Patrick Heller and Ashutosh Varshney recently co-authored a paper published in the American Journal of Sociology titled "The Rich Have Peers, the Poor Have Patrons: Engaging the State in a South Indian City."
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Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia
Patrick Heller
Director, Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia, Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs
Biography
Patrick Heller is the Director of the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia, Lyn Crost Professor of Social Sciences, and Professor of International and Public Affairs and Sociology at Brown University. He also serves as Director of the Graduate Program in Development at the Watson Institute.
His research focuses on the comparative study of social inequality and democratic deepening. He is the author of The Labor of Development: Workers in the Transformation of Capitalism in Kerala, India (Cornell, 1999) and co-author of Social Democracy and the Global Periphery (Cambridge, 2006). His most recent book, Bootstrapping Democracy (Stanford, 2011), co-authored with Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Marcelo Silva, examines politics and institutional reform in Brazilian municipalities.
Heller has published widely on urbanization, comparative democracy, social movements, development policy, civil society, and state transformation. He has also conducted research on urban transformation in South Africa and developed a database on the spatial transformation of post-apartheid cities.