Dr. Ankita Barthwal

Ankita Barthwal is a Research Fellow in the Department of Political Institutions and Conflict. Her research focuses on party systems, institutions, and voting behavior in developing democracies, with a regional focus on India. Drawing on a mixed-methods approach, her work explores how close ties between parties and people are sustained under conditions of low political institutionalization and high volatility. A second strand of her work engages questions of gender and representation. Methodologically, she works primarily with survey research methods, and causal inference, combining these with observational analyses and qualitative interviews from field research.