Chapter 4 examines the book’s main protagonists – India’s slum leaders. I first draw on my ethnographic fieldwork and survey data to explore the strategies that residents use to claim public services. I find that India’s slum residents primarily orient their collective action toward the state, in the presence of informal slum leaders, to improve local conditions. The chapter then establishes the pervasiveness of slum leaders and their central place in local distributive politics. Next, it describes how slum leaders climb into their positions of informal authority, the material incentives that motivate them to make this gritty political ascent, and the diverse problem solving activities they perform for residents. I then argue that slum leaders must demonstrate efficacy to build a following – the base upon which they collect rents, attract patronage, and seek party promotion. The chapter subsequently describes the subset of slum leaders who have become party workers, absorbed into party organizations, and given positions within their hierarchies.

Chapter 1 motivates the central puzzle of the book: Despite a shared context of informality, patronage politics, and discretionary state institutions, India’s slum settlements are not uniformly marginalized in the distributive politics of the city. Instead, they exhibit dramatic variation in their capacity to organize and push the state to extend basic public services. The chapter begins with two vignettes that illustrate divergences in settlement organization and development. It then draws on official data and my own survey findings to establish wide variation in access to public services across India’s slums. Next, the chapter provides an overview of the book’s theoretical framework and foreshadows its contributions to several literatures in the field of comparative politics. Next, it positions the study at the intersection of several literatures and establishes why extant theories are insufficient in explaining inter-settlement variation in public service delivery. Next, the chapter defines the specific type of slum under study – squatter settlements – and introduces Jaipur and Bhopal. It then turns to the research design and data and concludes by mapping the remaining chapters.

Chapter 8 concludes. It revisits the substantive and theoretical motivations of the book and provides a brief summary of its main findings. The chapter then expands on the contributions of the book to our understanding of democracy and development in India and other rapidly urbanizing countries in the Global South, and subsequently discusses the book’s implications for the design and implementation of community-driven development programs.

Chapter 7 examines the formation of party worker networks, and the reasons why they vary so remarkably in their density and partisan distribution across settlements. The chapter presents quantitative evidence that key drivers of variation in party worker density are ethnic diversity and settlement population. Higher levels of social diversity increase the fractionalization of informal leadership within a settlement. Over time, parties attempt to bring slum leaders into their fold, increasing party network density in the process. The second is the population of the settlement. A slum’s population – the size of its “vote bank” – determines electoral incentives for parties to extend scarce patronage resources and positions to maximize votes.The chapter then takes an additional step backward, probing why settlements vary in their populations and levels of ethnic diversity in the first place. I find that idiosyncratic features of the urban geography and constraints over where poor migrants settle influence settlement size and ethnic diversity, providing analytical leverage in explaining their impact on party organization and, in turn, public services.

Chapter 2 situates the book in the context of a rapidly urbanizing India. It describes India’s demographic shift to cities and towns since Independence in 1947 and the concurrent proliferation of slum settlements. The chapter further outlines the formal institutions of governance in India’s post-decentralization cities and the sources of public finance that are used to provide services to slums. It then goes on to delineate the mediated, nonprogrammatic environment in which slum residents seek access to public services. The chapter ends with a description of the organizational structures of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Indian National Congress (INC) in Bhopal and Jaipur and how they have percolated neighborhoods.

Chapter 5 presents ethnographic narratives from eight case study settlements – four from Jaipur and four from Bhopal. The narratives trace the emergence of informal authority, party linkages, and public service delivery in each settlement, from the initial period of squatting to the present. In addition to demonstrating the mechanisms underpinning the book’s theoretical framework, the narratives address issues of historical sequencing and causality.

Chapter 6 quantitatively tests the theoretical framework with survey data from 111 squatter settlements. I find that party worker density is positive and statistically significant in its association with paved road coverage, streetlight coverage, municipal trash removal, and the provision of government medical camps. These findings hold when controlling for a wide range of potential confounders and are robust to several model specifications and post-estimation tests. Read alongside my qualitative findings, these statistical relationships provide further evidence that denser concentrations of party workers are associated with higher levels of public service provision.

Chapter 3 presents the book’s theoretical framework. It explains why settlements with dense concentrations of party workers are better positioned to demand public services than those with thin or absent networks. The discussion is set around three mechanisms undergirding this relationship: political connectivity, mobilization capacity, and the informal accountability generated by competition among party workers for a following. The chapter further considers the implications of having party workers affiliated to competing parties, which I argue has several countervailing influences on public service delivery. Next, the chapter takes a step backward in the sequencing of events and asks why settlements vary in the density and partisan balance of their party workers. I argue that two variables – settlement population and ethnic diversity – shape bottom-up incentives for residents to engage in party work and top-down incentives for parties to extend their organizational networks.

By the 1990s, India’s appellate courts had become closely involved in the regulation of street vending in several metropolitan cities. However, despite the frequent use of legal mechanisms by street vendor collectives, there has been little progress towards “formalization” of the street vending economy. To understand the limited impacts of legal intervention, it is necessary to examine the timing and the circumstances under which street vendor collectives first turned to judicial forums for protecting their livelihoods. Based on a historical examination of street vendor politics in Bombay and Madras, I show that legal mobilization in both instances was a response to serious threats faced by the political regimes that had previously shielded street vendors from dispossession and exploitation, rather than being a direct result of new legal opportunities (such as the emergence of public interest litigation). Since organized street vendors had a strong preference for maintaining the status quo, litigation was used as an effective method for buying time in the face of a hostile or uncertain political environment, even when the ultimate verdict was not likely to favor street vendors.

By the 1990s, India’s appellate courts had become closely involved in the regulation of street vending in several metropolitan cities. However, despite the frequent use of legal mechanisms by street vendor collectives, there has been little progress towards “formalization” of the street vending economy. To understand the limited impacts of legal intervention, it is necessary to examine the timing and the circumstances under which street vendor collectives first turned to judicial forums for protecting their livelihoods. Based on a historical examination of street vendor politics in Bombay and Madras, I show that legal mobilization in both instances was a response to serious threats faced by the political regimes that had previously shielded street vendors from dispossession and exploitation, rather than being a direct result of new legal opportunities (such as the emergence of public interest litigation). Since organized street vendors had a strong preference for maintaining the status quo, litigation was used as an effective method for buying time in the face of a hostile or uncertain political environment, even when the ultimate verdict was not likely to favor street vendors.