Thibaud Marcesse
Associate Professor
Biography
Thibaud Marcesse is a comparativist specializing in Indian democracy, local governance, and the political economy of development. He earned his Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University and is the author of The Accommodation of Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2025), which examines how the bureaucracy enables rent extraction in India’s poverty alleviation programs. His current research focuses on local partisan recruitment in urban and rural India, the subject of his second book manuscript.Thibaud teaches courses on the politics of India and South Asia, political institutions, and the political economy of the welfare state. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, and his work has appeared in World Development. Before academia, he worked in international development with UNICEF, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), and Chemonics International.