Jill Gandhi
Biographic Data
| ID | 315743 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jill Gandhi |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jill |
| FAMILY NAME | Gandhi |
| SIGNATURE | GANDHI J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Emory University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8868-4149 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2058 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Is Transitional Justice Blind? The Link between Culpability and Prosecution in Argentina’s Human Rights Trials
Fixing the Past: The Effects of Human Rights Trials on Political Attitudes in Argentina
Does prosecuting perpetrators of repression under a dictatorship promote public support for human rights and the courts? We argue that convicting perpetrators in human rights trials reduces public acceptance of these violations. However, while convictions signal judicial efforts to end impunity, they may also call attention to the politicized process by which transitional justice begins. We estimate the effects of human rights trial verdicts on a…
Early Absenteeism and Academic Outcomes: Evidence from a Longitudinal Study
Socioeconomically Marginalized Youth of Color (SMYoC) across global contexts tend to receive lower academic grades and standardized test scores due to systemic racism and classism. Research suggests that preschool enrollment is associated with short-term positive academic effects, yet little is known about how absenteeism relates to later academic outcomes particularly among SMYoC. This is a crucial area of study as preschool can help to close op…
What's missing? A multi-method approach to gaining a fuller understanding of early care and education decision-making
Impacts of the Chicago School Readiness Project on measures of achievement, cognitive functioning, and behavioral regulation in late adolescence
The current paper reports long-term impacts of the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP) on measures of achievement, cognitive functioning, and behavioral regulation taken toward the end of students' high school careers. The CSRP was a self-regulation-focused early childhood intervention implemented in Head Start centers serving high-poverty neighborhoods in Chicago. The intervention was evaluated through a cluster randomized control trial, pro…
Shoring up power: Electoral reform and the consolidation of authoritarian rule
The Effects of the 2021 Monthly Child Tax Credit on Child and Family Well-Being: Evidence from New York City
The temporary monthly child tax credit implemented in 2021 had the potential to affect many aspects of child and family well-being, including poverty, hardship, use of food pantries, spending on child-related items, and parents' mental health and employment. The authors assess these effects using data from two longitudinal studies of well-being in New York City. They find that the monthly child tax credit led to significant declines in the risk f…
Variations in Pre-Kindergarten Classroom Quality Ratings across the School Year: Observation Ratings from New York City’s Pre-K for All
Many school districts face the empirical challenge of monitoring program quality to assure that all children experience pre-K environments that foster early learning and development. Factors that are exogenous to classrooms (such as evaluation timing) may play a role in estimates of program quality and yet are not fully understood. This paper examines the role of timing in pre-K classroom quality as it was observed in practice by one of the large…
Joint attention partially mediates the longitudinal relation between attuned caregiving and executive functions for low-income children
Using data from a large longitudinal sample (N = 1,292) of children and their caregivers in predominantly low-income, nonurban communities, we investigated longitudinal relations between attuned caregiving in infancy, joint attention in toddlerhood, and executive functions in early childhood. The results from path analysis demonstrated that attuned caregiving during infancy predicted more joint attention in toddlerhood, which was in turn associat…
Exploring the Impacts of an Early Childhood Educational Intervention on Later School Selection
In the current article, we examine the long-run school selection patterns of children randomly assigned to the Chicago School Readiness Project, an early childhood educational (ECE) intervention that aimed to improve the quality of Head Start classrooms serving low-income communities. Analyses suggest that adolescents who participated in the program were more likely to opt out of their assigned neighborhood school and attend schools with better i…
Measuring the Consolidation of Power in Nondemocracies
Dictators come to power with the support of elites who are also capable of removing them from power. If autocrats successfully navigate this critical period, they are more likely to survive in power with time. Yet their persistence in office alone does not reveal how they have managed to survive. Survival in power is the result of two distinct arrangements. In one, power remains balanced between the leader and the elite, and in the other, leaders…
Legislatures and Legislative Politics Without Democracy
What do authoritarian legislatures and legislators do? Would outcomes in dictatorships be different if they were absent? Why do dictatorships have legislatures in the first place? These questions represent central puzzles in the study of authoritarian politics and institutions. The introductory article to this special issue on legislatures in nondemocracies discusses what we now know about these assemblies; what the issue’s articles contribute to…
The Institutional Roots of Democratic Backsliding
