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Research

Books | Articles & chapters | Work in progress


My research investigates how interactions between citizens and public officials shape accountability, state capacity, and human welfare. I am particularly interested in the conditions under which citizens can secure meaningful responses from the state—and in the institutional, political, and social factors that enable or constrain public officials’ responsiveness to citizens’ claims. I examine these dynamics across domains including welfare provision, infrastructure and service delivery, environmental protection, and policing, primarily in rural and urban India, with comparative research in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.

Books

Claiming the State: Active Citizenship and Social Welfare in Rural India. Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Citizens around the world look to the state for social welfare provision, but often struggle to access essential services in health, education, and social security. This book investigates the everyday practices through which citizens of the world's largest democracy make claims on the state, asking whether, how, and why they engage public officials in the pursuit of social welfare. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in rural India, Kruks-Wisner demonstrates that claim-making is possible in settings (poor and remote) and among people (the lower classes and castes) where much democratic theory would be unlikely to predict it. Examining the conditions that foster and inhibit citizen action, she finds that greater social and spatial exposure - made possible when individuals traverse boundaries of caste, neighborhood, or village - builds citizens' political knowledge, expectations, and linkages to the state, and is associated with higher levels and broader repertoires of claim-making.

Claim-making in Comparative Perspective: Everyday Citizenship Practice and its Consequences (with Janice Gallagher and Whitney Taylor). Cambridge Elements, 2024.  

Claim-making – the everyday strategies through which citizens pursue rights fulfilment – is often overlooked in studies of political behavior, which tend to focus on highly visible, pivotal moments: elections, mass protests, high court decisions, legislative decisions. But what of the politics of the everyday? This Element takes up this question, drawing together research from Colombia, South Africa, India, and Mexico. The authors argue that claim-making is a distinct form of citizenship practice characterized by its everyday nature, which is neither fully programmatic nor clientelistic; and which is prevalent in settings marked by gaps between the state's de jure commitments to rights and their de facto realization. Under these conditions, claim making is both meaningful (there are rights to be secured) and necessary (fulfillment is far from guaranteed). Claim-making of this kind is of critical consequence, both materially and politically, with the potential to shape how citizens engage (or disengage) the state.

Unequal Contagion: Citizenship, Democracy, and Covid-19 in India (Ed., with Poulami Roychowdhury). Oxford University Press, 2026.

Cover of "Unequal Contagion: Citizenship, Democracy, and the Politics of COVID-19 in India"

In India—one of the world’s most unequal democracies—the COVID-19 pandemic and government responses unfolded across a hierarchical social landscape and uneven institutional terrain, producing starkly different experiences of risk, protection, and loss. This book brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to examine how long-standing inequalities shaped pandemic experiences, how state responses intensified them, and how historically rooted forms of social mobilization and citizen–state relations sometimes helped mitigate their effects. Drawing on methods ranging from surveys to ethnography, contributors show how centrally imposed lockdowns, disruptions to health systems, and uneven welfare provision interacted with class, caste, gender, religious, and regional inequalities. The chapters demonstrate that access to healthcare, welfare, and relief depended not only on policy design but on everyday relationships among citizens, local officials, frontline workers, and civil society organizations. Grounded in India yet widely relevant, the book advances a relational and intersectional account of governance under stress, linking subnational variation in pandemic policy and welfare outcomes to historically embedded patterns of social mobilization and political engagement.

  • Coming soon, Oxford University Press.


 

Articles and chapters

“Democratizing Bureaucracy: Can citizens demand accountability from unelected officials?” (with Tanu Kumar). Forthcoming, World Politics. [Pre-publication accepted version | Appendix]

“Institutional Recognition: Activating Representation to Build Police Responsiveness” (with Akshay Mangla and Sandip Sukhtankar). American Political Science Review, published online August, 2025. [Pre-publication accepted version | Appendix]

“Social Brokerage: Accountability and the Social Life of Information.” Comparative Political Studies, 55(14), 2022. [Pre-publication accepted version]

“Policing in patriarchy: An experimental evaluation of reforms to improve police responsiveness to women in India" (with Sandip Sukhtankar and Akshay Mangla). Science, 377 (6602), 2022. 

Great Expectations, Great Grievances: The Politics of Citizen Complaints in India. Comparative Politics, 54(1), 2021. 

"State–Society Synergy at COVID-19’s Invisible Front Lines," with Dyuti Saunik, Avani Kapur, & Jessica Mayberry. Economic & Political Weekly (Engage), 56(32), 2021.

"The Geography of Citizenship Practice: How the Poor Engage the State in Rural and Urban India," with Adam Auerbach. Perspectives on Politics, 18(4), 2020. 

"The Pursuit of Social Welfare: Citizen Claim-Making in Rural India." World Politics, 70(1): 122-163 (2018). (Corrigendum.)

"Seeking the Local State: Gender, Caste, and the Pursuit of Public Services in Post-Tsunami India." World Development, 39(7): 1143-1154 (2011).

"Promoting Sustainability, Building Networks: A Green Entrepreneur in Mexico." In M. Shaper (Ed.), Making Ecopreneurs: Developing Sustainable Entrepreneurship. Routledge (2010).
 

Selected work in progress

“(Un)Willing Partners? Citizen-bureaucrat collaboration in capacity-constrained settings” (with Tanu Kumar, Dyuti Saunik, Manish Ranjan, and Jessica Mayberry). (Under review).

“Beyond Recruitment: Supporting Gender Integration in Policing” (with Arielle Bernhardt, Akshay Mangla, and Sandip Sukhtankar). (Working paper, available upon request).

“Anatomy of Reform: Organizational Change, Persistence, and the Scaling of Gender-Targeted Reform in India’s Policing Sector” (with Akshay Mangla & Sandip Sukhtankar). (Draft in progress).

“Building an Inclusive Workforce: Interventions to Empower Female Police Officers in India” (with Suddhasatwa Bhattacharya, Chitwan Lalji, Akshay Mangla, and Sandip Sukhtankar). (Research in progress).

"Citizen Journalism in the Digital Age: Trust, Action, and Local Problem-Solving" (with Bhumi Purohit and Anustubh Agnihotri). (Research in progress).

"Claims in the Rains: From Information to Local Environmental Action in Unequal Cities" (with Bhumi Purohit and Emily Gregory). (Research in progress).