Brown University's Patrick Heller, Siddharth Swaminathan, and Ashutosh Varshney recently co-authored a paper published in the American Journal of Sociology titled, "The Rich Have Peers, the Poor Have Patrons: Engaging the State in a South Indian City." The article poses a simple question studied through a large, unique sample survey carried out in a South Indian city: How do citizens engage the state? Their findings indicate effective citizenship as refracted through the institutional specificities of urban India, while noting "a substantial part of participation is associated with forms of brokerage that compromise democratic citizenship." Read the full paper.