Vivienne Shue

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.

State power and social forces: State power and social forces: on political contention and accommodation in the Third World

A STATE-IN-SOCIETY APPROACH The recent renewal of intellectual interest in the state has made a number of salutary collateral contributions to the field of comparative politics. One of these has been to provoke a certain rejuvenation of the comparative study of politics and society in the low-income countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Moving beyond the lamentable dialogue of the deaf to which the debates between both modernization and dependency analysts had descended in the 1970s, numerous stimulating monographs published during the 1980s have been successful in “bringing the state back in” to Third World studies. It often happens in the social sciences, however, that new gains made on one analytical front may only give rise to yet newer and yet more challenging problems of analysis on other fronts. Against this generic malady, the recent state-oriented studies have shown no immunity. Furthermore, a common tendency to mistake analytical claims for empirical ones has shown itself to be especially problematic for this line of inquiry and research. The general analytical claim concerning the primacy of state can easily lead, for example, to the fallacious view that states in low-income settings are always and inevitably the most significant social actors on the scene. And the research agenda that, in turn, can flow from a view of the state-as-domineering- Leviathan is almost bound to be deficient for the study of most countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where really-existing states have so rarely achieved such colossal proportions, and where those that might be classified as genuine goliaths have so often proved to be but crippled giants.

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

Beyond the Budget: Finance Organization and Reform in a Chinese County

We think of the economic reforms of the Deng Xiaoping government as essentially &dquo;decentralizing.&dquo; Much has been said since the Third Plenum (of the eleventh CCPCC, December 1978) about the need to break bureaucratic rigidity and set free latent entrepreneurial initiative by putting greater resources and authority into the hands of people closer to the production and exchange processes, people who in the aggregate are referred to as &dquo;local levels.&dquo; The first wave of postMao fiscal decentralization reforms seemed quickly to get out of control, however. By late 1980 the national leadership began to blame alarming budget deficits and excessive investment in capital construction on overenthusiasm at local levels. The

The New Course in Chinese Agriculture

Chinas current reform program in agriculture is enormously ambitious in intent and highly significant for all aspects of future economic and political development. It represents a rejection of past policies of large-scale labor mobilization and communal self-reliance in favor of commercialization and individual incentives for peasants. Diversification of the rural economy, decentralization of farm management, production specialization, crop selection in accord with comparative advantage, expansion of free markets, release of labor from the land, and a shift toward household-based, rather than collective, cultivation have all been important elements of the new line. The resultant explosion of pent-up rural entrepreneurship, fueled also by marked state procurement price rises, produced dramatically positive effects on overall productivity, peasant incomes, and standards of living. These led to widespread introduction of even more radical reforms. The recent agricultural boom will be difficult to sustain, however, without worsening Chinas already serious budget and finance crisis. Todays leadership coalition also faces intrabureaucratic opposition from cadres at all levels who are threatened by the reorganizations, and widespread popular unease about new patterns of social inequality that may accompany greater reliance on market relations. Decentralized management, a wider role for the market, and the vigor of new commercial combines also appear to be hampering the ability of central planners to regulate the economy. Such factors are capable of producing their own political backlash. The new course is, therefore, still a risky gamble in search of a workable balance between plan and market, growth and equality, national priorities and local demands.