Speaker Noah Nathan will be presenting joint research conducted with Paige Bollen (Ohio State University).

Abstract: The physical structures in which urban life occurs are an underappreciated determinant of how grassroots urban politics unfolds. In many rapidly growing cities, housing scarcity forces residents into multifamily buildings that create daily exposures to neighbors. We argue that these exposures affect political behavior by shaping residents’ access to political information and capacity for collective action. We focus on the informal, vernacular architecture of West Africa’s dominant urban housing form — the compound house. Compound house residents in urban Ghana participate more in politics than similar residents of other housing types. Leveraging an original survey, including novel measures of tenants’ spatial network centrality within their residential buildings, we suggest that key mechanisms for this relationship emerge from the effects of architectural design on visibility and social ties among co-tenants. Ultimately, built environments must be studied alongside demographic environments to best understand contextual effects on political behavior.

Lunch will be available from 12:15pm. Please RSVP here.

Speaker: 

Noah Nathan is an Associate Professor of Political Science at MIT. His research focuses on electoral politics, political economy, and urban politics in Africa. His most recent book, The Scarce State: Inequality and Political Power in the Hinterland (Cambridge University Press, 2023), explores long-term effects of state-building in the rural periphery on economic inequality, elite capture, clientelism, and violence. His first book, Electoral Politics and Africa’s Urban Transition: Class and Ethnicity in Ghana (Cambridge University Press, 2019), examined urbanization's impacts on ethnicity, clientelism, and the emergence of programmatic politics. Other research has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics, and World Politics. He received his PhD in Government at Harvard in 2016. 

Contact Kate Danahy at kdanahy@mit.edu with any questions.

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