DEMOCRATIZATION FROM ABOVE: The Logic of Local Democracy in the Developing World by Anjali Thomas Bohlken. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2016.
COMPARATIVE political theory of democracy and democratization, which began with a focus on the national and cross-national levels, has now significantly shifted to the local level. In its first phase, this theory almost assumed that democratization at the national level subsumed democratization at the local level as well. By now a second phase of democratic theory has crystallized, which is significantly concerned with the phenomenon of local democracy.
In ancient India and Greece, democracy first began in small communities which subsequently came to be overtaken by monarchical political formations with bureaucratic or feudal overtones. The reincarnation of democracy in modern and contemporary times has, more frequently than not, been initiated by the national level polity, often coupled with pressures from below, or sometimes above from the international level. In some cases even authoritarian national political elites initiate inauthentic drives to local democratization for ulterior or cosmetic motives.
The two books under review are remarkable pieces of research and theorization on the process of ‘deepening of democracy’ and the ‘logic of local democracy’. Both are focused on India in vigorous comparative perspectives. Interestingly, both the authors are of Indian origin teaching in North America, the birthplace of modern democracy and federalism – presidential or parliamentary. And India happens to be a post-colonial parliamentary-federal democracy of reasonable success in the global South. Incidentally, the USA, Canada and India have a common British colonial past. Moreover, these three countries represent three routes to decolonization – a revolutionary War of Independence, evolutionary transition of a colony to a nation, and a nonviolent freedom struggle. The USA produced the first presidential-federal model; Canada, the first parliamentary-federal model; and India pioneered the Canadian model adapted to its needs in the Afro-Asian world.
Anoop Sadanandan seeks to unravel the ‘puzzle’ or ‘deepening of democracy’ in India in the wake of the 73rd Constitutional Amendment (1992) relating to the rural local self-government (Panchayat Raj), which sought to give ‘thick’ democratic ‘constitutional status’ to it by way of a more vigorous model of local democracy suggestively outlined in the Constitution and prompting the state legislatures to re-enact their Panchyat Raj laws in its image.
It is important to remember that this amendment is an exercise in constitutional morality, not in constitutional law. For despite this amendment, local government under the Constitution remains a devolutionary feature; it does not become a federal feature. Local government remains a subject in the State List in the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution, and the status of the 11th Schedule dealing with the 29 subjects devolved to the jurisdiction of panchayats does not become tantamount to the 7th Schedule dealing with the federal division of powers between the Union and the states. This point is also clearly clarified by the Andhra Pradesh High Court in its 3:1 judgement in Ranga Reddy District Sarpanches Association v. State of Andhra Pradesh.1 Only Switzerland, Germany, and the new Constitution of Nepal (2015) give federal status to the local government in the respective countries.
Sadanandan defines ‘deepening of democracy’ in terms of greater conformity to the 73rd amendment in varying responses of the various states of the Indian Union (28 at the time of this study; now 29 after the creation of Telangana in 2014). He seeks to measure and compare this phenomenon by systematically reviewing the decentralization policies of the 14 states from 1994 to 2008. Eight different indicators of deepening of democracy are used in the study: (i) functional devolution, (ii) decentralized planning, (iii) panchayat autonomy, (iv) integrated decentralization across state and Union programmes, (v) local capacity building, (vi) local institutional strength, (vii) local spending capacity, and (viii) regular, free and fair elections.
The summary interrelations among the various indicators are subjected to statistical factor analysis to yield a composite score for democratic deepening in the states. On this basis, the studied states are classified into three clusters of categories: (a) High democratic deepening (Himachal Pradesh, West Bengal, Karnataka and Kerala); (b) Moderate democratic deepening (Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu); and (c) Low democratic deepening (Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Bihar and Orissa).
The rest, and the bulk, of the book is devoted to explaining the varying levels/degrees of democratic deepening in the studied states in terms of a variety of hypotheses culled from an enormously large corpus of theoretically oriented empirical researches on India and all over the world.