Committed or Conditional Democrats? Opposition Dynamics in Electoral Autocracies
In electoral autocracies, opposition coalition formation offers the best hope of getting to democracy. Yet forming electoral coalitions also entails convincing opposition voters to ignore compromises and engage in the cross‐party voting necessary for opposition victory. To what extent are voters committed to defeating the autocratic incumbent even if it would result in dislikable outcomes? A survey experiment in Malaysia finds that opposition vot…
Electoral Systems in Authoritarian States
The literature on the choice and effects of electoral rules in autocracies tends to focus on the dictator’s preferences. However, it is important to recognize that even the most powerful autocrats choose rules under constraints. The constraints may come in the form of opposition actors who threaten the regime or the dictator’s own limited information or knowledge about how the rules work and the distribution of preferences among the electorate. T…
Minority Languages in Dictatorships: A New Measure of Group Recognition
What explains minority language recognition in dictatorships? In this paper, we argue that minority language groups in authoritarian regimes are morelikelyto have their languages recognized when their interests are represented by a party in the legislature. Moreover, thelevelof recognition is greater. We test this argument using original group-level and time-variant measures of minority party in legislatureandminority language policies for all As…
Apsa Committees
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Elections and Political Regimes
Post-Cold War autocracies appear novel in their use of multiparty elections, attracting the attention of scholars and policymakers alike. A longer historical view, however, reveals that what is unique is not electoral authoritarianism after 1989, but rather the electoral inactivity of autocracies during the Cold War period. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, authoritarian regimes have held multiparty elections. The prevalence of t…
The incentives for pre-electoral coalitions in non-democratic elections
What are the incentives of opposition parties to coordinate their electoral strategies to challenge authoritarian incumbents? Are these incentives the same in non-democracies as in democracies? A well-formed literature on party competition in established democracies points to the importance of mostly institutional factors in determining whether parties form pre-electoral coalitions. We find, however, that many of these institutional factors have …
Timing and targeting of state repression in authoritarian elections
Economic Performance and Elite Defection from Hegemonic Parties
Hegemonic party regimes are non-democratic regimes that (1) rule with the aid of a dominant political party and (2) hold multi-party elections. Elite coalitions organized under the aegis of a hegemonic party are most vulnerable in elections that coincide with poor economic performance. A declining economy provides elites with a platform around which they can mobilize support to challenge incumbents in elections. As a result, the likelihood of def…
Democracy and dictatorship revisited
Coopting Workers under Dictatorship
What explains the variance in how authoritarian regimes treat labor? We advance a theory of why and how some dictatorships coopt workers using nominally democratic institutions, such as legislatures and political parties. When dictatorships need cooperation from society and face a potentially strong opposition, they attempt to coopt workers to reinforce their bases of support. As instruments of cooptation, legislatures and parties are useful in f…
Elections Under Authoritarianism
Current scholarship on elections in authoritarian regimes has focused on exploring the relationship between elections and democratization, and it has generally used analytical frameworks and methods imported from the study of genuinely democratic elections to do so. These tendencies have kept scholars from asking a wide range of questions about the micro-level dynamics of authoritarian elections and the systematic differences among them. With the…
Political Institutions under Dictatorship
Often dismissed as window dressing, nominally democratic institutions, such as legislatures and political parties, play an important role in non-democratic regimes. In a comprehensive cross-national study of all non-democratic states from 1946 to 2002 that examines the political uses of these institutions by dictators, Jennifer Gandhi finds that legislative and partisan institutions are an important component in the operation and survival of auth…
Democracy and dictatorship revisited
Authoritarian Institutions and the Survival of Autocrats
Why do some autocrats survive for decades, and others fall soon after taking power? The authors argue that when authoritarian rulers need to solicit the cooperation of outsiders or deter the threat of rebellion, they rely on political institutions. Partisan legislatures incorporate potential opposition forces, giving them a stake in the ruler's survival. By broadening the basis of support for autocrats, these institutions lengthen their tenures. …
Elections Under Authoritarianism
Current scholarship on elections in authoritarian regimes has focused on exploring the relationship between elections and democratization, and it has generally used analytical frameworks and methods imported from the study of genuinely democratic elections to do so. These tendencies have kept scholars from asking a wide range of questions about the micro-level dynamics of authoritarian elections and the systematic differences among them. With the…
Economic Performance and Elite Defection from Hegemonic Parties
