What is the basic meaning of democracy?
1a : government by the people especially : rule of the majority. b : a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.
What are the 3 types of democracy?
Consensus democracy – rule based on consensus rather than traditional majority rule. Constitutional democracy – governed by a constitution. Deliberative democracy – in which authentic deliberation, not only voting, is central to legitimate decision making.
[A] pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit no cure for the mischief of faction.
What are the main features of democracy?
Some of the major features of a democracy are:
The final decision making power rests with those elected by the people.
It must be based on a free and fair election.
Each adult citizen must have one vote and each vote must have one value.
It should rule within limits set by constitutional law and citizens' rights.
It intends to measure the state of democracy in 167 countries, of which 166 are sovereign states and 164 are UN member states.
Examples of Different Types of Democracy
When it comes to governments, you might know there are several types out there like a democracy, totalitarian, a monarchy or a theocracy. A democracy is an example most people are familiar with, especially if you live in the U.S. Use examples to learn about the different types of democracy governments.
What Is Democracy?You might have heard the word "democracy" thrown around on the news or by politicians. A democracy is a form of government, just like a monarchy or oligarchy. In a democracy, the power to run the government is placed in the hands of the people. However, how direct those people get to run their government is what makes different types of democratic government.
Types of Democracy
Democracy is a complicated thing. Most scholars will state there are two main types of democracy around the world, including direct and representative. However, several governments offer their own specific take on democracy, making for different democracy government constructs.
To clear up the confusion, check out examples of eight democratic governments from around the globe.
Direct Democracy
When you think of a democracy where people run everything, you are thinking of a direct democracy. For laws and government changes, people vote directly rather than having anyone represent them. Everything from fixing the roads to raising taxes requires the people's vote. If a large group thinks something is an issue, it can be brought to the government.
While direct democracies are hard to find in reality, Switzerland is close to the best example. The government of Switzerland uses popular initiatives, optional referendums and mandatory referendums to oppose amendments and demand bills. The nation also votes on all issues through popular vote.
Types of Direct Democracy
There are two schools of thought when it comes to a direct democracy.
Depending on the governing body, a representative government can be broken down into different subsets of a democratic government.
Parliamentary Democracy In a parliamentary democracy, the power is given to the legislative branch of the government through the parliament and the prime minister. These governments also have an executive branch but with less power.
The United Kingdom is a great example of a parliamentary democracy. The U.K. parliament is broken down into the House of Commons and House of Lords. These houses, along with the prime minister, work to make laws, check government spending and review the work of the government. The judicial branch is headed by a monarch.
India also uses a parliamentary democratic government. Unlike the U.K., India's head of state is the president.
Presidential Democracy A presidential democracy is the opposite of a parliamentary democracy. In a presidential democracy, the executive branch has the power. The people elect a president to head the government. However, the president is kept in check by the legislative branch.
The United States and Nigeria are examples of presidential democracies. The executive branch includes the president and his cabinet. Along with the judicial and legislative branch, the three branches of government work to keep checks and balances, but the president has final say.
Authoritarian Democracy In an authoritarian democracy, some people, specifically the wealthy and elite, direct the power of the government. These regimes adopt the government models that are generally associated with a democracy, including executive and legislative branches, but the government itself is not in the hands of the people. Additionally, if it is a small group of elites who are governing, then it might be called an elite democracy.
There are not many examples of an authoritarian democracy. Many will point to Russia since it includes elections and a legislature, but the government is currently led by the Vladimir Putin regime.
Religious Democracy This is where secular laws and the people meet to create the principles of the government. The most common example is an Islamic democracy. This is where the laws of Islam are what guide policy creation. The leaders of this democracy must also follow the teachings of Islam. However, these leaders are elected to their positions by the people.
Afghanistan and Pakistan have executive, judicial and legislative branches of government that are guided by the laws of Islam and the Qur'an. These governments also have a constitution and representatives are chosen by the people.
Exploring Democracy
Democracy is far from perfect. But, it does work to create a government that values every individual. Find out how this is different from fascism where only one dictator rules all.
The 15th President of the Republic of China (Taiwan) Tsai Ing-wen delivered her official inauguration speech on May 20, at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic continues to raise significant concerns about the future of the rules-based international order, the status of global democracy, and the trajectory of cross-strait relations. Taking the speech as a reflection of President Tsai’s vision for her second administration, Taiwan’s priorities will be strengthening cooperation with allies, accelerated development of asymmetrical defense capabilities, and managing tense cross-strait relations.
