Moving the State: The Politics of Democratic Decentralization in Kerala, South Africa, and Porto Alegre

Abstract

Over the past decade, a large number of developing countries have made the transition from authoritarian rule to democracy. The rebirth of civil societies, the achievement of new freedoms and liberties have all been celebrated with due enthusiasm. But now that the euphoria of these transitions has passed, we are beginning to pose the sobering question of what difference democracy makes to development, or to be more precise, whether democracy can help redress the severe social and economic inequalities that characterize developing countries. Two separate problems are involved here. The first parallels the western European literature on the rise of the welfare state and is centrally concerned with patterns of interest aggregation, and specifically the dynamics and effects of lower class formation. This literature has convincingly argued that political rights can be translated into social rights, and procedural democracy becomes substantive democracy, only to the extent that lower class demands are organized and find effective representation in the state. In the developing world however, uneven capitalist development, resilient social cleavages and various forms of bureaucratic authoritarianism have blunted lower class collective action. The three cases examined here, however, break with this pattern. In South Africa, Brazil, and the Indian state of Kerala, working-class