2024 APSA Awards

Feyaad Allie's dissertation "Power, Exclusion, and Identity: The Politics of Muslim Marginalization in India" was selected unanimously from a very strong field of candidates as the winner of the 2024 Gabriel A. Almond Award.Allie explores the roots of Muslim exclusion in India, as well as the reasons why this political exclusion is so difficult to overcome even when Muslim candidates are elected.Whereas much other work on representation in contemporary India focuses on democratic backsliding at the systemic level, Allie centers the experience of Muslims, who, unlike other marginalized groups have failed to see political gains in recent decades.Even as the Muslim share of population has grown, Allie shows, their representation in elected office has declined.Moreover, where Muslims have broken through and won elected office, they are rarely able to retain it in subsequent elections.This argument challenges our understanding of the challenges facing democracy in contemporary India, arguing that its problems are more deeply historically rooted, and predate the recent dominance by the BJP.Allie's theory explains not only when Muslim candidates get nominated, but also which parties are more likely to nominate them, which Muslim candidates are most effective, and which parties among those that do are most likely to win.This last element of the argument, which introduces the idea that parties vary in their ability to signal that Muslim candidates will be constrained from favoring their in-group, generates some especially precise predictions that Allie is able to test with finegrained data about candidates and party leader characteristics.An especially interesting feature of the dissertation is its argument about the dilemma that faces Muslim politicians once in office.Because winning elections as a Muslim requires gaining support from Hindu voters, these politicians must balance pressures from the Muslim community for descriptive representa- WilliamAnderson Award for the best dissertation in the general field of federalism or intergovernmental relations, state, and local politics