How much are young people interested in politics? Are they ready for political participation? What do they think about democracy, in general as well as about the onethey experience? How do their attitudes develop and to what extent are their views influenced by their parents?

Hidden behind the much-touted success story of India’s emergence as an economic superpower is another, far more complex narrative of the nation’s recent history, one in which economic development is frequently countered by profoundly unsettling, and often violent, political movements. In Democracy against Development, Jeffrey Witsoe investigates this counter-narrative, uncovering an antagonistic relationship between recent democratic mobilization and development-oriented governance in India. Witsoe looks at the history of colonialism in India and its role in both shaping modern caste identities and linking locally powerful caste groups to state institutions, which has effectively created a postcolonial patronage state. He then looks at the rise of lower-caste politics in one of India’s poorest and most populous states, Bihar, showing how this increase in democratic participation has radically threatened the patronage state by systematically weakening its institutions and disrupting its development projects. By depicting democracy and development as they truly are in India—in tension—Witsoe reveals crucial new empirical and theoretical insights about the long-term trajectory of democratization in the larger postcolonial world.

This book helps to understand in which ways local governing elites are important for the success or failure of national democratic development. Although we know a great deal about the general importance of civil society and social capital for the development of sustainable democracy, we still know little about what specific local governing qualities or political capital that interact with democratic development. The collected data covers time series of surveys from between 15 to 30 political and administrative leaders in over a hundred middle-sized European and Eurasian cities. The study takes us across the 1980s and 1990s, going from cities in Sweden and the Netherlands - through the Baltic cities - to the cities of Belarus and Russia. The findings show the importance of local political capital based on commitments to core democratic values, informal governance networks, and the significance of initially connecting the community to global, non-economic relationships.

Despite the decline in the number of military coups since the 1960s and 1970s, Militaries continue to be crucial political actors in many world regions. Their impact on the democratic development of nations, however, has been mixed. On the one hand, coups against democratically elected leaders in Mali (2012), Egypt (2013), and Thailand (2014) have spelled doom for these countries’ nascent democratic regimes and have ushered in new periods of military dominance in politics. The cases of Portugal (1974), the Philippines (1986), and Tunisia (2011), on the other hand, show that the military’s decision not to defend authoritarian leaders against mass protests contributed crucially to the fall of dictatorships and facilitated transitions to democracy. This volume addresses the military’s ambivalent role as "midwife" or "gravedigger" of democracy and highlights the often multi-layered and complex relationship between militaries’ political behaviour and democratization. The chapters were originally published in a special issue of Democratization.

The concept of a democratic developmental state is part of the current development discourse advocated by international aid agencies, deliberated on by academics, and embraced by policymakers in many emerging economies in the global South. This volume investigates these attempts to establish a new and more inclusive conceptualization of the state.

This book is the outcome of a multiyear process of participatory meetings, individual and collective writings, and insightful criticisms sponsored by the Kettering Foundation regarding the intersection of community development and democratic practice. The collective outcome from these processes is a wide range of innovative articles at the forefront of thinking about the intersections of power, participation, and engagement in the realm of community practice. The authors highlight a range of case studies that vary by location, scale, and purpose. The book serves as a heuristic framework for ‘democratic community development’ and raises several related questions about how democracy, community, and the public are constituted, and what processes, end goals, methods, and tools are to be used to further democratic community development. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Community Development.

Several scholars have written about how authoritarian or democratic political systems affect industrialization in the developing countries. There is no literature, however, on whether democracy makes a difference to the power and well-being of the countryside. Using India as a case where the longest-surviving democracy of the developing world exists, this book investigates how the countryside uses the political system to advance its interests. It is first argued that India's countryside has become quite powerful in the political system, exerting remarkable pressure on economic policy. The countryside is typically weak in the early stages of development, becoming powerful when the size of the rural sector defies this historical trend. But an important constraint on rural power stems from the inability of economic interests to overpower the abiding, ascriptive identities, and until an economic construction of politics completely overpowers identities and non-economic interests, farmers' power, though greater than ever before, will remain self-limited.