Apurva Bamezai’s main research interests include political selection, bureaucracy, gender, and public goods provision. Her research has a strong policy design and impact focus, aimed at generating evidence for strengthening democratic accountability mechanisms to improve last-mile service delivery.
While at Notre Dame, Bamezai will work on the project, “Public Sector Employment as a Pathway to Electoral Politics? Evidence from India,” which examines how public sector employment in India influences political entry at the household level, using a combination of panel data analysis and conjoint experiments.
Her work has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Maternal and Child Nutrition and the Journal of Development Economics. Her projects have been funded by J-PAL's Governance Initiative, the International Growth Centre, Sobti Family Fellowship (CASI), Penn Development Research Initiative (PDRI) - DevLab@Penn, and the Penn SAS Dissertation Research Award among others.
Previously Bamezai worked in development research and the public policy space for more than eight years, mainly conducting mixed-methods impact evaluations and process assessments of government programs in India, with a focus on governance and service delivery in the realms of social protection, nutrition, and early childhood education interventions.
She holds a PhD in Comparative Politics from University of Pennsylvania, an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge, and an MA in Development Studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.
Academic Year 2025-2026 : Public Sector Employment as a Pathway to Electoral Politics? Evidence from India