Foreign policy: Strengthened cooperation with allies and like-minded countries
President Tsai announced that Taiwan will participate more actively in regional cooperation mechanisms, strengthen mutually beneficial cooperation with its allies, and bolster ties with the United States, Japan, Europe, and other like-minded countries. Taiwan’s achievements in preventing the spread of COVID-19 and providing medical assistance to other countries has shown its strength in the field of public health and further highlighted the urgent need of being included as a member in the World Health Organization. With these foreign policy priorities in mind, Taiwan will likely maintain and expand three regional and global roles moving forward: Advocator of universal values: Democracy, freedom, and human rights are Taiwan’s core values. Taiwan may look to form more democratic partnerships with like-minded countries and play a constructive role in the US Indo-Pacific strategy.Node of economic activity and trade: The security of sea lanes of communication (SLOCs) is key to ensuring protected trade and economic activity. Taiwan’s unique geographic location, excellent global competitiveness, and open and transparent society can empower it to serve as a hub for economic and trade transactions in the Asia-Pacific region and promote the development of international trade.Platform for regional security cooperation: Taiwan is one of the safest countries in the world. Its stable politics and good governance can serve as a platform for organizing various forms of security cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region. Taiwan can provide vital assistance on the issues of counter-terrorism, humanitarian aid, and non-traditional security.National defense: Accelerated development of asymmetrical capabilities President Tsai also gave recommendations for national defense reforms over the next four years. As military threats from China increase, Taiwan must accelerate the construction of deterrence forces and strengthen its self-defense capabilities. In this vein, Taiwan must increase its security cooperation with the United States through the following actions:Advocate for an invitation to participate in the regional multilateral joint military drills, such as the Rim of the Pacific Exercise (RIMPAC). These exercises help enhance mutual trust between relevant countries while deepening regional multilateral security cooperation. If Taiwan can participate in RIMPAC, it can also provide a certain degree of logistical support and assistance in counter-terrorism, natural disasters, humanitarian relief, and other projects to the rest of the Indo-Pacific region.Active strategic communications via think tanks and academic institutions: Faced with a Chinese military threat for decades, various academic institutions and think tanks such as the National Defense University of the Republic of China (Taiwan), Graduate Institute of China Military Affairs Studies of NDU, or the “the Institute for National Defense and Security Research,” have been extensively studying the united front of China and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Coupled with Taiwan’s language and cultural advantages, their research can play a vital role in providing insights into Chinese military capabilities, doctrine, and strategy. In the long run, Taiwan and the United States should boost military cooperation and personnel exchanges to create a safer environment in the Indo-Pacific region.Cross-strait relations: Guided by the principle of “peace, parity, democracy, and dialogue”
The Taiwan Strait, the Korean Peninsula, and the South China Sea are the three major hot spots for regional conflicts in the Asia-Pacific region. In her speech, President Tsai stated that cross-strait relations had reached a historical turning point. She also reaffirmed that Taiwan would not accept Beijing’s use of “one country, two systems” to downgrade Taiwan and undermine the cross-strait status quo.Moreover, the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to diplomatically and militarily coerce Taiwan have surged in recent years. These threats have further damaged perception of China among the Taiwanese public. According to the latest survey from Focus Taiwan, 73 percent of the Taiwanese respondents disagreed with the statement that “the Chinese government is a friend of Taiwan’s,” suggesting that the intensifying CCP threat.
AUGUST 4, 2020
Since it was written, the world has changed beyond recognition. Millions have been quarantined or sickened by COVID-19. Hundreds of thousands have died. In the United States, pandemic lockdowns were the most astonishing event of 2020 — until the streets filled with protesters demanding the defunding and demilitarization of police departments, the protection of Black lives, and an end to white supremacy.
Between the cruel indifference of Washington’s pandemic response and the monstrous violence used by police, it’s clear that authorities have abdicated their responsibilities to all but the wealthy and the well connected. The work of mutual care has fallen back onto neighborhoods and local communities. Ordinary people have taken it upon themselves to collect medical gear and deliver meals to front-line health-care workers, to provide refuge to protesters and put their bodies between their fellow citizens and state violence.
It’s hard not to wonder how these things are related — if the experience of lockdown hasn’t in some way replenished the human solidarities now driving the protests. Both pandemic and mass protest teach us that daily democratic habits are not luxuries. They’re essential for individual survival and collective resilience.
Reconstructing Democracy:
How Citizens Are Building from the Ground Up should be precisely the book for this moment. it’s a smooth, optimistic manifesto about grassroots democratic renewal. But can it reassure us about democracy’s future? Do we still speak the same language?In about 100 pages, the authors present our contemporary democratic crisis as a twofold challenge. First, they write, democracies are getting worse at solving problems. Elected leaders “often don’t know which policies are adequate” for a complex and interconnected world. This failure is compounded by growing distance between regular people and those who rule them. Leaders “are afraid to take drastic measures that might not be supported by their constituents” (e.g., on climate) while voters no longer grasp how politics works. Our only hope, the authors propose, is to “reconstruct democracy from the bottom up.” The book elevates “experiments [in] revitalizing democracy” from North America and Europe, though what they mean isn’t labor activism, protest, or electoral organizing but rather dialogue-driven community planning and new forms of consultation. Guided by an earnest faith in expertise, rationality, and consensus, Reconstructing Democracy is about how ordinary voters can learn to speak in ways that their rulers can understand. “Only if we enhance and reinvigorate democracy at the base,” they argue, “will the citizenry find clarity about what to ask for, or what future to envision.”There are democratic lessons here, but not the ones imagined by the authors. For although it honors ordinary citizens, this is a book for elites. Reconstructing Democracy is a balm to power, a reassurance that the old tools still apply. Already a relic from our very recent past, it speaks volumes about how the powerful are meeting this crisis: equipped with the same faulty assumptions that led us here to start with. It also teaches us to beware. Not all forms of local democracy are made equal.
