Democratic Accountability and Foreign Security Policy: Theory and Evidence from India

Identifying the links between democracy and foreign security policy has proven elusive. This paper engages this research agenda by developing a novel theory of “accountability environments” and exploring it in the case of India. We hypothesize that the varying electoral salience of foreign security policy and the clarity of responsibility for policy outcomes combine to create different accountability environments in which politicians operate. Accountability environments determine the incentives that politicians face for devoting effort to external security issues. We illustrate the argument with evidence from India over time and across issue areas (India, Pakistan, and defense procurement/development). Scholars need to incorporate the complexities and diversity of representation and rule into the study of democratic politics and international relations.     

Food subsidy policy and democracy: A comparative study of Sri Lanka and Zambia

This article compares the political processes involved in food subsidy policies in Sri Lanka and Zambia and relates these experiences to the concept of ‘good government’ that western nations have been promoting. The Sri Lankan case illustrates the workings of the policy process in a democratic political system, albeit one that centralized considerably in the 1980s. The Zambian case illustrates the policy process in a one‐party state that returned to multi‐party democracy in 1991. Despite their very different political systems the nature of food subsidy policies show striking similarities: decades of high levels of non‐targeted consumer subsidies that placed great demands on public expenditure until radical reductions in expenditure occurred following an electorally based change of government and multilateral agency pressure. Differences in the processes of policy formulation and public accountability are explored. They reveal that neither case study functioned as democratic theory would predict. The conclusion points to the inability of the concept of ‘good government’ to model the empirical experiences reported in the article.     

The impact of bureaucratic openness on public trust in South Korea

In this study, I assess whether administrative procedural openness, via administrative procedure acts (APAs) enhances public confidence in the civil service. I argue that APAs increase governmental transparency, predictability and accountability. Consequently, APAs ought to enhance public confidence in a country's democratic institutions, ceteris paribus. To substantiate this prediction, I investigate trends, pre- and post-APA passage, in the attitudes of Korean citizens regarding their country's democracy in general and civil service in particular (as well as with a second, brief case study of Taiwan). The evidence supports my argument both cross-sectionally and over time, suggesting that passage of Korea's APA laws in the mid-1990s did enhance the Koreans’ confidence in their country's civil service. Attitudes toward the bureaucracy, in turn, are powerful predictors of satisfaction with Korea's democracy, measured both absolutely and relative to attitudes toward the state of the nation 10 years prior. Several key findings replicate for Taiwan.     

Globalising Accountability within the International Organisation of Credit: Financial Governance and the Public Sphere

Recent developments concerning the international financial architecture have drawn attention to what many perceive to be an accountability deficit at the level of global decision making. This problem is explored here within the framework of an increasingly globalised structure of financial governance, drawing attention to the institutional barriers that stand in the way of operationalising traditional forms of accountability. In order to strengthen a global form of accountability in the absence of traditional democratic links between citizens and decision-making institutions, it is argued that accountability needs to be better internalised within those institutions that actually make decisions with global consequences. To be effective, however, this form of accountability demands the formation of a global financial public sphere, where norms of inclusion and publicness can be established and progressively instantiated. The first step towards realising such a development must be to understand accountability itself in terms of what can be called a logic of participation. This article therefore considers how such a logic can be formulated and grafted onto the existing foundations of global financial governance, and advances several strategies to strengthen accountability framed in this way.     

The lessons of Eastern Europe for modern intelligence reform

The proliferation of threats to security, which emerge in states going through major reform processes, demands a functional intelligence architecture. Accurate intelligence is essential in identifying risks to the wider reform process. Western intelligence agencies have viewed intelligence services in reforming states as tactical opportunities and sources of intelligence rather than as targets for reform in the context of a wider reform agenda. Sensitivities inherent in intelligence gathering in states with a recent history of repressive government make the relationship between the intelligence services and civil society crucial if the intelligence services are to be effective and to play a positive role in the transition process. The practice of countering terrorism has altered the nature of intelligence gathering in ways that make accountability and public legitimacy more central to the effectiveness of intelligence services than the ‘traditional’ threats did. Western models of intelligence oversight and accountability are inadequate in states without developed traditions of democratic governance and weaknesses in wider political culture means that these models are not effective in lending intelligence services popular legitimacy. Alternative models for structuring the relationship between the intelligence services, parliament, the executive and the public must therefore be identified.     

Transformative pathways to world government: a historical institutionalist critiquea

Proposals for world government (WG) have come from a variety of sources including international relations (IR) scholars, economists, normative political theorists and global justice academics. In general, these visions are couched as ideal models to be approximated as closely as possible. The key argument of the article is that, in evaluating the democratic potential of these proposals, we should focus upon the process of designing and building a WG. This is because there is an ineluctable gap between ideal conceptualization and non-ideal realization that emerges through institutionalization. I employ a historical institutionalist lens to describe and problematize potential institutional shifts along a WG pathway. I argue that institutionalizing these ideal visions in our current, non-ideal context would actually exacerbate the democratic deficit. Specifically, building a WG would likely entrench existing inequalities, expand the authority of unaccountable bureaucrats and limit institutional improvements over time. These three points respectively undercut three core values of democratization: equal participation, accountability and institutional revisability. Given this argument, I conclude that an incremental approach—which focuses on advancing values rather than moving towards an ideal model—represents a more productive pathway for global democratization.     

Towards an era of official (involuntary) accountability of NGOs in India

In the recent past, governance reforms in India have resulted in the government and corporate sectors making serious efforts to enhance and showcase their accountability to their principals, namely citizens and shareholders. Similarly, NGOs have been pushed to demonstrate their accountability to multiple stakeholders, namely donors, communities and most importantly, the state. This viewpoint highlights this transition and also reflects on the changing contours of NGO accountability debates in India.     

Meeting the Dalai Lama and perceptions of democracy in China: a quasi-natural experiment

How does the international human rights community affect the likelihood of democratization? Scholarship on Chinese citizens’ preferences about their political system has not explored the importance of the external environment, perhaps surprising given the extensive foreign pressure on China’s authoritarian system over the last 30 years. I use a quasi-natural experiment around the meeting between President Obama and the Dalai Lama in 2011 to examine the impact of foreign pressure on citizens’ perceptions of democracy in China in real time. I show that the meeting significantly increased the Chinese public’s belief that their country is democratic, with those of above average patriotism over 11 percentage points more likely to believe China is democratic in the five days following the meeting than before. The findings suggest that some kinds of external pressure may help to increase satisfaction with authoritarian rule, ultimately boosting autocrats’ ability to hold on to power.     

Canal bureaucracy and the corruption nexus around water in the Mumbai hinterland: Questions for development and governance in Maharashtra,India

This is a case study of corruption in an irrigation project in a “tribal” belt of the Mumbai-Konkan region in India. Using Robert Wade’s framework of the corruption nexus in the irrigation department, it critically examines, among other features, the relationship between junior section engineers on the one hand, and senior executive engineers and politicians on the other. The article highlights key features of this nexus in the specific context of tribal Maharashtra, and shows that junior section engineers and bureaucrats in irrigation projects often wield informal power and can frequently block the activities of rent-seeking senior executive engineers and politicians. The article later relates this account of bureaucratic politics to throw light on the social, political and economic dynamics of water management in the context of the intensely competitive inter-sectoral politics of water sharing in the Mumbai-Konkan region.     

What a Little Democracy Can Do: Comparing Trajectories of Reform in Malaysia and Indonesia

Economic crisis sparked political mobilization in both Malaysia and Indonesia in the late 1990s, but with very different results. Reformism in competitive electoral authoritarian Malaysia took a largely electoral route, yielding marginal, top-down institutional change and the enhancement of democratic norms. The hegemonic electoral authoritarian regime in neighbouring Indonesia, on the other hand, was toppled by a sudden upsurge of grass-roots protest, encouraged by elite factionalism. Changes to Indonesian political institutions and personnel since then have disappointed many reformers, and mounting cynicism endangers the entrenchment of democratic political culture. The article argues that a relatively more democratic system grants more space for autonomous challengers to organize and mobilize over the long term than a less open system does. Specifically, civil society agents in the former may accumulate both social capital and its organizational-level counterpart, coalitional capital, facilitating mobilization. Such a regime, though, is better able to contain or otherwise defuse protest than is a more autocratic variant. The latter is thus more vulnerable to dramatic collapse, despite its fragmented political opposition, and faces serious hurdles in subsequent democratic consolidation.     

