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"Deliberative democracy India."
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Deliberative Democracy in an Unequal World: A Text-As-Data Study of South India’s Village Assemblies
This paper opens the “black box” of real-world deliberation by using text-as-data methods on a corpus of transcripts from the constitutionally mandated gram sabhas, or village assemblies, of rural India. Drawing on normative theories of deliberation, we identify empirical standards for “good” deliberation based on one’s ability both to speak and to be heard, and use natural language processing methods to generate these measures. We first show that, even in the rural Indian context, these assemblies are not mere “talking shops,” but rather provide opportunities for citizens to challenge their elected officials, demand transparency, and provide information about local development needs. Second, we find that women are at a disadvantage relative to men; they are less likely to speak, set the agenda, and receive a relevant response from state officials. And finally, we show that quotas for women for village presidencies improve the likelihood that female citizens are heard.
Journal Article
Deliberative Cultures
Increasing interest in applying the theory and practice of deliberative democracy to new and varied political contexts leads us to ask whether or not deliberation is a universal political practice. While deliberation does manifest a universal competence, its character varies substantially across time and space, a variation partially explicable in cultural terms. We deploy an intersubjective conception of culture in order to explore these differences. Culture meets deliberation where publicly accessible meanings, symbols, and norms shape the way political actors engage one another in discourse. Fuller understanding of political deliberation requires comparative and historical studies of particular contexts. We look at one case from Egypt in some depth and provide shorter illustrations from Botswana, Europe, India, Japan, Madagascar, the United States, Yemen, and elsewhere. Cross-cultural learning can enrich the theory of deliberative democracy, and give democratic theory a more universal reach.
Journal Article
How Women Talk in Indian Democracy
In democracies, political institutions based on deliberation offer citizens scope for talk-based participation in development and governance. A prominent example is the Indian gram sabha, or village assembly. We undertake a talk-centered analysis of women’s participation in village assemblies and examine if associational membership, in the form of self-help group (SHG) membership, makes a difference in how women frame their concerns and demands addressed to the state. Analyzing 255 village assembly transcripts from four South Indian states, we find that women’s participation varies vastly between states, and SHG membership matters for narrative style. In Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, women associated with SHGs employed a wider variety of narrative styles and utilized a more complex structure to convey their problems and demands compared to non-member women. Drawing on this analysis, we argue that SHGs contribute to deepening democracy by improving the quality of women’s participation in deliberative political institutions. We discuss the mechanisms through which this influence might come to bear. This study contributes to understanding the link between associational life and democracy and the political sociology of democracy.
Journal Article
Dignity through Discourse: Poverty and the Culture of Deliberation in Indian Village Democracies
Employing a view of culture as a communicative phenomenon involving discursive engagement, the authors argue that the struggle to break free of poverty is as much a cultural process as it is political and economic. The authors analyze public meetings in Indian village democracies, gram sabhas, where villagers are constitutionally empowered to make decisions regarding budgetary allocations for village development and beneficiary selection for antipoverty programs. They examine 290 transcripts of gram sabhas from South India, looking at how they create a culture of civic/political engagement and how the definition of poverty is understood within them. They highlight how gram sabhas impart discursive skills and civic agency and illustrate how the poor deploy these skills in a resource-scarce and socially stratified environment. The intersection of poverty, culture, and deliberative democracy sheds light on cultural processes that can be influenced by public action in a manner that helps improve the voice and agency of the poor.
Journal Article
Pranab k. Bardhan, awakening giants, feet of clay: assessing the Economic rise of China and India
Issue Title: Deliberation and Participation in China
Journal Article
Is the South 'Brazilian'? The public realm in urban Brazil through a comparative lens
Participatory budgeting, which originated in southern Brazil, entails an important reworking of the public sphere. The deliberative democracy of the 'Brazilian model' is, however, less readily replicated, even within Brazil itself, than many enthusiasts recognise. A crucial feature of Brazilian urban politics is the relative weakness of political society in terms of both redistribution (of resources and dignity) and co-optation (of dissident civic activists). In some other parts of the global South, including India and South Africa, the strengths of political society inhibit the emergence of a public sphere along the lines of the 'Brazilian model'.
Journal Article
CAN THE RIGHT TO INFORMATION HELP?
The concept of an open government is the direct emanation from the right to know which seems implicit in the right of free speech and expression guaranteed under Article 19(1)(a) [of the Indian Constitution]. [...] the disclosures of information in regard to the functioning of government must be the rule, and secrecy an exception justified only where the strictest requirement of public interest so demands.2 Whatever the constitutional warrant for institutionalizing openness, however, no government seriously acted upon it until various grassroots movements applied sufficient pressure beginning around the middle of the 1990s.
Journal Article
The Making and Unmaking of Local Democracy in an Indian Village
This study is an ethnographic investigation of a gram sabha (village assembly), the cornerstone of local democracy, in Soonaghalli, in the Mandya district of Southern Karnataka, India. Observation of the meeting and informal, open-ended conversations with the key actors illuminated how democratic policies that are conceived at the global level are practiced and experienced by local community members. The article speaks to the significance of moving beyond the prevailing politico-institutional framework of democracy that is dominated by concerns about formal regime shifts and focusing on informal practices that contribute to the making and unmaking of democratic governance. The findings shed light on the varied forms that deliberative processes take and on multiple meanings of deliberative cultures, emphasizing the need for a comparative sociological inquiry into democratic practices for a richer formulation of democratic theory.
Journal Article
What Democracy Is For
In this provocative book, Stein Ringen argues that the world's democracies are failing to live up to their ideals--the United States and Great Britain most especially. The core value of democracy, he contends, is freedom, the freedom to live a good life according to one's own choosing. Yet he shows that democracy's freedom is on the decline. Citizens are increasingly distrustful of political systems weighted by money, and they don't participate in political affairs as they once did. Ringen warns of the risks we face if this trend continues, and puts forth an ambitious proposal for democratic reforms. The issues that concern him are ones that should concern us all. They include education, poverty, the social and economic roles of families, the lack of democracy in our economic lives, and the need to rejuvenate municipal democracy. Along the way, Ringen proposes policy solutions aimed at restoring democracy, such as universal vouchers for education, substituting the principle of individual insurance for social-welfare pensions, and rethinking how we measure poverty in rich and poor countries. He calls for the revival of local democracy, a democratically grounded global economy, and the protection of political democracy from the transgressions of economic power.
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