¤
In 2004, the Canadian province of British Columbia established a path breaking Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. Balanced by gender and regional representation, with two seats set aside for Indigenous members, this group of 160 randomly selected citizens spent a year learning about electoral systems, reflecting on shared values, and holding public hearings. In their final report, they recommended the province switch from the infamously uneven first-past-the-post system to a form of proportional representation.
The Canadian model has since traveled. Ireland made headlines by legalizing same-sex marriage in 2015 — and then abortion three years later. Both constitutional amendments, endorsed by referendum, emerged from national citizens’ assemblies. The Irish panels are rebooted regularly with new participants and mandates. The third and current assembly is focused on gender equality. Chosen at random, 99 citizens gather monthly to hear expert presentations, listen to testimonials, propose policy changes, and write ballot questions.
Also in 2015, the western Austrian state of Vorarlberg used the citizen assembly model to defuse tensions related to refugee resettlement and integration. A “wisdom council” of 23 citizens, selected at random, met with the help of expert facilitators to identify conditions for peaceful, prosperous coexistence. Members of the gender-balanced council were aged 18 to 75. One-fifth of them had personal or family experience with migration. Feelings of anger and fear gradually gave way to a new consensus: that newcomers and locals should be in regular contact, refugees should be supported in achieving economic independence, and residents should be given more volunteering opportunities to help the process along.
The co-authors propose that these bodies represent a fourth political power they call the consultative (next to the executive, legislative, and judicial branches). Advisory councils of randomly chosen citizens cannot replace elections, nor should they. But they do seem useful for handling divisive issues, practicing deliberative habits, and tackling challenges that extend beyond the terms of a single parliament or presidency. What’s distinctive and important about assemblies or “future councils” like these is that they give regular people new tools for remaking existing political structures. They bring non-elite voices right into the corridors of power.Some of Reconstructing Democracy’s other case studies are less innovative, although not less valuable. The co-authors tell us about Lawrence Community Works, a Massachusetts “community development corporation” that builds networks among low-income residents so that they can provide services to their own even more vulnerable neighbors. Of course, ordinary people have used the bonds of local community to help one another long before they found the vocabulary (social capital, community assets, etc.) to make it attractive to wealthy donors. And a truly decent democracy would ensure that none of its citizens was too poor to live, rather than asking them to arrange meal-sharing services for themselves.Indeed, it’s a strangely private vision of the public sphere that structures Reconstructing Democracy. A project like Lawrence Community Works is evidently important. But even as it testifies to neighborhood vitality, it also draws the eye to a deeper civic predicament, about which the co-authors have extremely little to say: the privatization of public goods, the marketization of our democratic imaginations, and the shunting of shared obligations onto the shoulders of individuals and local communities. This is nothing to celebrate.What it means for an activity to be democratic is not a question the authors ever explicitly answer. They seem to equate democracy with deliberation or dialogue, but it’s not always clear how the forms of participation they write about are assertions of power by free and equal citizens. The strange result is that certain examples don’t feel that democratic at all.
¤
Take, for instance, the Market Creek Plaza (MCP) project in San Diego’s Diamond Neighborhoods district, a poor and diverse corner of the city tucked among intersecting freeways. In the 1990s, the Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovation acquired a 20-acre industrial site and asked local residents how they’d like to develop it. The Jacobs team imagined a profitable commercial center that would serve the community’s needs (public space, a supermarket, a movie theater, etc.) and that would be owned, in part, by those who lived nearby.Beginning in 2001, community investors (mostly educated African American women homeowners) were allowed to purchase shares in the complex, up to 20 percent of the entire capitalization. A glowing 2007 report in the Stanford Social Innovation Review called it “the people’s IPO.” Reconstructing Democracy holds up MCP, which opened in 2004, as an achievement “of great human and also political importance,” an example of participatory democracy “which has itself something of the nature of an artistic creation.”A quick Google search reveals a sadder story. Since 2010, MCP has been struggling. Pride in ownership has dissolved into disappointment. The movie theater was never built; just a DVD rental kiosk. Many community-owned businesses have vanished. Replacing the craft store and women’s fitness center are Starbucks, Papa John’s Pizza, Subway, and T-Mobile. Here, “reinvigorating democracy at the base” apparently means acquiring a minority stake in an outdoor mall choked with chain stores and run by philanthropists. The idea that expert-guided deliberation (we could call it facilitated democracy) could revitalize economically distressed zones in Europe and the United States, from eastern Germany’s post-communist coal country to the shuttered towns of the American Midwest. These areas are caught in what the co-authors call the Appalachian predicament. Communities suffering economic decline lose their “capacity to self-organize” or “develop new ideas to move forward.” Lacking the cultural and social capital to respond to a changing world, people get worse at understanding “the mechanisms of change” and, left to their own devices, are unable to “collectively take their fate into their own hands and move on.” They turn against democratic institutions that don’t serve them and reject political systems that they no longer understand.Could facilitated democratic deliberation be the answer? The co-authors call our attention to Wisconsin Rapids, the once-thriving seat of Wood County, Wisconsin. Downsizing hit the community hard in the early 2000s. The paper industry contracted and 40 percent of all local jobs were lost. A local community foundation called In-courage moved to address urgent needs (job retraining, transit benefits for students, etc.) while convening a series of “community conversations” about the region’s future. Using this “participatory planning process,” the foundation worked with locals to decide how best to transform the town’s folded Daily Tribune newspaper building into a community center. It’s telling, though, that the co-authors of Reconstructing Democracy single out for praise not citizens but rather the staff of a Louisiana-based firm called Concordia, hired by In-courage to direct public meetings and build consensus. The co-authors frame this project as part of “a democratic counter blow against the current drift to stagnation and xenophobic exclusion.” They assert that the efforts of facilitation firms like Concordia and foundations like In-courage will have a long-term impact on the democratic future of poorer communities by renewing civic bonds and strengthening political habits. “[W]e usually need to start with the question of how to initiate and foster the process from the outside,” Reconstructing Democracy tells the hopeful story of Wisconsin Rapids using surveys and reports that date mostly from the early 2010s. What happened in 2016? Wood County voted overwhelmingly, by a margin of 20 points, for Donald Trump. (One way of explaining that election is that it was a frustrated repudiation of a technocratic neoliberal presidency guided by many of the same assumptions as this little book.) The community project to re-imagine the local newspaper building, however, is still underway.
¤This idea of an “Appalachian predicament” is more than a little condescending. But it tells us something essential about how the co-authors understand democracy — and how they believe regular citizens should participate. One assumption here is that the crisis of democracy is primarily a crisis of knowledge: citizens don’t understand the world, don’t know what they want, and don’t know how to speak to powerholders about what they desire and value. A second belief appears to be that facts are democracy’s cure-all, that when given accurate information human beings will make rational decisions. “In any case,” they write, with all the procedural optimism of a corporate annual report, “well-crafted solutions to recalcitrant problems will draw support.” The third conviction is that citizens need experts, to acquire that knowledge and learn to communicate well. Finally, Reconstructing Democracy assumes that the ideal democratic condition is consensus, that with enough dialogue or deliberation, we can all basically agree on the things that matter. We’re asked to “imagine the synergy created” if downtrodden regions were able to find consensus “around the best direction to go” instead of voting for xenophobic populists. To put it all differently: If former South Bend, Indiana, mayor and presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg were a book about fixing democracy — not the daring generational crusader who entered the race pledging to pack the Supreme Court, mind you, but the technocratic consultant who departed it while warning about the price tag of universal health care — at any rate, if Pete Buttigieg were a book about fixing democracy, he’d be this one. The point, of course, isn’t that expertise is unnecessary for democracy or that deliberative processes don’t work or that consultations aren’t important. If we can’t reason together in public, the democratic game is lost. And so it’s worth developing new ways to master the habits that allow us to rule ourselves, as free and equal citizens, through deliberation and debate and sometimes even consensus, not coercion or violence. But there’s a metonymic quality to the vision of democratic politics guiding this book, a small part standing in for the larger whole. Dialogue and deliberation are critical for democracy, but the procedures alone don’t keep us democratic. How they relate to power makes all the difference.Here are some things that do not appear in this short book, published in 2020, about “how citizens are building from the ground up.” Electoral movements. Black Lives Matter and protests about criminal justice. Climate protests. Women’s marches. Labor activism. The 2018–’19 red-state teachers’ strikes. Surging interest in local elections. Bernie Sanders. It is odd, frankly, that a book selling local engagement as the antidote for illiberal populism would deliberately omit so many vital examples of citizens asserting their public power.More frustrating, however, is that the co-authors look at forms of democratic action that aren’t dialogue-driven and see only failure. Protests and movements, to their mind, can’t achieve real change because they’re not coordinated with existing institutions. But this misses the forest for the trees. In Wisconsin Rapids, the co-authors proudly tell us, more than 500 people attended 75 local planning meetings. How many more residents of south Wood County have, in recent years, attended rallies for populist presidential candidates, or joined marches, or knocked on doors, or made donations to political candidates? What feels more satisfying right now, and more democratic: talking or acting?The expert vision of facilitated democracy offered here is guided by an abiding faith in reason and procedure. But it has little to say about the world as it actually exists for us as we enter this third decade of the 21st century: profoundly unequal, structured by massive concentrations of political and economic power, relentlessly violent, challenged by dark alternate visions of racial and political community, and, at least in the United States, ruled by bad faith actors no longer all that convinced by democracy. Sometimes, we are learning, you can’t argue your way into a fairer distribution of resources or a more just share of power. Democracies do need a certain level of underlying social agreement. The co-authors aren’t wrong. But any meaningful democratic consensus, about the kinds of political action and ideas we wish to allow and the ones we don’t and who’s included and who’s kept out and where those lines are drawn — none of that just exists in the world. It has to be won.
