Nikhar Gaikwad

Nikhar Gaikwad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Member of the Committee on Global Thought, Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, and the South Asia Institute at Columbia University.  Previously, he was a Fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University.  Prior to his academic positions, he was a Senior Analyst and Research Associate at Cornerstone Research, where he conducted economics and finance research in complex regulatory disputes.

Gaikwad received his Ph.D. with Departmental and University Distinction, M.Phil., and M.A. in Political Science from Yale University.  He received his B.A. magna cum laude in Economics and Political Science (Honors) from Williams College, where he was a Williams College Undergraduate Research Fellow and studied at the University of Oxford as part of the Williams-Exeter Program at Oxford.

Gaikwad’s research interests span international and comparative political economy, with a focus on the politics of economic policymaking and identity.  Substantively, he works on international trade, migration, and climate change.  He has a regional specialization in India, which he studies in comparative perspective with other democratic emerging economies.  A main line of inquiry studies how material interests interact with identity-related factors when voters and political elites contest distributive policies in the electoral arena.  A related stream of work investigates how structural features of the global economy and geopolitics interface with democratic politics to influence international economic cooperation, representation, and development.  His work employs a range of methodological approaches—from quantitative analysis, formal modeling, and experiments to interviews, archival analysis, and qualitative methods. 

Gaikwad’s articles have been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, World Politics, International Organization, and Perspectives on Politics.  His co-edited volume, Climate Justice Now! Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Climate Crisis, is forthcoming at Columbia University Press (2025), and he is working on a book manuscript, Identity Politics and Economic Policy.

Gaikwad has received a number of awards, including the International Political Economy Society’s David A. Lake Award for Best Paper; the American Political Science Association’s Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award for Best Paper, Political Economy Section’s Fiona McGillivray Award for Best Paper and Mancur Olson Prize for Best Dissertation (Honorable Mention), Democracy and Autocracy Section’s Juan Linz Prize for Best Dissertation and Best Paper Award, Comparative Politics Section’s Sage Paper Prize for Best Paper, and Representation and Electoral Systems Section’s Lawrence Longley Award for Best Paper (Honorable Mention); and the Midwest Political Science Association’s Pi Sigma Alpha Award for Best Paper, Kellogg/Notre Dame Award for Best Paper in Comparative Politics, and Robert H. Durr Award for the Best Paper in Applied Quantitative Methods.

His research has been funded by the Social Science Research Council, International Growth Centre, Tobin Project, Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, President’s Global Innovation Fund, Evidence in Governance and Politics, and Research and Empirical Analysis of Labor Migration, among other centers.  It has been profiled in media outlets around the world, from The New York Times to Le Monde to Hindustan Times. 

Gaikwad is the 2025 recipient of Columbia’s Division of Social Science Award for Excellence and Commitment to Teaching.  He has a keen interest in pedagogical innovations in the classroom.  With support from Provostial teaching grants at Columbia, he has developed case study-based curricula and published a wide range of instructional case studies to teach students topics in political economy.  

Gaikwad has also led several discipline-wide initiatives, including serving as the co-chair of the Historical Political Economy Working Group, Virtual-IPES, and APSA’s Qualitative and Multi-Method Section's Working Group on Text-Based Sources.  He is on the Editorial Board of Comparative Political Studies.  At Columbia, he has participated in university-wide initiatives, including serving as the co-chair of the Climate School’s Decarbonization, Climate Resilience, and Climate Justice network, on the Junior Faculty Advisory Board, and on the Executive Committees of the Committee on Global Thought and Columbia Mumbai Global Center.