in this piece for NDTV. In it, I argue:

This nasty, brutish, and interminable campaign has revealed many uncomfortable truths about American democracy. These truths-the widespread prevalence of economic nationalism, white nativism, and anti-government rage-are not new, but Trump’s populist campaign provided them with a steady supply of oxygen.

When it comes to the ramifications for our friends and partners overseas, I conclude on a skeptical note:

What will reassure friends abroad the most is America’s ability to get its own house in order, something that is-frankly-a question mark under a President Trump. America’s credibility has come under intense fire during this election. But what hurts even more? So has its character.

You can read the full piece here.

Now that the U.S. election is over and done with, soon Indians (and many others) will turn their attention to the upcoming elections in the gargantuan north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. UP is home to 144 million eligible voters (which is roughly equal to the number of registered voters in the United States today). If it were a country, it would be the world’s fifth largest (on par with Brazil).

I have a new column in Mint that explores the emerging electoral strategy of the BJP, which sees a real opportunity to seize power in India’s most populous state. The strategy, to use a clunky analogy, resembles a “five-layer cake.” The five layers are: nationalism, Hindu majoritarianism, Modi’s personal popularity, the TINA (There is No Alternative) factor, and strong (if not superficial) headline economic numbers.

To be sure, the BJP’s five-layered cake is hardly foolproof, but it could represent the party’s best chance of swaying voters to its side in a state where its organizational foundations are wanting. The stakes could not be higher, and the risks are—pardon the pun—already baked in.

You can read the full piece here

Saksham Khosla and I have a new op-ed in the Hindustan Times. The piece extracts lessons from our recent Carnegie paper on India’s elite civil service cadre, the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). Here is the gist:

Over the years, widespread political meddling has fueled the notion that malicious politicians stand in the way of honest, hardworking bureaucrats who seek to implement key government policies. A nascent scholarly literature, combining data on the career records of IAS officers with granular information on development outcomes and electoral dynamics, does not dispel this notion. But it finds that the relationship between politicians and the bureaucracy is far more complicated.

You can read the full piece here.

On Tuesday, I had the pleasure of moderating a wide-ranging discussion with three Indian Members of Parliament at the Carnegie Endowment: Sushmita Dev of Assam (INC), Baijayant “Jay” Panda of Odisha (BJD), and Anurag Thakur of Himachal Pradesh (BJP) .

The 90-minute discussion, including about 30 minutes of Q&A with the audience, touched upon everything from the Goods and Services Tax (GST) to U.S.-India economic relations and climate change.

You can watch the entire event here.

Saksham Khosla and I have an op-ed in Monday’s edition of Mint that summarizes our recent Carnegie paper on the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). You can read the column here, but this is the basic gist:

Although there is no shortage of opinions related to the IAS, there has been a surprising paucity of hard data on its operations and performance until now. A new body of research, combining unprecedented access to the profiles of IAS officers with granular data on local development outcomes and electoral dynamics, sheds new light on their career trajectories, their impact on development outcomes, and their relationship to politics.

Mint supplied this nice infographic to accompany our piece (incidentally, Mint relaunched today as a broadsheet newspaper):

If you are interested, you can read the full paper on which this op-ed is based here.

The August issue of Seminar is now online and it is worth checking out. There’s been a longstanding debate about the utility of election surveys in India, and this special issue explores multiple aspects of election surveys, from methodology to prediction and causal inference.

The full issue can be accessed here.  Neelanjan Sircar and I have a short essay on how to improve election surveys (short answer: greater transparency + data sharing). You can read our contribution here.

If you’re interested in what Members of Parliament from across the Indian political spectrum think about the Indian economy, the Modi government, or U.S.-India relations, then you’re in luck.

On Tuesday, September 13th from 4 to 5:30 p.m, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace will host a public discussion with three Lok Sabha MPs: Sushmita Dev of the Indian National Congress, Baijayant “Jay” Panda of the Biju Janata Dal, and Anurag Thakur of the Bharatiya Janata Party. I’ll be moderating.

You can RSVP for the event here. If you can’t make it person, we will post video of the event within 2-3 days. We’re grateful to the Georgetown India Initiative and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) for co-hosting this event with us.

If you have any questions you would like me to ask, send me a message.

Saksham Khosla and I have a new paper that reviews a fascinating, nascent empirical literature on the functioning and performance of India’s elite civil service cadre, the Indian Administrative Service (IAS).

Seemingly everyone has an opinion on what ails the IAS and what reforms ought to be pursued. But for the first time, we have actual hard data that can help inform both what is broken and, in turn, what fixes might be applied.

Our paper, and the literature we review, tries to answer three questions:

What determines the career success of officers in the IAS? To what degree can individual officers influence tangible development outcomes in areas such as poverty, health, and education? And what impact does politics have on bureaucratic functioning?

The full paper can be found here. But for those who would like an easy, one-page summary of the key take-aways, have a look at this policy brief.

A decade-and-a-half in the making, last week both houses of Parliament overwhelmingly passed a bill that amends the Indian Constitution to create a Goods and Services Tax (GST), bringing India closer than ever before to functioning as a common market.

I have a new essay in Foreign Affairs that looks at what the GST means for India–and the hard road ahead when it comes to implementation. Here’s a taste of the challenges that await:

Even assuming speedy legislative action and a reasonable compromise on the GST rate, the path ahead is riddled with landmines. Businesses will have to incur costs to adjust to the new regime, which will be especially high for smaller firms that have never paid taxes or lack the technology and expertise to adapt. The government will have to train new tax collectors and implement a massive new online tax system. In fact, leading economists suspect that there could be adverse consequences to both growth and inflation in the short term until these teething pains subside. To further muddy the waters, legal experts are already warning of future lawsuits over the constitutionality of the GST, since it alters the basic federal–state structure outlined in India’s founding document by reallocating taxation powers.

You can read the full piece here.

The terrific Indian journal, Seminar, has a special issue focused on the ins and outs of election surveys in India. The essays are gated until September 1, but for now you can read the introductory essay by Rahul Verma (the guest editor) here.

Election surveys have something of a checkered past in India. The essays in this special issue look at the problems, suggest solutions, and examine how surveys work in other democracies. To quote Rahul, the issue tries to address three questions:

First, is polling an imperfect science? Second, what is an ideal time to conduct a poll that proposes to study the political behaviour of citizens? And third, what would be the academic cost of not conducting polls at the time of elections?

Neelanjan Sircar and I have a piece on how to better leverage surveys in India from a research perspective. You can read that one here.