Hegemonic party regimes are non-democratic regimes that (1) rule with the aid of a dominant political party and (2) hold multi-party elections. Elite coalitions organized under the aegis of a hegemonic party are most vulnerable in elections that coincide with poor economic performance. A declining economy provides elites with a platform around which they can mobilize support to challenge incumbents in elections. As a result, the likelihood of def…
Timing and targeting of state repression in authoritarian elections
Coopting Workers under Dictatorship
What explains the variance in how authoritarian regimes treat labor? We advance a theory of why and how some dictatorships coopt workers using nominally democratic institutions, such as legislatures and political parties. When dictatorships need cooperation from society and face a potentially strong opposition, they attempt to coopt workers to reinforce their bases of support. As instruments of cooptation, legislatures and parties are useful in f…
Legislatures and Legislative Politics Without Democracy
What do authoritarian legislatures and legislators do? Would outcomes in dictatorships be different if they were absent? Why do dictatorships have legislatures in the first place? These questions represent central puzzles in the study of authoritarian politics and institutions. The introductory article to this special issue on legislatures in nondemocracies discusses what we now know about these assemblies; what the issue’s articles contribute to…
The incentives for pre-electoral coalitions in non-democratic elections
What are the incentives of opposition parties to coordinate their electoral strategies to challenge authoritarian incumbents? Are these incentives the same in non-democracies as in democracies? A well-formed literature on party competition in established democracies points to the importance of mostly institutional factors in determining whether parties form pre-electoral coalitions. We find, however, that many of these institutional factors have …
Committed or Conditional Democrats? Opposition Dynamics in Electoral Autocracies
In electoral autocracies, opposition coalition formation offers the best hope of getting to democracy. Yet forming electoral coalitions also entails convincing opposition voters to ignore compromises and engage in the cross‐party voting necessary for opposition victory. To what extent are voters committed to defeating the autocratic incumbent even if it would result in dislikable outcomes? A survey experiment in Malaysia finds that opposition vot…
Measuring the Consolidation of Power in Nondemocracies
Dictators come to power with the support of elites who are also capable of removing them from power. If autocrats successfully navigate this critical period, they are more likely to survive in power with time. Yet their persistence in office alone does not reveal how they have managed to survive. Survival in power is the result of two distinct arrangements. In one, power remains balanced between the leader and the elite, and in the other, leaders…
The Institutional Roots of Democratic Backsliding
Elections and Political Regimes
Post-Cold War autocracies appear novel in their use of multiparty elections, attracting the attention of scholars and policymakers alike. A longer historical view, however, reveals that what is unique is not electoral authoritarianism after 1989, but rather the electoral inactivity of autocracies during the Cold War period. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, authoritarian regimes have held multiparty elections. The prevalence of t…
Dictatorial Institutions and their Impact on Economic Growth
Non-democratic regimes vary in the degree to which domestic groups threaten their rule and the extent to which they need the cooperation of these groups. To both neutralize threats to their rule and solicit cooperation, some dictators coopt potential domestic opposition by providing rents and policy concessions within nominally-democratic institutions, such as legislatures and political parties. These institutions, designed as instruments of coop…
The Effects of the 2021 Monthly Child Tax Credit on Child and Family Well-Being: Evidence from New York City
The temporary monthly child tax credit implemented in 2021 had the potential to affect many aspects of child and family well-being, including poverty, hardship, use of food pantries, spending on child-related items, and parents' mental health and employment. The authors assess these effects using data from two longitudinal studies of well-being in New York City. They find that the monthly child tax credit led to significant declines in the risk f…
Minority Languages in Dictatorships: A New Measure of Group Recognition
What explains minority language recognition in dictatorships? In this paper, we argue that minority language groups in authoritarian regimes are morelikelyto have their languages recognized when their interests are represented by a party in the legislature. Moreover, thelevelof recognition is greater. We test this argument using original group-level and time-variant measures of minority party in legislatureandminority language policies for all As…
Shoring up power: Electoral reform and the consolidation of authoritarian rule
Fixing the Past: The Effects of Human Rights Trials on Political Attitudes in Argentina
Does prosecuting perpetrators of repression under a dictatorship promote public support for human rights and the courts? We argue that convicting perpetrators in human rights trials reduces public acceptance of these violations. However, while convictions signal judicial efforts to end impunity, they may also call attention to the politicized process by which transitional justice begins. We estimate the effects of human rights trial verdicts on a…