Since the mid-1960s social scientists have agreed that, of the countries where democracy has emerged, its flourishing has been most improbable in India. Of course, the health of Indian democracy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, incumbent for the past six years, has caused widespread concern. The Swedish V-Dem Institute’s recent Democracy Report, which laments the decline in democracy globally, warns that India “is on the verge of losing its status as a democracy due to the severe shrinking of space for the media, civil society, and the opposition.” Yet the report also suggests that India’s democracy is in decline, not collapse.
That judgment, in part, reflects the long-recognized exceptional nature of India’s democracy, established where political philosophers thought its emergence impossible. At a time when countries around the world are experiencing democratic backsliding—Freedom House’s widely read annual report warned that “2019 was the 14th consecutive year of decline in global freedom”—we may have much to learn from India’s example. But to understand what it tells us about the prospects for democracy in difficult settings we must first understand India’s democratic founding.
This August India celebrates seventy-three years as an independent nation. During these decades of independence, the country has been run democratically (aside from the twenty-one months of the infamous Emergency from 1975 to 1977). With the exception of Costa Rica, no other developing country has enjoyed as long a democratic run since World War II. And in the case of Costa Rica, it is worth bearing in mind that the country is small, with a GDP per capita six times that of India’s (in 2019 Costa Rica’s GDP per capita was $12,238, while India’s was $2,104). Modern democratic theory holds that democracies generally live longer when their citizens have higher levels of income. And in societies with lower incomes, the mortality rate of democracy is often high. For decades now India has defied this conventional scholarly wisdom.
Surprise at India’s democratic success is well documented. Barrington Moore was the first major social scientist to note the uncommon and the unexpected. In 1966 he observed that “as a political species, [India] does belong to the modern world. At the time of Nehru’s death in 1964 political democracy had existed for seventeen years. If imperfect, the democracy was no mere sham.” Half a decade later, in 1971, Robert Dahl—arguably the most influential figure in democratic theory--wrote that India was a “deviant case . . . indeed a polyarchy.” Polyarchy, so used, was Dahl’s conceptual term for democracy. By 1989 Dahl had no doubt that India was “a leading contemporary exception” to democratic theory. Astonishment at India’s success continued to register among political scientists into this century. On the basis of a massive international dataset spanning 1950 to 1990, Adam Przeworski concluded in 2000 that “the odds against democracy in India were extremely high.”
It then comes as a surprise that Madhav Khosla, author of the new book India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy (2020), remarks that the founding of India’s democracy—particularly, its constitutional founding—has been “neglected within the history of political ideas.” Khosla is a political philosopher, a faculty member at both Columbia Law School in New York and Ashoka University in India. His surprising observation speaks to the divide between political philosophy and the more empirically driven social sciences—a divide that renders both fields intellectually poorer.
There should be some degree of intellectual trespassing between political philosophy and the social sciences; without it, neither field can know the other nor heed the other’s explorations. Khosla forgoes any discussion of India’s representation in empirical democratic theory and instead responds to the intellectual terrain of political philosophy. He begins with G. W. F. Hegel, who thought that India was doomed to be a despotic polity and speculated that Indians lived according to age-old caste rules rather than as autonomous agents capable of making conscious choices. In such a society, made up of citizens supposedly devoid of agency, the older order—hierarchical, oppressive, and despotic—would continue ad infinitum, and a modern political order breaking from tradition was virtually impossible.
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Approximately half a century later, John Stuart Mill considered India through the lens of colonialism. Mill distinguished between colonies that were “of similar civilization to the ruling country, capable and ripe for representative government, such as British possessions in America and Australia” and other colonies “like India (that) are . . . at a great distance” from the British civilization. These polities, so different from that of their colonists, only allowed for “a choice of despotisms.” Following this interpretation, British tutelage in the form of colonization was India’s best option. In contrast, the advanced European civilizations and their cousins—Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and, earlier, the United States—could have democratic rule owing to their higher capability for rational conduct.Khosla’s book largely seeks to remedy political philosophy’s failed portrayal of India. In doing so, the book presents an ambitious and novel claim:
The historical conditions of India’s creation should encourage us to see it as the paradigmatic democratic experience of the twentieth century, in much the same way that Tocqueville had seen the United States as the model nineteenth-century democracy.Khosla concentrates on India’s democratic origins, while the aforementioned empirical theories examine democracy’s persistence. The question of democracy’s persistence is not fundamentally a normative one; it has well-known empirical tests. But when an institutional framework is originally established, the normative visions of the founders—about the kind of society they wish to build and the reasons for its building—are on full display, and an analytic space for political philosophy clearly emerges.
