Shikhar
Singh

Shikhar
Singh

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania. I completed a PhD in political science at Yale University. I study democratic accountability and the political economy of development, with a regional focus on South Asia. One line of my research looks at variation in how developing democracies deliver welfare to their citizens, and why governments do not entirely shift to more efficient delivery strategies. A second strand seeks to explain why decentralization often fails to deliver expected improvements in public goods provision, local state capacity, and political responsiveness. I employ a mixed-methods approach to study these questions, using experiments, observational analyses, and extensive fieldwork. I have work forthcoming in the American Political Science Review. I have taught a wide range of quantitative methods and comparative politics courses. In 2020, I received a university-wide award, the Prize Teaching Fellowship, for excellence in teaching. I have been closely involved with the Metaketa II project as a research assistant to the steering committee. Prior to the PhD, I fielded and analyzed surveys for India’s Congress party in its election war-room.

Research

Teaching

4.7/5

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Visualization of Political and Social Data , Fall 2021, Undergraduate

5/5

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Advanced Quantitative Methods, Fall 2019, Graduate

5/5

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Design and Analysis of Field Experiments, Spring 2018, Graduate

This course uses Field Experiments: Design, Analysis, and Interpretation  (by Alan Gerber and Donald Green) as a textbook, covering one chapter each week. 

4.8/5

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The Logic of Randomized Experiments in Political Science, Spring 2022, Undergraduate

4.2/5

Student evaluation

Challenges of Young Democracies, Spring 2019, Undergraduate

4/5

Student evaluation

Introduction to Comparative Politics, Fall 2017, Undergraduate

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