Indian American political scientist Tanushree Goyal has a received the 2026 Lawrence Longley Award from the American Political Science Association for an article exploring local political representation as a pathway to power in India.

Goyal, an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Princeton University, received the best article award for paper, “Local Political Representation as a Pathway to Power: A Natural Experiment in India” published in the American Journal of Political Science.

As a comparative political scientist Goyal’s research is at the intersection of gender and politics, and the political economy of development. India is her primary empirical focus, with extensions to other regions of the Global South.

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Her new book “Representation from Below: The Grassroots Origins of Women’s Political Power in India, Cambridge University Press, Studies in Comparative Politics Series, is expected to be published next month.

Goyal combines quantitative and experimental approaches with fieldwork and qualitative research, which inform hypothesis generation, survey design, data collection, and interpretation.

Her work brings tools of causal inference to primary survey data informed by fieldwork, newly compiled administrative datasets at unprecedented scale, and AI-assisted analysis of textual and visual data.

Goyal’s research has been published in leading political science journals, including the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics.

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She has received some of the most prestigious awards in political science, including the Mancur Olson Best Dissertation Award in Political Economy (2022) and the Juan Linz Prize for Best Dissertation in the Comparative Study of Democracy & Autocracy (2023). Recently, she recieved the prestigious APSA Urban and Local Politics career award, the Susan Clarke Young Scholar Award (2025).

Before joining Princeton, Goyal was a postdoctoral scholar at the Harvard Academy and a non-resident visiting fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania.

She earned her PhD in Political Science from the University of Oxford in 2021 as a member of Nuffield College, and a Research Master’s in Social Sciences from the University of Amsterdam. Before transitioning to political science, she completed a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering.