Economics Research Seminar – Dr Valeria Rueda
Title: From Modi’s India to Westminster: How Hindu Nationalism Shapes Islamophobic Rhetoric Abroad (with Apurav Bhatiya and Andrés Martignano)
Date: 22 October 2025
Time: 13:30- 14:30
Venue: TEAMS
Meeting ID: 324 562 363 272 4
Passcode: uE3AH9WS
If you would like to attend, please register using the following link:
Speaker:
Dr Valeria Rueda is an Associate Professor in the School of Economics, and the deputy director of NICEP (Nottingham Interdisciplinary Centre for Political and Economic Research). She is a research affiliate of the CEPR and CAGE.
She received a PhD in Economics from Sciences Po, Paris in 2016. She joined the School of Economics in 2019. Before that, she was a Career Development Fellow at the University of Oxford, where she was associated with the Economic and Social History Research Group
Please visit Valeria Rueda’s website for up-to-date information on research
Abstract:
In today’s connected world, migrants remain tied to their origins in ways that allow events abroad to reverberate within host-country politics. We ask whether homeland shocks that target a diaspora’s identity can reshape political rhetoric in host countries. To answer this, we assemble a panel of UK parliamentary speeches from 2013 to 2024 and link them to weekly records of religious violence in India, exploiting the timing of violent events. We find that anti-Hindu violence in India leads MPs in Westminster from constituencies with larger Hindu populations to use significantly more Islamophobic rhetoric. The effect intensifies after the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and holds regardless of whether Hindus are victims or initiators of violence. These rhetorical shifts reflect constituency pressures, donor influence, and symbolic alignment with diaspora concerns, rather than electoral returns. Our findings highlight how transnational ties can transmit homeland ideologies into host-country politics, underscoring that debates over migration and integration cannot be understood purely through domestic dynamics.