Associate Professor at Penn State University | Ph.D. Yale University 2007.
Professor Yadav’s research focuses on the comparative study of political parties, and business and religious interest-groups in developing countries and the consequences of their interactions for governance, policy outcomes and democracy. She has a special interest in South Asian politics. Her previous books include Political Parties, Business Groups and Corruption in Developing Countries (Oxford, 2011) which won the American Political Science Association’s 2013 Epstein Best Book award and the 2012 Alan Rosenthal Book award; Democracy, Electoral Systems, and Judicial Empowerment in Developing Countries (Michigan 2014) and The Politics of Corruption in Dictatorships (Cambridge 2016). Her work has been supported by the US National Science Foundation, the Azim Premji Foundation (India), and the McCourtney Institute of Democracy. She is currently working on projects analyzing the rise and consequences of populist parties in developing democracies, how politicians’ personal characteristics influence political outcomes using experiments and surveys on political elites, and the impact of elite characteristics and rebel governance on development using lab-in-the-field experiments.