Joel S. Migdal

Centralization and powerlessness: India's democracy in a comparative perspective

During the 1970s and 1980s, a recurring pattern characterized political change in India: Control over governmental decisions tended to centralize in leaders who ruled by virtue of personal popularity, but who found it difficult to transform their personal power into a problem-solving political resource. A number of political consequences typically followed. Governmental legitimacy became hard to sustain; there was a high leadership turnover below the highest ranks; the state continued to perform at a low level of efficacy – in terms both of accommodating conflicting interests and of solving developmental problems; and political violence as well as poverty continued to dominate the political landscape. This chapter attempts to explain the roots of the simultaneous tendencies toward centralization and powerlessness in Indias low-income democracy. It is argued that such tendencies toward centralization and powerlessness are generated by the near absence of systematic authority links between the states apex and the vast social periphery. In years past, especially during the 1950s, Indias nationalist party, the Congress, forged patronage links with regional and local influentials, thus creating a chain of authority that stretched from the capital city to villages. Over the last two decades or so, these links in the authority structure eroded, owing to a number of forces: The spread of democratic politics undermined the influence of regional and local traditional elites; and the nationalist party-qua-organization was destroyed by intra-elite conflict and by the recalcitrance of power-hungry national leaders.

Mutual Empowerment of State and Society: Its Nature, Conditions, Mechanisms, and Limits@@@State Power and Social Forces: Domination and Transformation in the Third World@@@State-Society Synergy: Government and Social Capital in Development

Nearly two decades have passed since the state was brought back in to the comparative social sciences. During this period the autonomy of the political has been emphasized, and a consensus has been reached that the state has always been a critical agent of socioeconomic change. Statism, as an antidote to the social reductionism embodied in the liberal-pluralist and Marxist perspectives that prevailed during the first thirty years after World War II, is now a dominant theoretical paradigm in the field of comparative politics.1 In recent years, however, a voice of criticism has emerged from within the statist school itself, arguing that some statist claims have been pushed too far. Especially, more and more state theorists have come to realize that it is an error to equate the strength of the state with its autonomy from society and with the ability of state elites to ignore other social actors or to impose their will in any simple manner on society. Scholars find that some dimension of state power has more to do with the states ability to work through and with other social actors and therefore that a states apparent disconnectedness from social groups turns out to be associated in many cases with weakness rather than strength. In other words, the state, for its parts, needs society to achieve its objectives.2 This revisionist statism is clearly developed in State Power and Social Forces: Domination and Transformation in the Third World, edited by Joel S. Migdal, Atul Kohli, and Vivienne Shue. In this seminal book, scholars working in the Weberian tradition of political sociology suggest a more balanced state-in-society perspective

Rules and rights in the Middle East : democracy, law, and society

Preface Introduction PART 1. OVERVIEW The Practice of Electoral Democracy in the Arab East and North Africa: Some Lessons from Nearly a Centurys Experience PART 2. POWER AGAINST POWER Populism and Democracy in Turkey, 1946-1961 Taxation without Representation: Authoritarianism and Economic Liberalization in Syria State, Legitimacy, and Democratization in the Maghreb Civil Society in Israel PART 3. PRACTICAL POLITICS Prospects and Difficulties of Democratization in the Middle East American Policy toward Democratic Political Movements in the Middle East Voices of Opposition: The International Committee for a Free Iraq PART 4. THE SHADOW OF LAW Public Confessions in the Islamic Republic of Iran Obstacles to Democratization in Iraq: A Reading of Post-Revolutionary Iraqi History through the Gulf War Private Goods, Public Wrongs, and Civil Society in Some Medieval Arab Theory and Practice Index Contributors

Why Change?: Toward a New Theory of Change Among Individuals in the Process of Modernization

When and why people abandon their old institutions, patterns of behavior, and even places of residence in favor of new ones that are associated with sustained economic growth and development is a question of central importance to social science. Increasingly, political scientists have associated these processes of change with the occurrence of disintegration of particular political units, groups, and systems, and with the integration of others. The changing nature of social and cultural ties signals concomitant modifications in what people define as their community, where they place demands, and where they look for authoritative decisions to be made.

Integration and Disintegration: An Approach to Society-Formation

Internal wars and other forms of instability have taken millions of lives in ‘Third World’ countries since the Second World War. The Cold War fuelled many of these conflicts, but the end of that prolonged stand-off did not bring a respite from continuing tension, even outright slaughter, in numerous internal disputes in Africa and Asia. And new political and communal violence has since flared in hot spots throughout the former communist countries. How can we understand domestic conflict in a broad comparative framework? While every set of tensions holds its own distinctive grudges and sparks, a state-society approach helps us discern some of the key obstacles in establishing an accepted set of rules for peaceful resolution of disputes within a country.

Vision and Practice: The Leader, the State, and the Transformation of Society

Visionary leaders have sought to use the modern state as the organization through which they could transform society. However, world historical forces largely beyond the control of such leaders have greatly affected their success in using the state to bring about intended social transformations, which constitute the core of their visions. Three such forces have affected the international and domestic environment leaders face, and have influenced their risk calculations as they decide whether to confront organizations in society resisting the leaders desired changes. Three hypotheses concerning these forces of social dislocation, the threat of war, and the opposition to change by leading world powers help explain the necessary conditions for a visionary leaders success. The cases of Lázaro Cárdenas of Mexico, Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt, and David Ben-Gurion of Israel illustrate the important influence that world historical forces have had on the success of leaders in realizing their visions

Urbanization and Political Change: The Impact of Foreign Rule

This is a much expanded and revised version of a paper presented at the Round Table on Political Integration, IPSA, Jerusalem, September, 1974. I would like to thank my many colleagues at Tel-Aviv University who commented on the paper and R. Marcia Migdal, Y. Porath, Mark Heller, Ariela Gottlieb, and Zipporah Kleinbaum for their useful suggestions. Also, I would like to thank the Tel Aviv University Social Science Research Fund for the grant which enabled me to undertake this research. I Note the growth rates in percentages of cities over 100,000 inhabitants in 1960-1970 in the following areas:

Individual change in the midst of social and political change

Abstract Scholarship about rapid social and political change, especially in the Third World since 1945, often fails to consider adequately the role of the individual man or woman. This article assesses the work of Daniel Lerner, Lucian Pye, David McClelland, M. N. Srinivas, Clyde Mitchell, Alex Inkeles, and David Smith. Despite their notable contributions, these scholars sometimes made assumptions that are open to challenge. One was that change was unidirectional. Another was that personality is unitary. The primacy of the state was a third. The correct view is more complex. This new model must account for how syncretic men and women respond to diverse situations with a limited variety of concepts of self. It must point to the conflicting sets of principles and values they call upon in an environment of conflict as states and other social organizations contend.

Peasants, Politics, and Revolution: Pressures toward Political and Social Change in the Third World

During the last quarter century, peasant participation in politics has increased markedly in parts of Latin America and Asia. Why the poor and vulnerable peasant population has chosen to leave the confines of the village for political activity and at times for sustained revolution is the question this book explores. The author draws on informal interviews and observation of peasants in Mexico and India and on fifty-one community studies of peasants in Asia and Latin America compiled by ethnographers in the last forty years. He suggests that severe economic crises have driven peasants to roles in the larger economy outside the village, where they are initially attracted to politics by material incentives.Originally published in 1975.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.