Suchergebnisse

This study looks at the vibrancy of local democracy through linkages between local tax collection and accountability: When villagers pay taxes to the village panchayat are they more likely to hold the panchayat accountable? Fifty villages in Andhra Pradesh were surveyed through 500 structured interviews. The study found that in the low-tax environment where panchayats generally follow government-established minimum tax rates, the level of taxation is not politically salient and has no acknowledged impact on panchayat elections. Tax-paying villagers are more likely to participate in the panchayat when residents have connections to outside parties and officials. Except in questions regarding the fairness of internal distributions of works and services, panchayats appear more as the lowest end of the state system than as local democracies. Local government in Andhra Pradesh has a democratic deficit.

This article examines the usefulness of the theory of clientelism for understanding the politics of Andhra Pradesh (AP), where pressures to secure election funds as populations became more mobile led political leaders to seek centralized control over state resources and access to private funds. Innovative chief ministers sought new ways of relating to voters that undercut local leaders, leading to populist politics and a shift towards programmatic politics that provided individual benefits rather than collective benefits as under the prior system of patronage politics. These changes created a system that was more amenable to individual leadership but also more vulnerable when the leadership collapsed. The theory of clientelism provides a useful guide to the political and economic costs of this system, including the democratic deficit, but does not provide for voters' innovative responses. The theory's emphasis on transactional politics does not adequately address the continuing role of social groupings such as caste nor does it acknowledge the critical role of leadership in building and sustaining the system.

Bina Agarwal, Gender and Green Governance.Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2010. 488 pages. ₹ 625.

This article is an ethnography portraying the processual and performative dimensions of the 2009 state assembly election in Andhra Pradesh. It shows how upper castes have persisted in power in a multicaste and increasingly democratic society through the distribution of welfare and patronage benefits to more marginalized segments of society. Conceptually, it argues for the importance of "political society" over "civil society," when examining state-society relations in neoliberal, democratic India.

The empowerment of women is a broadly endorsed strategy for solving a host of difficult problems, from child poverty to gender violence to international development. The seventeen international scholars in this multi-disciplinary volume offer thoughtful critiques of the notion of empowerment based on their studies in twenty countries in all regions of the world. The comparative introduction places concepts of empowerment in the context of models of the market and of community, showing how contradictions in these models as they are enacted on the ground provide both spaces and constraints for w

Contains critiques on the notion of empowerment of women by seventeen international scholars. This volume considers opportunities for women in the context of globalization, resurgent nationalism and politicized religion, cultures of masculinity, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa.