Cultivating Clients: Reputation,Responsiveness, and Ethnic Indifference in India's Slums

Studies of clientelism overwhelmingly focus on how brokers target voters with top-down benefits during elections. Yet brokers also receive requests from voters for assistance between elections, initiating the processes through which they cultivate clients. Why are brokers responsive to the requests of some voters and not others? We provide the first study of broker preferences when evaluating client appeals. Theories emphasizing brokers as vote monitors anticipate they will prefer co-partisans and coethnics, whose reciprocity they can best verify. Theories emphasizing brokers as vote mobilizers anticipate they will prefer residents who will maximize their reputations for efficacy. We test these expectations through a conjoint experiment with 629 Indian slum leaders, ethnographic fieldwork, and a survey of 2,199 slum residents. We find evidence of reputational considerations shaping broker responsiveness. We find mixed support for monitoring concerns, highlighted by an absence of the strong ethnic favoritism assumed to dominate distributive politics in many developing countries.     

Terrorism Research: Past,Present, and Future

Research on terrorism and counterterrorism draws on many disciplines, including Politics, History, Sociology and Anthropology. Yet there are concerns about scope, methodology, impact, and the level of public debate. An agreed definition of terrorism is unattainable: there should be more focus on particular acts rather than labelling whole movements. The threat of terrorism should be kept in proportion. Understanding its causes, and associated belief-systems, is crucial to conducting effective counterterrorist operations. Evaluations of the effectiveness of both terrorism and counterterrorism need to encompass more factors, including terrorism's deadliest legacies: wars on terror that fail, and a habit of violence.     

Ethics,terrorism and counter‐terrorism

Traditionally, the Talmudic Orthodoxy always postulated the reestablishing of a Jewish state only by an act of God's grace at messianic times. The establishment of Israel by secular Jews thus caused real consternation among Orthodox sects. Ultra Orthodox sects did not even recognize Israel as a Jewish entity. However, the occupation of the West Bank, the site of the ancient Jewish kingdoms, in 1967 was seen by many Orthodox Jews as a sign of redemption and also an opportunity to take an active, even a leading, role in a “true Zionist” enterprise of fulfilling God's promise to Abraham that the whole land will belong to his offspring. The settling of the West Bank was congruent with the government's political aims. This led the government to provide deep financial and massive military support to settlers, both the religious population that follows a radical nationalistic policy enveloped with messianic motifs, and other settlers, attracted by the substantial perks. The violent conduct of the militant religious sector among the settlers provides a radical threat to Israel's character, and even its existence. Above and beyond that provided by the military and economic burden of the West Bank settlements themselves.