Education

• MPhil in Politics (Comparative Government), University of Oxford
• BA (Hons) in Political Science, Ashoka University

Profile

Madhav Singh is a Visiting Faculty member at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru, and an incoming Assistant Professor at SRM School of Law, Chennai. His research focusses on how democratic institutions survive in some subnational regimes even as they erode nationally.

At Oxford, his MPhil drew on elite interviews and original index construction to study how states like Tamil Nadu sustain democratic practices amid centralising pressures. He is currently developing a first-of-its-kind subnational democracy index for India, adapting established comparative frameworks to measure democratic performance across Indian states at an unprecedented level of indicator disaggregation.

He was previously a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Legislative Education and Research at FLAME University, where he synthesised archival and census datasets to trace the territorial evolution of Indian federalism and helped build automated infrastructure for documenting administrative boundary changes across Indian states. He has also held research positions at Lokniti (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies) and the Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi.

Research Interests

• Democratic backsliding, Federalism, Indian politics, Ethnicity and identity, Comparative democratisation, Process tracing