Reaching the unreached? Good governance and welfare reform politics in Delhi,India

Good governance scholarship has been preoccupied with the donor-driven conditionalities imposed on aid-receiving developing countries. Limited attention has been given to power struggles and resistance from government actors (bureaucrats and politicians) to embrace internally driven good governance programmes. To address this gap, this article ethnographically examines a good governance initiative of the Delhi government (India) to reform its welfare system in partnership with NGOs. The study indicates that the conflict between government and non-governmental actors over the authority to govern the poor eventually maintained the status quo of the welfare system while the poor remain marginalised.     

Regime change and the convergence of democratic value orientations through socialization. Evidence from reunited Germany

Theories of socialization and political culture claim that public ideas about how a democracy should be shaped will only change slowly after regime changes. Thus, citizens’ value orientations should converge after a replacement of generations and through institutional learning. Pertaining to the development and convergence of individual conceptions of democracy or democratic value orientations, these assumptions have not yet been tested empirically. This article therefore provides an empirical test, drawing on the case of German reunification as a natural experiment. I analyse the development of democratic value orientations based on data from the sixth wave of the European Social Survey using both factor and cohort analysis. The findings provide strong support for the assumptions of socialization theories: More than 20 years after reunification, people who grew up in East Germany still show a higher affiliation to a socialist model of democracy than people socialized in the West, who instead show higher support for a liberal model. However, differences in democratic value orientations are converging for citizens less than 30 years of age across Germany, the first generation socialized entirely in a democratic political system.     

Evaluating Democratic Governance: A Bottom-up Approach to European Union Enlargement

To be admitted to the European Union (EU), an applicant country is expected to meet five conditions for democratic governance set out in the EU's Copenhagen criteria. The first section compares the EU's criteria with alternative criteria of democracy and of governance. Secondly, the article uses New Europe Barometer sample surveys to demonstrate how the bottom-up evaluation of governance by a country's citizens can complement top-down evaluations by external institutions. Evaluations by citizens of Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, and Ukraine are compared with those of citizens in eight post-communist countries admitted to the EU in 2004. Factor analysis demonstrates that, unlike democracy indexes, democratic governance is a multi-dimensional concept. Citizens characterize their system of democratic governance as acceptable on some criteria but not on others. Taken singly, each Copenhagen criterion can be a tool for diagnosing an area of weakness in democratic governance. However, political pressures lead policymakers to lower demands for improving governance as a deadline approach for deciding whether or not to admit an applicant country to the European Union.     

Illiberal democracy and violent conflict in contemporary Indonesia

When Indonesia's President Suharto was forced to resign in 1998, the accompanying uncertainty triggered serious communal violence in five regions. As the nation's politics and economy stabilized from 2002, so did those provinces. Identity-based conflict is now the rare exception rather than the rule in democratic Indonesia. Yet puzzlingly, despite the consolidation of democracy, ethnic clashes and mob violence against religious minorities continue to occur. While such events are now far smaller than those in the first years of democratization and occur only occasionally, their persistence requires analysis given the potential for escalation and what it tells us about Indonesia's reform process. In this article I compare recent incidents with that of the initial post-authoritarian era, and find that identity-based collective violence persists because many important causes of conflict have not been removed by democratic consolidation. As found by numerous scholars, many illiberal characteristics of the authoritarian state have segued neatly into democratic Indonesia. I assert that this has left several main causes of group violence firmly in place. I further contend that the failure to remove these phenomena partly has its origins in the order of democratic reforms chosen in the years after Suharto's resignation.     

Tools of single party hegemony in Tanzania: evidence from surveys and survey experiments

Political systems dominated by a single party are common in the developing world, including in countries that hold regular elections. Yet we lack knowledge about the strategies by which these regimes maintain political dominance. This article presents evidence from Tanzania, a paradigmatic dominant party regime, to demonstrate how party institutions are used instrumentally to ensure the regime's sustained control. First, I show that the ruling party maintains a large infrastructure of neighbourhood representatives, and that in the presence of these agents, citizens self-censor about their political views. Second, I provide estimates of the frequency with which politicians give goods to voters around elections, demonstrating that such gifts are more common in Tanzania than previous surveys suggest. Third, I use a survey experiment to test respondents’ reaction to information about corruption. Few voters change their preferences upon receipt of this information. Taken together, this article provides a detailed picture of ruling party activities at the micro-level in Tanzania. Citizens conceal opposition sympathies from ten cell leaders, either because they fear punishment or seek benefits. These party agents can monitor citizens’ political views, facilitating clientelist exchange. Finally, citizens’ relative insensitivity to clientelism helps explain why politicians are not punished for these strategies.     

