Patrick Heller

Patrick Heller is an American sociologist and the director of the development research program at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

Education Patrick Heller completed his bachelor's degree in arts in Sociology and South Asian Studies (1985) from University of California, Santa Cruz. He then received an MA in sociology from University of California, Berkeley by 1988. Patrick Heller's area of research is mainly the comparative study of social inequality and democratic deepening. He explores how democratic institutions and practices can promote more inclusive and more participatory forms of development, by focusing primarily on Brazil, India and South Africa. His article "Deliberation and Development: Rethinking the Role of Voice and Collective Action in Unequal Societies" was published by World Bank and received substantial scholarly attention. He is affiliated with American Sociological Association. He argues that legacies of egalitarianism, social rights and public trust in Kerala helped the state to encounter the economic and welfare consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic successfully. He was invited as a panelist by Kerala Government for the three-day virtual global conclave that seeks to lay down the roadmap for Kerala's long-term development by factoring in perspectives from top economists, industry leaders, administrators and planners amid a changed world order due to COVID-19. His study revealed that Kochi in Kerala has very high levels of service delivery and associational life. He argued that rapidly growing cities of Kerala (like Kochi) needed to be "States within States", having tremendous autonomy.

Important publications Patrick Heller has 118 scholarly articles and book chapters in International Journals and reputed publishers

Books Bootstrapping Democracy: Transforming Local Governance and Civil Society in Brazil (co-authored with Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Marcelo Kunrath Silva). Stanford University Press. 2011. Social Democracy in the Global Periphery: Origins and Prospects (co-authored with Richard Sandbrook, Marc Edelman and Judith Teichman). Cambridge University Press. 2007. The Labor of Development: Workers and the Transformation of Capitalism in Kerala, India. Cornell University Press. 1999.

Journal articles

"Local Democracy and Development: The Kerala People's Campaign for Decentralized Planning." American Anthropologist, vol. 106, no. 3, 2004. "Democratic Deepening in India and South Africa." Journal of Asian and African Studies, vol. 44, no. 1, 2009. "Democracy, Participatory Politics and Development: Some Comparative Lessons from Brazil, India and South Africa." Polity, vol. 44, no. 4, 2012. "HEGEMONIC ASPIRATIONS." Critical Asian Studies, vol. 38, no. 4, 2006. (Co-authored with Leela Fernandez) "Taking Tilly south: durable inequalities, democratic contestation, and citizenship in the Southern Metropolis." Theory and Society, vol. 39, no. 3–4, 2010.(Co-authored with Peter Evans) "Building Local Democracy: Evaluating the Impact of Decentralization in Kerala, India." World Development, vol. 35, no. 4, 2007. (Co-authored with K.N Harilal and Shubham Chaudhuri)