Professor Louise Tillin

Louise Tillin is a Professor of Politics in the King’s India Institute.

Louise’s research interests span federalism, democracy and territorial politics in India, and the history and politics of social policy design and implementation. Her books include Remapping India: New States and their Political Origins (Hurst & Co/Oxford University Press, 2013), Politics of Welfare: Comparisons across Indian States, edited with Rajeshwari Deshpande and KK Kailash (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2015), Indian Federalism (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2019) and The Politics of Poverty Reduction in India: The UPA Government, 2004 to 2014 (with James Chiriyankandath, Diego Maiorano and James Manor) (New Delhi, Orient Blackswan, 2020).

Her new book Making India Work: The Development of Welfare in a Multi-Level Democracy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) is a history of the development of social policy in India over the last century. The book points to the centrality of dilemmas about employment generation to the design of India’s welfare architecture. It also demonstrates the significance of welfare policies as a component of the building of India’s national economy and polity in the decades before and after Independence from British colonial rule in 1947. As the book shows, the ideas and interests that have shaped the historical design of social policies continue to shape India’s welfare regime today.

Other recent research, supported by the British Academy and conducted in collaboration with Oliver Heath, Sanjay Kumar, Jyoti Mishra and Sandhya Venkateswaran, has examined electoral perceptions around health in India. A summary of this research can be accessed here.

Louise has previously led research projects on subnational comparative politics and social policy in India (British Academy International Partnership, with Lokniti/CSDS), on explaining electoral change in urban and rural India (Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)), and on India’s Political Economy (UK-India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI) Trilateral Partnership with UC Berkeley and Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR). Between 2013-7, she was part of a multi-country research programme on the politics of reducing poverty and inequality across Brazil, China, India and South Africa supported by the ESRC. Louise held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2018-19) for a project on Welfare and Capitalism in India: A Political History. She was also the King’s Principal Investigator on the Horizon 2020 European Training Network Global India led by Dublin City University. She is Managing Editor of the journal Regional and Federal Studies, and an editorial advisory board member of Pacific Affairs.

Before joining King’s in 2011, Louise was Joyce Lambert Research Fellow in Politics at Newnham College, Cambridge. Louise holds a DPhil in Development Studies from the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Sussex. She was a Thouron Scholar (MA South Asia Regional Studies) at the University of Pennsylvania and has a BA (Hons) History from Cambridge.

Research

• Federalism, democracy and territorial politics
• History and politics of Indian social policy
• Political economy of development in India
• Subnational comparative politics

Teaching

Undergraduate/Postgraduate

• 6YYD0021/7YYD0034 Governing Complex Societies: Federalism, Decentralisation and Development

Further details

See Louise's research profile