This August India celebrates seventy-three years as an independent nation. During these decades of independence, the country has been run democratically (aside from the twenty-one months of the infamous Emergency from 1975 to 1977). With the exception of Costa Rica, no other developing country has enjoyed as long a democratic run since World War II. And in the case of Costa Rica, it is worth bearing in mind that the country is small, with a GDP per capita six times that of India’s (in 2019 Costa Rica’s GDP per capita was $12,238, while India’s was $2,104). Modern democratic theory holds that democracies generally live longer when their citizens have higher levels of income. And in societies with lower incomes, the mortality rate of democracy is often high. For decades now India has defied this conventional scholarly wisdom.Surprise at India’s democratic success is well documented. Barrington Moore was the first major social scientist to note the uncommon and the unexpected. In 1966 he observed that “as a political species, [India] does belong to the modern world. At the time of Nehru’s death in 1964 political democracy had existed for seventeen years. If imperfect, the democracy was no mere sham.” Half a decade later, in 1971, Robert Dahl—arguably the most influential figure in democratic theory--wrote that India was a “deviant case . . . indeed a polyarchy.” Polyarchy, so used, was Dahl’s conceptual term for democracy. By 1989 Dahl had no doubt that India was “a leading contemporary exception” to democratic theory. Astonishment at India’s success continued to register among political scientists into this century. On the basis of a massive international data set spanning 1950 to 1990, Adam Przeworski concluded in 2000 that “the odds against democracy in India were extremely high.”It then comes as a surprise that Madhav Khosla, author of the new book India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy (2020), remarks that the founding of India’s democracy—particularly, its constitutional founding—has been “neglected within the history of political ideas.” Khosla is a political philosopher, a faculty member at both Columbia Law School in New York and Ashoka University in India. His surprising observation speaks to the divide between political philosophy and the more empirically driven social sciences—a divide that renders both fields intellectually poorer.There should be some degree of intellectual trespassing between political philosophy and the social sciences; without it, neither field can know the other nor heed the other’s explorations. Khosla forgoes any discussion of India’s representation in emprical democratic theory and instead responds to the intellectual terrain of political philosophy. He begins with G. W. F. Hegel, who thought that India was doomed to be a despotic polity and speculated that Indians lived according to age-old caste rules rather than as autonomous agents capable of making conscious choices. In such a society, made up of citizens supposedly devoid of agency, the older order—hierarchical, oppressive, and despotic—would continue ad infinitum, and a modern political order breaking from tradition was virtually impossible.Approximately half a century later, John Stuart Mill considered India through the lens of colonialism. Mill distinguished between colonies that were “of similar civilization to the ruling country, capable and ripe for representative government, such as British possessions in America and Australia” and other colonies “like India (that) are . . . at a great distance” from the British civilization. These polities, so different from that of their colonists, only allowed for “a choice of despotisms.” Following this interpretation, British tutelage in the form of colonization was India’s best option. In contrast, the advanced European civilizations and their cousins—Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and, earlier, the United States—could have democratic rule owing to their higher capability for rational conduct.Khosla’s book largely seeks to remedy political philosophy’s failed portrayal of India. In doing so, the book presents an ambitious and novel claim:The historical conditions of India’s creation should encourage us to see it as the paradigmatic democratic experience of the twentieth century, in much the same way that Tocqueville had seen the United States as the model nineteenth-century democracy.
Khosla concentrates on India’s democratic origins, while the aforementioned empirical theories examine democracy’s persistence. The question of democracy’s persistence is not fundamentally a normative one; it has well-known empirical tests. But when an institutional framework is originally established, the normative visions of the founders—about the kind of society they wish to build and the reasons for its building—are on full display, and an analytic space for political philosophy clearly emerges.
So how did India’s founders come to imagine a democratic polity in a setting that conventional wisdom had ruled wholly unfit for democracy? Who, after all, thinks of universal franchise when the literacy rate (at the end of British rule) was a mere 17 percent (Mill thought literacy had to be the foundation of franchise), when more than 60 percent of the country was below the poverty line (Mill was unconvinced that the poor should have the right to vote), and when more than twenty languages were spoken in the country (Mill thought that all citizens must speak the same language if democracy was to function)? At independence in 1947, India possessed each of these disqualifying conditions. But India’s early leaders did not view these as insurmountable obstacles. Instead they decided that voting rights would not be based on literacy, income, property, or gender. Each citizen, however deprived, could be assumed to know their own interests as well as the privileged knew theirs. And, respecting India’s linguistic diversity, citizen education was made multilingual to generate a public sphere diverse in language.
