Suchergebnisse

Debates about transparency standards in social science research often lack specificity, mischaracterize the status quo, or stress the value of replication. These debates frequently talk past each other and provide limited practical guidance for qualitative and multi-methods research. Focusing on text-based sources, we provide a review of qualitative research that identifies deficiencies in transparency practices, and advances a five-point framework for improving transparency premised on better specification of sources' location, production, selection, analysis, and access. We next draw on a multi-year deliberative forum on qualitative transparency to identify researchers' concerns about changing the status quo. We then showcase illustrative examples of enhanced transparency and conclude with recommendations for how to improve transparency practices for text-based sources. We argue that greater research transparency yields numerous benefits, including facilitating scholarly exchange, improving graduate training, and aiding knowledge cumulation. Rather than advancing replication, which may be undesirable for various qualitative research traditions, new transparency technologies are promising because they allow authors to more easily provide additional context, present complexity, and unpack relevant contradictions about politics.

Migrants are politically marginalized in cities of the developing world, participating in destination-area elections less than do local-born residents. We theorize three reasons for this shortfall: migrants' socioeconomic links to origin regions, bureaucratic obstacles to enrollment that disproportionately burden newcomers, and ostracism by antimigrant politicians. We randomized a door-to-door drive to facilitate voter registration among internal migrants to two Indian cities. Ties to origin regions do not predict willingness to become registered locally. Meanwhile, assistance in navigating the electoral bureaucracy increased migrant registration rates by 24 percentage points and substantially boosted next-election turnout. An additional treatment arm informed politicians about the drive in a subset of localities; rather than ignoring new migrant voters, elites amplified campaign efforts in response. We conclude that onerous registration requirements impede the political incorporation, and thus the well-being, of migrant communities in fast-urbanizing settings. The findings also matter for assimilating naturalized yet politically excluded cross-border immigrants.

AbstractRural‐to‐urban migration is reshaping the economic and social landscape of the Global South. Yet migrants often struggle to integrate into cities. We conduct countrywide audit experiments in India to test whether urban politicians discriminate against internal migrants in providing constituency services. Signaling that a citizen is a city newcomer, as opposed to a long‐term resident, causes incumbent politicians to be significantly less likely to respond to requests for help. Standard "nativist" concerns do not appear to explain this representation gap. We theorize that migrants are structurally disposed to participate in destination‐area elections at lower rates than long‐term residents. Knowing this, reelection‐minded politicians decline to cater to migrant interests. Follow‐up experiments support the hypothesis. We expect our findings to generalize to fast‐urbanizing democracies, with implications for international immigration too. Policywise, mitigating migrants' de facto disenfranchisement should improve their welfare.

AbstractRapid urbanization is among the major processes affecting the developing world. The influx of migrants to cities frequently provokes antagonism on the part of long‐term residents, manifested in labor market discrimination, political nativism, and violence. We implemented a novel, face‐to‐face survey experiment on a representative sample of Mumbai's population to elucidate the causes of anti‐migrant hostility. Our findings point to the centrality of material self‐interest in the formation of native attitudes. Dominant group members fail to heed migrants' ethnic attributes, yet for minority group respondents, considerations of ethnicity and economic threat crosscut. We introduce a new political mechanism to explain this divergence. Minority communities facing persistent discrimination view in‐migration by coethnics as a means of enlarging their demographic and electoral base, thereby achieving "safety in numbers." Our article sheds light on the drivers of preferences over internal migration. It also contributes insights to the international immigration literature and to policy debates over urban expansion.