Research
Research Interests
State building, local government, bureaucracy, state-society relations, development, developing countries, surveys and interview methods
Dissertation Project
“Crises and the Transformation of the State”
The project investigates the relationship between large-scale crises and state building, focusing on local government.
The research traces how crises can lead to durable
improvements in state capacity and reshape interactions among bureaucrats, citizens, and politicians. Crisis management increases bureaucratic embeddedness, improves administrative processes, and strengthens state-society interactions that persist well beyond
the immediate crisis. The project evaluates these claims using a mixed-methods approach, combining administrative data, original surveys, in-depth interviews, and focus groups in crisis-hit and comparison regions across India.
Working papers
Nambiar, Preeti. “Crises, Bureaucrats, and the Transformation of the State”
Conventional wisdom holds that large-scale crises can overwhelm governments. I propose crises can enhance bureaucratic capacity sustainably. Crisis management requires intensive coordination among bureaucrats, citizens, and politicians, creating denser contact networks that improve information flow and governance. As crisis response draws on pre-existing governance structures, these improvements embed in everyday functioning and persist beyond crises. To test these hypotheses, I use large-scale natural hazards in India and a multi-methods approach. First, I employ TWFE and synthetic difference-in-differences models to evaluate government performance (20-36 months post-crisis). Second, I analyze an original survey of village chiefs (130 villages) to assess bureaucratic embeddedness mechanisms. Third, I draw on interviews covering 55% of sampled districts’ local bureaucrats to assess empirical patterns.
Analyses reveal sustained increases in government performance in disaster-affected regions (1.5- 5 years post-crisis) and an overlooked mechanism of state building and crisis-driven institutional change in developing democracies.
Link - Summary , Paper
Nambiar, Preeti. “After the Storm After the storm: Crises and evolution of civic capacity”
Citizens differ considerably in their ability to engage with the state. I conceptualize this ability as civic capacity as the individual and network-based resources that enable citizens to overcome the costs and barriers of interacting with the state. While existing research examines how large-scale crises reshape citizens’ trust, political attitudes, and participation, we know relatively less about whether crises alter citizens’ capacity to navigate and make claims on the state. I argue that large-scale crises can increase civic capacity. Crisis response generates simultaneous efforts by citizens, communities, bureaucrats, and politicians to exchange information, seek and provide assistance, and access the state. These interactions expand citizens’ networks within the community and with local bureaucrats and politicians, and build experience navigating government. These gains remain useful beyond the crisis, strengthening citizens’ ability to access the state as part of their everyday interactions with local government. Importantly, the intensive outreach among actors during a crisis means that these gains are not limited to those who begin with greater civic capacity, but also increase capacity among citizens lower on the civic capacity and socioeconomic scales. I use a mixed-methods approach to test the proposed theory using cases of large-scale natural hazards in India. The analysis draws on an original citizen survey, interviews with bureaucrats and politicians, citizen focus groups, and administrative data. I assess the underlying mechanisms and implications of shifts in civic capacity across regions with varying levels of disaster exposure. The findings indicate sustained increases in civic capacity in crisis-affected regions. This research identifies an overlooked consequence of large-scale crises and reveals how crises can induce shifts in civic capacity and strengthen grassroots democracy.
