Harry W. Blair

Participation and Accountability at the Periphery: Democratic Local Governance in Six Countries

Abstract Democratic local governance (DLG), now a major subtheme within the overall context of democratic development, promises that government at the local level can become more responsive to citizen desires and more effective in service delivery. Based on a six-country study sponsored by USAID (Bolivia, Honduras, India, Mali, the Philippines and Ukraine), this paper analyzes the two topics of participation and accountability, finding that both show significant potential for promoting DLG, though there seem to be important limitations on how much participation can actually deliver, and accountability covers a much wider range of activity and larger scope for DLG strategy than initially appears.

Participation, public policy, political economy and development in rural Bangladesh, 1958-85

Abstract During this period, four successive regimes in Bangladesh have felt reluctantly compelled to set up structures for local participation in government. Each found it had to reach out beyond the support of urban and rural elites and the military if it was to move beyond mere stability to real development of the country. Despite many problems, most notably local elite takeover at local level and military coup at national level, there is considerable evidence, particularly from neighboring India, to suggest that local participatory institutions can be successful over the longer term in promoting development for the middle and the poorer rural classes.

Mrs Gandhi's Emergency, The Indian Elections of 1977, Pluralism and Marxism: Problems with Paradigms

Given the system of parliamentary democracy that India developed after its independence in I947, it is understandable that pluralism came to be the major paradigm used to explain Indian politics. But just as the persistence of economic inequality was instrumental in calling pluralism into question as an appropriate model for explaining the American political system, so the continuation and even increase of inequality in India led social scientists to question the pluralist approach for India. And, as in the American case, a number of scholars turned to a Marxist class analysis to explain the Indian situation; by the mid-I97os a political economy model had begun to take shape that did offer a reasonable explanation of the pervasive inequality in India. Also, Mrs Gandhis Emergency of 1975-77 fits very easily into this class analysis approach. But then came the elections of I977 and the ouster of Mrs Gandhi at the polls, an event not explicable in terms of the Marxist model, but which fits very well into the pluralist framework. Which model, then, is more appropriate to employ in accounting for the Indian system? The best answer seems to be to try to fit the pluralist approach within the Marxist one, with the latter carrying most of the explanatory load. * * * As the worlds largest democracy, then the worlds largest (or second largest, depending on ones view of the Peoples Republic of China) dictatorship, then again democracy, India has exercised a great fascination for students of politics. This fascination has been accompanied, naturally enough, by a compulsion to explain, to abstract, to get at underlying significance, to apply paradigms.

Minority Electoral Politics in a North Indian State: Aggregate Data Analysis and the Muslim Community in Bihar, 1952–1972 *

Frequent elections and a long tradition of census taking in India should combine to provide excellent scope for aggregate data analysis, but so far they have not, largely because the electoral constituencies and the census tracts do not match. A number of ways have been devised to surmount the problem, none of them very satisfactory. This paper offers a new solution in the form of isoplethic mapping, a method that avoids the shortcomings of other approaches and permits use of demographic and voting data at the level of the state legislative assembly constituency. Substantively the paper traces patterns of voting for Muslim candidates to the Bihar Legislative Assembly and the relationship between Muslim population distribution and vote polled by different political parties over six elections. Instead of becoming more integrated over time within the general body politic, it appears that the Muslim minority group has become more politically cohesive and better able to elect Muslims to office where their numbers are strong. At the same time, Muslims have become less able to win elections where they are fewer in numbers. This tendency has not reached a state of political polarization between the Hindu and Muslim communities, however.

Reorienting development administration

Development By People: Citizen Construction of a Just World. By Guy Gran. New York: Praeger, UK distributor Holt‐Saunders, 1983. Pp.xxiv + 480. £34.50 and £9.95.ISBN 0 03 063294 3 and 063296 X. No Shortcuts to Progress: African Development Management in Perspective. By Goran Hyden. London: Heinemann, 1983. Pp.xv + 223. £12.50 and £4.95. ISBN 0 435 96303 1 and 96302 3. Development Projects as Policy Experiments: An Adaptive Approach to Development Administration. By Dennis A. Rondinelli, London: Methuen, 1983. £10.95 and £4.95. Pp.ix + 167. ISBN 0 416 73630 0 and 73640 8. The Challenge of Integrated Rural Development in India: A Policy and Management Perspective. By Gerald E. Sussman. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, UK distributor Bowker, 1983. Pp.xvi + 178. £22. ISBN 0 86531 922 7.

Planning for appropriate forestry enterprises: Lessons from rural development experience in Third World Countries

Over the last decade, forestry has become increasingly more involved with and integrated into the more general rural development (RD) process in the Third World. In doing so, forestry joins an activity that has itself been developing and maturing for some three decades and more, in the course of which a good deal of useful experience has been accumulated. This paper attempts to distill from that experience lessons that will be helpful in forestry development planning. This focus is first on the constraints that have affected RD, sometimes quite severely, in terms of resources, organization, policy, and the socio-political sphere. Second, the paper evaluates the experience with rural institutions as vehicles for promoting and nurturing RD, with particular emphasis on local organizations and popular participation in them. The third focus is on applying some of these lessons to the forestry sector, using as examples the issues of employment creation, regional growth, womens participation and distributional equity of development benefits.

Primary and secondary characteristics in peasant politics at the micro-level in an Indian constituency: a statistical odyssey

This paper has two purposes. The first is to examine the classic ascriptionachievement dichotomy in the context of elections in an Indian constituency. The relationships between primary and secondary population characteristics and voting are analyzed over three elections in the 1960s, using as the unit of analysis the polling booth, an area comprising on the average about 900 voters. The second purpose is to illustrate a number of methods of performing aggregate data analysis at the micro-level in the hope that they will be of interest to other scholars concerned with ecological analysis in South Asia and that they will invite others to offer alternate and more effective