16 highlights
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ONE OF THE BIG GOVERNANCE puzzles over the last few decades has been this: Representative government is not always responsive government.
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But what it takes to win elections is not necessarily what it takes to respond to the requirements of the well‐being of citizens.
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In India, the contrast with China is often construed in these terms, with some stylistic exaggeration. India has a representative government that is not responsive. China has a government that by virtue of not being representative has had to try harder to be responsive.
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One way of addressing this anxiety about democracy is to argue the following: The infirmities and weaknesses of democracy are a product of the incompleteness of democracy.
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This argument has a great deal of merit. But I want to suggest another consideration in the context of developing countries that we have not paid much attention to: the question of state capacity and state size.
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A welfare scheme worth a thousand crores used to be considered a big scheme; the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme now costs more than 100,000 crores. This is leading some politicians to the conclusion that they have enough resources to send credible signals to large sections of the population that in spending terms, their impact is no longer marginal. If they perform well, they will be rewarded by the voters.
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Indian politics in recent times has been undergoing two subtle but pronounced shifts that may have larger lessons for the politics of democratic accountability. The first is this: While identity politics—a politics structured around ascriptive identities—is still powerful in India, its importance is diminishing. The second is that rates of anti‐incumbency—the likelihood of a sitting legislator or state government failing to win reelection—are coming down.
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An alternative interpretation would be that a politics of accountability kicks in only when the state is of a sufficient size.
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One hypothesis is that economic growth has allowed a phenomenal growth in the increase of government revenues, averaging more than 15% over the five years prior to the financial crisis.
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Voters, particularly at the state level, are for the most part becoming more discriminating, and the vicious cycles of knee‐jerk anti‐incumbency are over. This will set up a healthier politics of accountability.
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When you can make hundreds of crores in real estate deals, or licensing, do you really need to extract money from the cattle fodder program, or the integrated child development scheme?
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While the quantum of corruption may be increasing, the structure of corruption may be changing in ways that are socially beneficial.
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The second interesting feature of enhanced state expenditures is this: You could argue that enhanced state expenditures lead to more corruption.
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It is precisely in poor states, where there are fewer opportunities for rent collection from large infrastructure contracts, real state values, and so forth that you will still find more incentives to extract rents from social programs on health and so forth.
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The third mechanism by which enhanced state resources might produce accountability is that it allows the state to invest in the instruments that are necessary conditions for accountability. For example, one of the big reasons for the failure of so many antipoverty programs in India was that the state simply did not have instruments to identify and target beneficiaries.
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It would be unwise to minimize the hurdles in the path toward genuinely accountable government in low‐income democracies. Social mobilization and civil society monitoring helps, but these instruments have their limitations. Still, there might be a deeper dynamic at work. A growth in state capacity can, to a certain extent, mitigate the ill effects of unaccountable government.