The founders had confidence in these historically unprecedented interventions. At the time of independence, as Khosla strikingly puts it, India’s political leadership held a Hobbesian view of politics, and “at the heart of the Hobbesian project was the independence of politics.” The notion of necessary democratic preconditions—literacy, income, language--implied that “human behavior was not the consequence of politics, but instead its cause … a scenario that Thomas Hobbes would have regarded as placing the cart before the horse.” Rather than understanding social conditions as a creator of politics, India’s democratic project was based on the notion that politics could change adverse social and economic conditions—that “the practice of democracy would create democratic citizens.” If politics was supreme, the improbable could be achieved.
India’s leaders were, of course, not alone in assuming the primacy of politics. In China, Mao Zedong, too, had similar beliefs. For example, the underlying tide of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–76) rose from the belief that politics could create a new man—one unconcerned with greed, unselfish, laboring for the country, and obedient to Maoist diktat. But despite the deployment of the world’s largest Communist party, no such transformation came about in China. Only after Mao’s death was China fundamentally transformed, albeit in the opposite way. A few years following Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping took control and spread the dictum that “to get rich is glorious.”
In other words, following a Hobbesian conception of politics does not guarantee political transformation: the result depends on what ends are being pursued and how such pursuits are shaped through institutional designs. Ideas, practices, and leadership matter. If the architecture of the polity is adequately imagined, put in place with resolve and determination, and practiced with nurturing care, the historically exceptional can be realized.
With this understanding of politics, Khosla fixes his gaze on India’s Constitution—produced in 1949 after three years of intense deliberation by a Constituent Assembly and still intact today. He focuses on three central constitutional elements: the codification of formal rules as opposed to a reliance on tradition, the centralization of political authority as opposed to villages governing themselves as self-sufficient democratic units, and the prioritization of individual representation as opposed to that of communities.
Today India has the longest constitution in the world. This is largely owed to B. R. Ambedkar, the chair of the Constitution Drafting Committee of the Constituent Assembly (1946–49). Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first and longest-serving prime minister (1947–1964), was opposed to extensive codification. However, Ambedkar had other ideas and, in the end, Ambedkar triumphed. As a central figure in Constitution-making, Ambedkar’s intellectual persona and personal history were both imprinted in the democratic imagination that formed the Constitution. Having received two PhDs—one from Columbia and another from the London School of Economics—Ambedkar was the most highly educated leader in India in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet, according to caste background, he was Dalit. This label relegated him to the lowest social tier, deeming him “untouchable” at that time. Though Dalits were not legally bought and sold as commodities as the slaves were in the United States, the institution of “untouchability” deprived Dalits of basic rights and elemental dignities for centuries. The symbolic significance of Ambedkar leading the making of the Constitution is monumental. Imagine W. E. B. Du Bois as a key architect of the U.S. Constitution, were he alive in the 1780s. Ambedkar knew that caste prejudices were deeply entrenched in India, with group and human inequality the system’s governing idea. Brahmins—at the top—enjoyed unencumbered privileges, and Dalits—at the bottom—enjoyed none at all. In both government and socio-economic life, Brahmins and the other upper castes dominated positions of power. Regardless of whether those in power were raving casteists, the hegemonic hold of caste-based beliefs in India made it clear to Ambedkar that an insidious form of caste prejudice was only to be expected.As a result, Ambedkar did not want to give discretion to legislators. Rather, he believed that “constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated.” From his perspective, the Constitution had to be an elaborate document with extensive codification containing not only the larger framework within which the legislature and government would function, but also specific laws. It also had to include the details of pivotal administrative arrangements.In India—a starkly unequal society attempting to institute a democracy—the Constitution needed to function as a kind of political teacher. This could only be accomplished if it went beyond the two standard and contrasting constitutional doctrines: the constraining of executive/legislative power (“legal constitutionalism”), or the enabling of executive/legislative power (“political constitutionalism”). At its deepest level, the Constitution had to nurture a system of “meanings” that all actors in the polity—executives, legislatures, bureaucracies, citizens and even courts—would share. The Constitution had to be a “textbook . . . a pedagogical apparatus,” not solely a “rulebook.”The unprecedented length of the Indian Constitution was thus dictated by the country’s undemocratic social circumstances: the necessary restriction of legislative and judicial discretion in a land of caste prejudice, and the need to create both democratic powerholders and democratic citizens. Ambedkar knew that democracy and its democratic citizens would not organically emerge; they had to be created by design.
