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Existing sociological theories highlight five explanations of development, which focus on leftist political parties in state power, women's office-holding, state capacity, social capital and resource mobilization, and state expenditure. Increasingly, however, the execution of development schemes by large democratic states of the global South relies on citizen participation in what I define as Redistributive Direct Democracy (RDD). RDD institutions devolve formal authorities and create political opportunities for participants to themselves allocate and claim development benefits. Within India's approximately two million local governments, a permanent RDD institution called the gram sabha offers all participants the formal, constitutional authority to directly select recipients of state benefits such as public housing and latrines. Drawing on fixed-effects, multivariate OLS analyses of data collected in a stratified random sample of 72 Indian local governments with active gram sabhas, I argue for a sixth, complementary explanation of development in democracies of the global South: women's participation in RDD. My analysis demonstrates strongly positive and highly significant effects of women's gram sabha participation on local development and a contrasting absence of support for longstanding explanations. These findings suggest that women's participation in RDD can make these new and popular, but poorly understood institutions matter for development outcomes.

Focusing on top civilian and military advisors within the national security establishment, this significant book looks at four case studies with a focus on civil-military relations within the US Department of Defense. Destined to influence US strategic thinking, it should be added to the syllabus of courses in civil-military relations, strategic studies and military history.

AbstractHow does financialization of the economy impact public governance of natural resources? One way includes a shift in how savings and cash accumulation are understood and practiced within public agencies. This article proffers that in the second half of the twentieth century, it became a taken-for-granted understanding that long-term savings should be held in financial investment accounts instead of traditional savings accounts. As a result of this, municipal organizations act as fiscally independent investors, marshaling economic resources to pursue strategic objectives that align with financialized institutional logics. Using a case study of the largest supplier of drinking water in the US, this article examines how the use of financial investments by a major public resource agency, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, evolved since first establishing an investment policy in the 1940s. Today, this organization maintains investments worth over one billion dollars. Analysis of archival documents suggests that financial activities, even if yielding dwindling returns over time, are counted upon as a source of revenue, deployed to obtain favorable bond ratings, used for access to earmarked funds, and leveraged to acquire land in water-strategic locations. Considering the ubiquity of these financial practices among medium to large-sized municipal governing bodies, the results of this study are suggestive and generalizable across substantive governing fields and in other locations. Ultimately, this study shows that public governance agencies are intertwined with private capital flows, problematizing the oft-assumed distance between public and private actors. The article also interrogates the influence that financial markets have over of public policy, showing that elected governance officials engage in the commodification of money, encouraging the further commodification of environmental resources.

Supplementing a traditional focus on economic dimensions of development, sociologists now frequently examine the origins of macro-level growth in human capabilities. One emergent theoretical framework for doing so emphasizes the promise of "twenty-first-century developmental states" for broadening delivery of capability-enhancing public services like health and education. Nevertheless, the configurations of state-society actors that are consistently willing and able to construct such institutions are far from obvious, highlighting a missing-agent problem at the core of the framework. The article addresses this gap by tracing Brazil's historic improvements in social development to what I call "programmatic configurations," or broad-based alliances of civil and political society actors that ameliorate vexing public problems by building democratic institutions and state capacities needed to enact rights-based social policies. It argues that frequent local office-holding by "sanitarista" activists from the country's most important health movement, the Sanitarist Movement, has been essential for constituting the programmatic configurations that maximized social development across urban Brazil in recent decades. More specifically, a brief historical account of the movement and fuzzy-set analysis show that programmatic configurations assembled by sanitaristas in Brazil's largest capitals have generally been a sufficient condition for maximizing improvement over time in three outcomes: infant-mortality reduction, municipal spending on health and sanitation, and municipal delivery of primary public health care. I correspondingly argue for broadening the twenty-first-century developmental state framework to accommodate how programmatic configurations—and the pragmatically inclined civil society activists at their core—can contribute to democratic state-building for social development.