Impacts of the Chicago School Readiness Project on measures of achievement, cognitive functioning, and behavioral regulation in late adolescence
The current paper reports long-term impacts of the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP) on measures of achievement, cognitive functioning, and behavioral regulation taken toward the end of students' high school careers. The CSRP was a self-regulation-focused early childhood intervention implemented in Head Start centers serving high-poverty neighborhoods in Chicago. The intervention was evaluated through a cluster randomized control trial, pro…
Cooperation, Cooptation, and Rebellion Under Dictatorships
Dictatorships are not all the same: some are purely autocratic but many exhibit a full panoply of seemingly democratic institutions. To explain these differences, we develop a model in which dictators may need cooperation to generate rents and may face a threat of rebellion. Dictators have two instruments: they can make policy concessions or share rents. We conclude that when they need more cooperation dictators make more extensive policy concess…
Authoritarian Institutions and the Survival of Autocrats
Why do some autocrats survive for decades, and others fall soon after taking power? The authors argue that when authoritarian rulers need to solicit the cooperation of outsiders or deter the threat of rebellion, they rely on political institutions. Partisan legislatures incorporate potential opposition forces, giving them a stake in the ruler's survival. By broadening the basis of support for autocrats, these institutions lengthen their tenures. …
Political Institutions under Dictatorship
Often dismissed as window dressing, nominally democratic institutions, such as legislatures and political parties, play an important role in non-democratic regimes. In a comprehensive cross-national study of all non-democratic states from 1946 to 2002 that examines the political uses of these institutions by dictators, Jennifer Gandhi finds that legislative and partisan institutions are an important component in the operation and survival of auth…
Dictatorial Institutions and their Impact on Economic Growth
Non-democratic regimes vary in the degree to which domestic groups threaten their rule and the extent to which they need the cooperation of these groups. To both neutralize threats to their rule and solicit cooperation, some dictators coopt potential domestic opposition by providing rents and policy concessions within nominally-democratic institutions, such as legislatures and political parties. These institutions, designed as instruments of coop…
Elections Under Authoritarianism
Current scholarship on elections in authoritarian regimes has focused on exploring the relationship between elections and democratization, and it has generally used analytical frameworks and methods imported from the study of genuinely democratic elections to do so. These tendencies have kept scholars from asking a wide range of questions about the micro-level dynamics of authoritarian elections and the systematic differences among them. With the…
Democracy and dictatorship revisited
Coopting Workers under Dictatorship
What explains the variance in how authoritarian regimes treat labor? We advance a theory of why and how some dictatorships coopt workers using nominally democratic institutions, such as legislatures and political parties. When dictatorships need cooperation from society and face a potentially strong opposition, they attempt to coopt workers to reinforce their bases of support. As instruments of cooptation, legislatures and parties are useful in f…
Economic Performance and Elite Defection from Hegemonic Parties
Hegemonic party regimes are non-democratic regimes that (1) rule with the aid of a dominant political party and (2) hold multi-party elections. Elite coalitions organized under the aegis of a hegemonic party are most vulnerable in elections that coincide with poor economic performance. A declining economy provides elites with a platform around which they can mobilize support to challenge incumbents in elections. As a result, the likelihood of def…
The incentives for pre-electoral coalitions in non-democratic elections
What are the incentives of opposition parties to coordinate their electoral strategies to challenge authoritarian incumbents? Are these incentives the same in non-democracies as in democracies? A well-formed literature on party competition in established democracies points to the importance of mostly institutional factors in determining whether parties form pre-electoral coalitions. We find, however, that many of these institutional factors have …
Timing and targeting of state repression in authoritarian elections
Apsa Committees
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Elections and Political Regimes
Post-Cold War autocracies appear novel in their use of multiparty elections, attracting the attention of scholars and policymakers alike. A longer historical view, however, reveals that what is unique is not electoral authoritarianism after 1989, but rather the electoral inactivity of autocracies during the Cold War period. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, authoritarian regimes have held multiparty elections. The prevalence of t…
Electoral Systems in Authoritarian States
The literature on the choice and effects of electoral rules in autocracies tends to focus on the dictator’s preferences. However, it is important to recognize that even the most powerful autocrats choose rules under constraints. The constraints may come in the form of opposition actors who threaten the regime or the dictator’s own limited information or knowledge about how the rules work and the distribution of preferences among the electorate. T…
Minority Languages in Dictatorships: A New Measure of Group Recognition
