Ritika Goel is a Comparative Politics Scholar and PhD Candidate at the University of California, Berkeley (expected summer 2025). Goel’s research interests are broadly grouped around economic inequality, status and identity, right-wing politics, and elite capture of institutions.
Goel’s Dissertation Project zooms in on a mutant version of right-wing populism in power, economically center-right, nativist, and anti-political elite. When do these populists consolidate electoral power and when do they fail to do so? She analyzes both top-down (institutional and rhetorical strategies) as well as bottom-up imperatives (why do poor voters respond), comparing the cases of India, the United States, and Brazil. While varying in income levels and institutional design, India, the United States, and Brazil are federal, multi-ethnic democracies with high social and economic inequality. This gives populist leaders a common set of strategies to campaign on, and a different set of institutional and business model constraints to be up against. Goel uses multiple methods to get to the heart of this puzzle, including qualitative interviews, survey experiments, observational analysis, and case studies.
Before her doctoral studies at Berkeley, Goel worked in International Development in South Asia including with the International Finance Corporation (IFC), World Bank Group, and with the UK Department for International Development (DFID). Born and raised Indian, she has a Masters in Economics and Public Policy from Princeton University, and a Bachelors in Engineering from NSIT, Delhi University. Goel is looking forward to working as a Visiting Scholar at the Center of Economy and Society at the SNF Agora Institute, John Hopkins University.