Hi, I'm Noah. I'm a fourth-year PhD candidate and the Carl J. Friedrich Fellow in the Department of Government at Harvard University, where I also received my MA (2024) and BA (2022). In the Summer of 2025, I was a Quantitative Research Intern at Two Sigma.
I'm primarily interested in the comparative study of large-scale, structuralist questions, especially with respect to party systems. I'm also interested in measurement and computation.
I am the creator of the Small-Area Global Elections (SAGE) Archive, a database of geocoded, small-area (usually polling-station level) election results for 110 countries. You can read more about the progress of SAGE here.
At Harvard, I have twice taught the Ph.D.-level "Math Prefresher" and GOV 2020: The Hidden Curriculum (for Gary King). I have also taught STAT 186: Causal Inference (for Susan Murphy) and GOV 97: Political Geography (instructor on record), as well as a GIS workshop for PhD students.
You can contact me by email at noahdasanaike[at]g.harvard.edu.
Classical modernization theory holds that development shifts party competition from identities to class interests. I argue the opposite: not levels but the sequence of modernization determines long-run cleavage structure. I distinguish between social modernization--the spread of literacy, mass communication, and universal participation--and economic modernization--the shift out of agriculture into industry and services. The absolute and relative timing of these separable forms determines which social solidarities are available when mass politics begins. Early or concurrent social modernization foregrounds class and occupation; late social modernization, especially with late economic modernization, foregrounds ethnic, religious, linguistic, or regional identities. Uncertainty at entry into mass politics pushes voters and elites toward these existing organizations, and path dependence then locks them in: what I call a cleavage shift. To test this alternative modernization story, I digitize individual-level electoral rolls, censuses, tax lists, civil registration records, and telephone books across time, totaling over 2 billion individual records, 30 countries, and a collective span of more than 150 years. A variety of empirical tests, including predicting vote choice for every individual in the data, align with the hypothesis of cleavage shift.
Does local governance still shape economic outcomes in an era of globalized capital and post-industrial production? Classic theories of comparative political economy held that partisan control and labor organization determined growth in advanced democracies during the industrial era. Yet the structural transformation of these economies since the 1970s casts doubt on whether such mechanisms operate at the local level, where authority is more constrained and capital increasingly mobile. In this paper, I reconsider the question of whether ``who governs" locally matters for economic performance under post-industrial conditions. I argue that the channels linking local political control to aggregate growth have weakened as production has become spatially fragmented and macroeconomic control centralized. Using novel, global data matching subnational electoral turnover to fine-grained economic indicators--from satellite-derived GDP and nightlights to property transactions, job postings, and consumer spending--across a large set of advanced democracies, I find that changes in local government have no discernible effect on overall economic growth. Instead, local political turnover systematically alters the composition and distribution of economic activity, shaping who benefits from development and how places evolve rather than how much they grow. I illustrate this finding using granular measurements of road quality derived from millions of street view images. The findings suggest that in contemporary economies, local politics matters less for the quantity of growth than for its geography and beneficiaries.
Are politics in the United States nationalizing? Increased polarization on the one hand seems discordant from recent scholarship arguing that nationalization has increased. We propose a measure of horizontal nationalization focusing on the level of political similarity between geographically distant but demographically similar places, and distinguish it from vertical nationalization, which is more commonly studied. Horizontal nationalization adheres closely to both classic and intuitive definitions of nationalization. Leveraging aggregate data at the state, county, and precinct level and individual data from surveys and voter files, we examine horizontal nationalization since the 19th century and find that it has decreased in recent decades from a peak in the late-20th century. We compare this to horizontal nationalization in France, which is higher and far more stable over the full time period. We suggest that one explanation for these fluctuations in the American case is the changing nature of the media landscape owing to technological development. Our findings have implications for recent literature in American politics on the influence of geographic and demographic sorting, and contrasts with recent prominent conceptualizations of nationalization that have focused on the levels of vertical unification between national and sub-national behavior to argue that nationalization has increased in recent years.
We consider the issue of generalizability in observational research designs. We argue that a major obstacle to generalizability is posed by the disjuncture between micro- and macro-level approaches to politics. There is little reason to suppose that the uncoordinated search for truth will lead to knowledge cumulation through a concatenation of local studies focused on observational data. To redress these concerns, we propose a ``glocal" research design, which by combining micro-level units of analysis with macro-level scope can overcome the respective limitations of both local and global designs with respect to generalizability and empirical rigor. We illustrate the glocal approach by testing the relationship between modernization and electoral contestation, drawing on granular voting returns for 110 countries. We find that only half of countries are more competitive in denser and more developed areas, and that the relationship between density and competitiveness is partially mediated by electoral system.