Caste and democratization in postcolonial India: an ethnographic examination of lower caste politics in Bihar

This article examines the case of lower-caste politics in the populous north Indian state of Bihar in order to show the ways in which the liberal democratic model fails to capture the realities of democracy in postcolonial India. In order to explain the rise of lower-caste politics, I examine the ways in which relationships between state institutions, caste networks and locally dominant groups shape contemporary political possibilities, necessitating a re-evaluation of the relationship between liberalism and democracy in India. With state institutions being unable to effectively enforce rights, a caste-based notion of popular sovereignty became dominant – as an idea (the lower-caste majority should rule) and as the everyday rough-and-tumble of an electoral politics that ultimately revolves around the force of numbers. It is inadequate, and actually unhelpful, to simply point out the obvious fact that the enforcement of rights is routinely and systematically undermined in practice and to call for more effective implementation. In fact, I argue that effective implementation in places such as Bihar could only be possible through a radical restructuring of local power that can only come from below, through democratic practice itself.     

Information Campaigns and (Under)Privileged Citizens: An Experiment on the Differential Effects of a Voting Advice Application

Information campaigns are key elements of elections. Past research has established the importance of campaigns in informing and educating citizens, and ultimately strengthening participatory democracy. While the Internet has increased the possibilities to disseminate information campaigns and eased access to political information, it is still debated whether online campaigns are effective in stimulating political interest and participation among the general public. The issue is not only one of access, but also of use of information. The investigation of main effects of campaigns obscures the fact that citizens may not use information in the same way and reap the same political benefits. In this study, I examine the conditional effects of a new type of Web information campaign, Voting Advice Applications (VAAs), on the political engagement and electoral participation of citizens with varying levels of education. By investigating who benefits most from using these apps, I evaluate whether VAAs reinforce patterns of participation or mobilize new people in politics. Building on political behavior research, communication theory, and social psychology, I study the differential effects of VAAs with an innovative randomized field experiment design. The results confirm that VAAs can stimulate the political engagement of the public. However, there is no significant impact on electoral participation. In addition, the evidence shows that VAAs work differently for more or less educated citizens, and that the lower educated users benefit the most from VAAs as they become more interested in the election and more motivated to vote.     

印度尼西亚的多元民主改革及前景

印尼多元民主改革始于宪政改革,并效仿美国一些政治制度,在具体实践中遇到了严峻的挑战。经过10年的改革,印尼基本建立起多元民主体制。印尼的民主改革的前景并非一片坦途,最终还需与民主治理、政府效能结合起来,印尼民主改革才能具有生命力。     

Sustaining Indian Growth: Interests Versus Institutions

Inclusive institutions make correct policy choices required for steady catch-up growth more likely. India started out with highly inclusive political institutions since it adopted democracy with universal suffrage at independence. But extractive economic institutions, inherited from the British, were made more so by economic controls. In addition, a heterogeneous electorate allowed politicians to cultivate vote-banks and populist schemes instead of delivering better public services and governance. India’s opening out was adequately nuanced and flexible but was sometimes used as a substitute for harder domestic reforms. It, however, added to the growing constituencies that benefit from growth, and are pushing for more inclusive productivity enabling economic institutions. Broader interest groups create better institutions and incentives. Examples from general governance, the regulation of industry, and agricultural marketing show the process, although messy and prolonged, is in the right direction.     

Health care and democratization in Indonesia

Analyses of Indonesian democracy often emphasize elite capture of democratic institutions, continuity in oligarchic power relations, and exclusion of popular interests. Defying such analyses, over the last decade, Indonesia has experienced a proliferation of social welfare programmes, some with a redistributive element. This article analyses the expansion of social welfare protection by focusing on health care. At the national level, Indonesia has introduced programmes providing free health care to the poor and approved a plan for universal social insurance. At the subnational level, in the context of far-reaching decentralization reforms, politicians have competed with each other to introduce generous local health care schemes. Taking its cue from analyses of social welfare expansion in other East Asian states, the article finds the origins of policy shift in the incentives that democracy creates for elites to design policies that appeal to broad social constituencies, and in the widening scope for engagement in policymaking that democracy allows. The article ends with a cautionary note, pointing to ways in which oligarchic power relations and the corruption they spawn still undermine health care quality, despite expansion of coverage.