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, where I continue to work part-time during the academic year.
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 tightly constrained and capital highly mobile. This paper reconsiders 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 management centralized. To evaluate this argument, I assemble what is, to my knowledge, the largest multi-country collection of subnational political and economic data ever compiled: over two billion administrative and proprietary observations spanning multiple tiers of government, as well as polling station-level election returns in local contests across advanced democracies. The analysis combines regression-discontinuity designs around close elections with global boundary comparisons and newly constructed, fine-grained economic indicators—from satellite-derived estimates of gross regional product and night-time light intensity to property transactions, rent listings, job postings, and consumer spending patterns. Across settings, I find that turnover in local government has no measurable effect on aggregate economic growth or its rate of change. Instead, political turnover systematically alters the composition and spatial distribution of economic activity, reshaping who benefits from development and where gains are realized. I illustrate these distributive effects using a new, image-based measure of road quality derived from millions of street-level panoramas evaluated by vision–language models. Taken together, the results suggest that in the contemporary economy, 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.