What explains minority language recognition in dictatorships? In this paper, we argue that minority language groups in authoritarian regimes are morelikelyto have their languages recognized when their interests are represented by a party in the legislature. Moreover, thelevelof recognition is greater. We test this argument using original group-level and time-variant measures of minority party in legislatureandminority language policies for all As…
The Institutional Roots of Democratic Backsliding
Committed or Conditional Democrats? Opposition Dynamics in Electoral Autocracies
In electoral autocracies, opposition coalition formation offers the best hope of getting to democracy. Yet forming electoral coalitions also entails convincing opposition voters to ignore compromises and engage in the cross‐party voting necessary for opposition victory. To what extent are voters committed to defeating the autocratic incumbent even if it would result in dislikable outcomes? A survey experiment in Malaysia finds that opposition vot…
Joint attention partially mediates the longitudinal relation between attuned caregiving and executive functions for low-income children
Using data from a large longitudinal sample (N = 1,292) of children and their caregivers in predominantly low-income, nonurban communities, we investigated longitudinal relations between attuned caregiving in infancy, joint attention in toddlerhood, and executive functions in early childhood. The results from path analysis demonstrated that attuned caregiving during infancy predicted more joint attention in toddlerhood, which was in turn associat…
Exploring the Impacts of an Early Childhood Educational Intervention on Later School Selection
In the current article, we examine the long-run school selection patterns of children randomly assigned to the Chicago School Readiness Project, an early childhood educational (ECE) intervention that aimed to improve the quality of Head Start classrooms serving low-income communities. Analyses suggest that adolescents who participated in the program were more likely to opt out of their assigned neighborhood school and attend schools with better i…
Measuring the Consolidation of Power in Nondemocracies
Dictators come to power with the support of elites who are also capable of removing them from power. If autocrats successfully navigate this critical period, they are more likely to survive in power with time. Yet their persistence in office alone does not reveal how they have managed to survive. Survival in power is the result of two distinct arrangements. In one, power remains balanced between the leader and the elite, and in the other, leaders…
Legislatures and Legislative Politics Without Democracy
What do authoritarian legislatures and legislators do? Would outcomes in dictatorships be different if they were absent? Why do dictatorships have legislatures in the first place? These questions represent central puzzles in the study of authoritarian politics and institutions. The introductory article to this special issue on legislatures in nondemocracies discusses what we now know about these assemblies; what the issue’s articles contribute to…
Variations in Pre-Kindergarten Classroom Quality Ratings across the School Year: Observation Ratings from New York City’s Pre-K for All
Many school districts face the empirical challenge of monitoring program quality to assure that all children experience pre-K environments that foster early learning and development. Factors that are exogenous to classrooms (such as evaluation timing) may play a role in estimates of program quality and yet are not fully understood. This paper examines the role of timing in pre-K classroom quality as it was observed in practice by one of the large…
Shoring up power: Electoral reform and the consolidation of authoritarian rule
The Effects of the 2021 Monthly Child Tax Credit on Child and Family Well-Being: Evidence from New York City
The temporary monthly child tax credit implemented in 2021 had the potential to affect many aspects of child and family well-being, including poverty, hardship, use of food pantries, spending on child-related items, and parents' mental health and employment. The authors assess these effects using data from two longitudinal studies of well-being in New York City. They find that the monthly child tax credit led to significant declines in the risk f…
Impacts of the Chicago School Readiness Project on measures of achievement, cognitive functioning, and behavioral regulation in late adolescence
The current paper reports long-term impacts of the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP) on measures of achievement, cognitive functioning, and behavioral regulation taken toward the end of students' high school careers. The CSRP was a self-regulation-focused early childhood intervention implemented in Head Start centers serving high-poverty neighborhoods in Chicago. The intervention was evaluated through a cluster randomized control trial, pro…
Early Absenteeism and Academic Outcomes: Evidence from a Longitudinal Study
Socioeconomically Marginalized Youth of Color (SMYoC) across global contexts tend to receive lower academic grades and standardized test scores due to systemic racism and classism. Research suggests that preschool enrollment is associated with short-term positive academic effects, yet little is known about how absenteeism relates to later academic outcomes particularly among SMYoC. This is a crucial area of study as preschool can help to close op…
Law (20 works) · Political science (20 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (19 works) · Politics (19 works) · Democracy (17 works) · Political economy (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Economics (13 works) · Authoritarianism (12 works) · Psychology (10 works)