Social Origins of Democracy in South Asia

1
Social Origins of Democracy in South Asia

• Revisiting Barrington Moores Puzzle

2
Moores Conclusions on India

• First, origins are social, not formulaic
• Strong path dependency history matters.
• Social conflicts left unresolved at the
  foundation may tear apart the democracy
  established
• American civil war illustrated the consequences
  of structural dissonance in democracy
• Collapse of the Nehruvian consensus secularism
  and the developmental state
• Counter-factuals fascism, The Emergency
• Consolidation is more rare/fragile than
  transition
• Sri Lanka 1978-83
• Pakistan

3

• Democracy presupposes elimination of dyadic
  dependency relations, a reduction of the realm of
  unfreedom
• This is why B Moore Jr judged India not yet
  democratic formalism outweighed equality of
  participation
• Middle-class determinism is a myth

4
Gandhi and Nehru Got There First

• Two visions
• Village Republics
• Developmental State
• Scale and Scope Variable and Politically
  Contentious
• Who was right?

5
Social Science Research

• Micro - Anirudh Krishna
• Active Social Capital
• Macro Patrick Heller
• Degrees of Democracy, WP

6
Agreements with Moore

• Heller finds
• Elimination of Lord and Peasant enabled democracy
• Horizontal mobilization and solidarity enabled
  social autonomy of weaker sectors
• Scope, scale and depth of democracy highest by
  regional standards

7
Heller Nehru Was Right

• Substantive Outcomes Trump Procedures Normatively
• Deep democracy presupposes an activist state
• Social democracy the gold standard
• high-density citizenship
• Wide scope of equality of citizens

8
And So Was Moore

• Delhis early democracy was shallow
• Nehrus state lacked political capacity
• States follow different path dependencies
• Dreze and Sen A new-born girl can expect to
  live 20 years longer if she is born in Kerala
  rather than in Uttar Pradesh
• the probability that she will die before the
  age of one is more than six times as high in
  Uttar Pradesh as in Kerala.

9
Social Democracy and the Kerala Model

• Kerala's infant mortality is about 12 per 1,000
  live births versus 85 for India and 91 for other
  poor countries.
• Adult literacy rate was 91 while India's was 52
  and other poor countries 55.
• Coherent, programmatic choices for voters
  Meaningful options parties are not tweedledee
  and tweedledum gt High participation
• Decentralization/devolution vigorous
• Possible under certain conditions CARC
• Absence of dependency relations ie freedom in a
  meaningful sense

10
How Anomalous the Anomaly?

• Cp United States IMRs States Matter
• Minnesota 5.3 Delaware 10.7 Miss 10.5
• Are Minnesotans just healthy people? cp
• St Paul 8.9 Minneapolis 8.9
• Race and Ethnicity Matter
• St Paul Black 18.0 Minneapolis Black 12.0
• Milwaukee White 7.1 Black 16.7 Hisp 10.8

11
Path-Dependency, Democracy and Slavery

• Post American Civil War
• great challenge of integrating former slaves,
  freed during the war, into the body politic.
• Radicals in the Congress tried to impose a
  social transformation that came to be called
  "Reconstruction" (1865-1877 )
• American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission1864 "No
  such thing as a free, democratic society can
  exist in any country where all lands are owned by
  one class of men and cultivated by another"
• Promise of 40 acres and a mule
• Agrarian reform to constitute the freed slaves as
  a political force and economic engine of
  recovery.

12
What Difference Would Agrarian Reform Have Made?

• Eric Foner
• "well into the twentieth century, blacks who did
  acquire land were more likely to register, vote,
  and run for office than other members of the
  rural community."
• Lester Salamon
• New Deal experiments in land distribution
  demonstrate that landless African-American
  tenants who benefited from very limited land
  distribution in the l930s created a permanent
  middle class that ultimately emerged in the l960s
  as the backbone of the civil-rights movement in
  the rural South.

13
Lost Historical Moments

• Thaddeus Stevens, presciently noted the
  importance of historical conjuncture for path
  dependence.
• "The whole fabric of southern society must be
  changed and never can it be done if this
  opportunity is lost. How can republican
  institutions, free schools, free churches, free
  social intercourse exist in a mingled community
  of nabobs and serfs?"
• If we fail in this great duty now, when we have
  the power, we shall deserve and receive the
  execration of history and of all future ages.
  December 18, l865

14
Empowering Policies

• Agrarian reform is archetypal, but not alone
• e.g. Education of women correlates with
  democracy in aggregate studies
• Fair Electoral Procedures inspire confidence in
  rules of the game
• or not

15
But Path Dependency Limits Options

• Maybe Gandhi was also right
• Gandhi assumes village community, Anirudh
  Krishna goes looking for it
• Anirudh Krishna
• Radically variable social capital in villages
  makes for radically different capacities for
• Democracy, social peace, development
• In most efficacious villages, caste declined,
  educated young people became new leaders

16
What to Do?

• Whether Gandhi or Nehru was more right, there may
  be limitations on the degrees of freedom of
  current policy
• This is the policy frontier

17
Conclusions

• Democracy is a struggle, not a stable equilibrium
• As a technical matter
• As a conceptual matter
• Democracy as a system of political equality sits
  uneasily with, in tension with, capitalism.
• Democracy is no guarantee of substantive outcomes
• Partial exception evidence for the peaceful
  nature of democracies in dealing with other
  democracies has led to the democratic peace
  hypothesis.
• There are multiple routes to deep and efficacious
  democracy, but scaling up remains the hardest
  problem
• Warts are inevitable, normatively variable in
  impact

18
Ironically,

• It pays to choose the right colonial master.

19
Conundra

• How fixed are fixed parameters?
• The Third Wave of Democratization Devolution,
  Decentralization, and Power to the Bottom?
• The anarcho-communitarians
• Participation fatigue
• The Middle Class
• Desertion of the public sphere with deepening of
  democracy? The dirty river phenomenon
• Representation and the NGO sphere
• Who speaks for the poor? For women?

20
What Scale, What Scope, Who Counts?

• Consider the range in the international system
  you could have
• One person one vote in which case China and
  India rule the world.
• UN one nation one vote in which case Chad, Niger
  and Lichtenstein outvote France and Brazil
• IMF/IBRD one dollar one vote, or money talks in
  which case the US outvotes all of Africa