The Making of “World‐Class” Delhi: Relations Between Street Hawkers and the New Middle Class

Urban India is undergoing transformation as formal electoral politics increasingly favors the new middle class. Scholarship tends to compartmentalize the politics of the new middle class and the poor, and this article focuses on inter‐class relations. By focusing on relations between street hawkers and the new middle class in Delhi, I show that rather than engaging in zero‐sum conflicts over urban space, conflict is typically over the terms of its use. The analysis shows that these classes are interdependent; the poor depend on the new middle class for their livelihoods, and the lifestyles of new middle class are enabled by services provided by the poor. While the poor enable and participate in Delhi's transformation into a so‐called “world‐class” city, the reconciliation of competing visions of urbanization—one geared toward social reproduction and the other subsistence—is what is at stake in contemporary inter‐class relations.     

Probing the reds and blues: Sectionalism and voter location in the 2000 and 2004 U. S. presidential elections

The election outcomes of a place hinge largely on what is within its political boundaries: economic, social, cultural, and other compositional factors facing voters. Yet, it is also important to investigate geographic context, both within and between places. This study presents renewed emphasis on two geographic factors that relate to electoral outcomes while controlling for compositional attributes: sectional distinctions and population density. Within different regions of the United States and across different locations (urban, suburban, and rural residents), there exist notable differences in presidential voting. Using survey and county-level data on the 2000 and 2004 U.S. presidential elections, this study evaluates the partisan preferences of voters from a regional perspective, and from a density perspective. The findings demonstrate independent relationships between section and voting, and location and voting. A major consequence of the distinctiveness of section and location in the face of migration effects (as noted by others) is the increased spatial polarization of the electorate's political preferences in these recent presidential contests.