S7 Ep43: Caste, race, and power: The barriers to political inclusion

The ballot cast by a landless labourer counts the same as the one cast by the landlord whose fields he works. In this way, democracy can give excluded or subordinate groups access to political power.

That's not what has happened, at least, not in large parts of the Global South. Amit Ahuja (UC Santa Barbara) calls those at the bottom of the social order "subaltern groups". Three barriers stand between their votes and any lasting gain. Violence that goes unpunished. The erasure of their shared culture and history by those in power. And they have too little money and organisation to campaign for their rights.

The evidence shows that since 2014 the gains that these groups made in the previous three decades have started to reverse, he warns. The old hierarchies are reasserting themselves.

The research behind this episode:

Ahuja, Amit. 2026. "Subaltern Mobilization in the Global South." Annual Review of Political Science 29: 391-411. Open access.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Amit Ahuja. 2026. "Caste, race, and power: The barriers to political inclusion." VoxDev Talks (podcast).

About the guest

Amit Ahuja is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with research spanning ethnic parties and movements, military organisation, caste, and the politics of inclusion and exclusion in multiethnic societies. His book Mobilizing the Marginalized: Ethnic Parties Without Ethnic Movements won the 2020 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize. He co-edited Internal Security in India: Violence, Order, and the State with Devesh Kapur.

Research cited in this episode

Subaltern. The word means "of inferior rank" and was used by Antonio Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks to describe groups subordinated by a ruling elite. Ahuja gives it three working attributes: a stigmatised identity acquired at birth, disproportionate poverty, and disadvantage that passes from one generation to the next.

Ranked and unranked social orders. Donald Horowitz, in Ethnic Groups in Conflict (1985; University of California Press, 2000 edition), separates societies where groups sit in a vertical hierarchy from those where they sit side by side. The Hausa-Fulani, Igbo and Yoruba in Nigeria, and Maronite Christians, Sunnis and Shia in Lebanon, compete without one being formally subordinate to another. Hierarchy is not a universal feature of diverse societies.