Is democratic deepening attributable to political ideology and party organization? Is it attributable to international factors like the UN and the World Bank or FDI inflows? The author persuasively – by reasoning and evidence – shows that these factors have limited explanatory mileage. Some supportive evidence for their impact is largely negated by equally or more contradictory evidence. A more general and consistent explanation, according to this author, lies with the characteristics of the larger entity on the ground, i.e. the states concerned. These state attributes relate to two dimensions: (i) States with relatively secure socio-economic circumstances (Himachal Pradesh, Kerala and Tamil Nadu) and those with high levels of socio-economic vulnerability (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh); (ii) States with the salience of local information for national leaders correlated with the states with socio-economic circumstances of vulnerability.
According to the author: ‘Attributes of states affect the voter-related informational asymmetries that exist between the state leaders and local politicians. These state-level attributes shape the political value and cost of local information to leaders and, in doing so, they make it more or less likely for leaders to decentralize power and foster local democratization.’ (p. 53)
The author thus offers a well elaborated and documented ‘information theory of democratic deepening.’ A telling and concluding line of the book is: ‘Democracy deepens when the central leader’s political survival rests on local information.’ (p. 157) This local information largely pertains to the political preferences of the local leaders and voters. I feel inclined to add that the quality of democracy may ultimately be premised on the rule of law and constitutionalism, but its immediate survival depends on the minimalist criterion of free and fair elections.
The puzzle of the second book under review is the same as that of the first: the explanation for democratization from above. Bohlken finds that there is a significant measure of variation across the developing world in the degree of democratization the national elites are willing to allow at the local levels of the political systems they govern. What factors are accountable for it? The author suggests that, ‘This book offers a theory of local democratization… that rather than being a means of granting more autonomy to local actors, local democracy emerges from the need of these government elites to control local intermediaries on whom they rely for political support. Thus, the book offers a logic of local democratization that runs counter to the logic of national democratization and to the logic of decentralization.’ (p. 3)
Bohlken clarifies that while national democratization theories are mostly defined and theorized as exposing the incumbent elites to democratic contestation and possible electoral turnover of power, the theory of local democratization here offered ‘may be implemented as a means of allowing national incumbent to consolidate their power.’ (p. 18)
Sadanandan’s theory of democratic deepening is more authentically and holistically democratic in intent and content than Bohlken’s theory of local democratization, which has a tinge of authoritarian-democratic ambivalence in the motivation of the national elites in allowing local democratization.
It is a moot question whether the former is more idealistic and the latter more realistic. It goes without saying that the motive of manipulative, if not exploitative, use of information and skill of the local political intermediaries by the national elites is germane to both the theories. For, much like Sadanandan, Bohlken also introduces the hypothesis of ‘local democratization as a solution to an information problem’ and ‘local intermediary performance and informational asymmetries’ while constructing her ‘strategic logic of local democratization.’
Both the studies use a significant amount of qualitative as well as quantitative data (Sadanandan’s about 14 states of the Indian Union and Bohlken’s about 68 countries with a population greater than 10 million in three continents – Asia, South and Central America, and Africa). In the case of India, the period covered by the latter is 1950 to 2010; and the year of subnational democratization reform is 1992, the year of the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments relating to the rural and urban local governments.
To sum up, in Sadanandan’s theory of democratic deepening, the primary causal effects of the socio-economic characteristics of state contexts are inter-mediated by the intervening causal effects of the need of local information for national leaders who, in the bargain, allow local democratization. In preference for this parsimonious theoretical formulation, other explanatory factors like party ideology and organization or international factors like the UN and Bretton Woods institutions/FDI inflows are rejected by Sadanandan as only partially valid or even spurious.
This kind of parsimonious explanatory clarity seems to elude Bohlken’s theory of local democratization in which the complicating effects of alternate causal factors like the nature of political party organizations in India (chapter 3), intraparty competition in Kerala and Tamil Nadu (chapter 6), etc. are not easily shown to be less efficacious than the master explanatory factor of the strategic need for local information for the national elites. The messy causal effects of the primary and intervening/intermediary factors on the dependent or effect phenomenon of local democratization are not clearly disentangled. In fact, come to think of it, the nature of party organization and intra-party competition may well be a dimension or aspect of democratization rather than its cause.
Mahendra Prasad Singh
National Fellow, Indian Institute of Advanced Study , Shimla
Footnote:
1. https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1981313; accessed 23 February 2019.