The allocation of power between the judicial, legislative, and executive branches turns on the distribution of horizontal authority. But those making the Constitution also had to consider the vertical distribution of power. Which levels of government—central (federal), state, and local—would have what kind of power? Ambedkar’s response to this question was again informed by a distrust of Indian social norms. Much like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mahatma Gandhi had long argued in favor of empowering local governments and encouraging local participation, asking for “village republics.” Ambedkar fundamentally disagreed with this perspective. In his eyes, villages were “the ruination of India . . . a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism.” Nehru concurred, and, together, the two left behind the Gandhian idea of village republics.Untouchability’s lived effects informed Ambedkar’s perspective on village rule. Unlike race, untouchability was not inscribed in the color of one’s skin, the texture of one’s hair, or the shape of one’s nose. It was given away by one’s name and, often, one’s traditional profession. One could easily recognize castes in a village, less easily in the anonymity of a city, and only with great difficulty at the national level. Caste names tended to be regional or local, because India hosted many languages and names were understood in a linguistic register. Brahmins and “untouchables” were found everywhere, but there were no comprehensive caste names in the country. Brahmin names in the South were very different from those in the North, and the same was true of “untouchable” names. Local or regional knowledge was necessary to correctly identify caste.Though Khosla largely ignores this anthropological reality, his conceptualization of caste allows him to explain the vertical distribution of power in India. To counter the impact of caste and to foster the idea of uniform citizenship and equal rights, Ambedkar thought it necessary to concentrate power at the federal center with less authority given to the states. This would launch a top-down battle against the hierarchical, caste-based, local power structures. He saw no other way to defeat a deep-rooted ascriptive caste hierarchy. This approach did not stray far from that the United States took during Reconstruction (1865–77). Political leaders and citizens all knew that race relations in the South would never reconstitute themselves and federal oversight and push were necessary. The project of racial equality could not be left to the discretion of the southern states.Substituting caste for race, Ambedkar’s mantra pushed for a stronger Delhi and weaker states. This approach had an interesting manifestation for local governments. Ambedkar knew that political power in villages would likely mirror social power—oppressing Dalits. Accordingly, he persuaded the Constitution drafters to not legally require elections for the third tier of government. It was not until 1992, decades later, that two constitutional amendments were passed by parliament, mandating elections for local government. Prior to these amendments, India had only two tiers of elected government: central and state.This came to be known as centralized parliamentary federalism. It received huge support in the Constituent Assembly, but not for the reasons that Ambedkar advanced. Many members worried that, in the absence of a strong national government, some regions might secede. The fact that Muslim-majority states had broken away and formed Pakistan only deepened this anxiety. Indeed, a strong central government was integral to the success of national integration; but, to Ambedkar and Nehru, it was also necessary to shatter the power of tradition.
In writing the Constitution, the final matter to address was political representation: would India be conceptualized as a society composed of communities or individuals? The British were convinced that Indians could not reason as individuals. Rather, they believed that ascriptive communities of religion and caste were so preponderant that they preempted individual agency. Accordingly, the British formed separate electorates at the local and state levels. In separate Muslim electorates, only eligible Muslims could vote and run for office—non-Muslim participation was forbidden in Muslim constituencies.India’s freedom fighters believed that this communal structure of British Indian polity had prevented the emergence of a common political arena, one that could have joined the Hindus and Muslims—India’s two largest religious communities—together as a coherent nation. If anything, they thought the colonial privileging of a group-based polity created the Muslim nation of Pakistan. Separate electorates promoted separatism, not integration.Upon independence India moved to privilege the political representation of individuals, rather than pre-determined group identities. It did away with religion-based electorates. Instead “a model of citizenship centered on the political participation of individuals…would allow the categories of majority and minority to be . . . defined and redefined within the fluid domain of politics.” Individuals needed to form judgements autonomous from their birth-based groups, and this required new rules of representation. Ambedkar, though a proponent of individual autonomy, also favored group-based representation for specific categories. In particular he believed that electoral constituencies should be reserved for Dalits and Adivasis (the tribals) in accordance with their demographic proportions. Because Dalits comprised 16 percent of the national population and Adivasis 6.5 percent, the Constitution reserved 22.5 percent of parliamentary constituencies for these two groups. Each state assembly was also required to make reservations based on the demographic share of these two communities in their state populations.But the reserved constituencies differed from the despised separate electorates. The key difference lay in the conceptualization of the voting public. Like separate electorates, only Dalits and Adivasis could run for office in the reserved constituencies, but all communities, unlike separate electorates, could vote in the elections. In other words, Dalit politicians could not win these seats by appealing only to Dalits. They needed the support of the larger community to win office. Herein lay a significant tension: How could one allow group reservation, however different from separate electorates, if individuals were to be the unit of representation? If religion was to be dropped as a basis for electoral constituencies, why were the lowest castes worthy of special group representation? Khosla’s resolution to this puzzle is noteworthy. He extracts from Ambedkar’s argument a threshold-based reasoning: “Caste based domination was so entrenched that the problem could not be entirely solved by suffrage. . . . the path to individualization of identity lay in permitting special treatment towards members of groups that had remained constrained.” In other words, “for individual liberty to be realized, the stubborn practice of superior groups needed to end.”Groups such as Dalits that had faced centuries of social repression needed state support. Only after a certain threshold had been crossed and some semblance of equality had been reached could one rely on individual agency to climb the economic and social ladder. Muslims did not need the same kind of support, as they were not part of the Hindu caste system and therefore not repressed by the force of tradition. Though many Muslims were indeed poor, Muslim princes and aristocrats had ruled large parts of India for several centuries. Dalits, entirely devoid of such privileges and never part of the ruling class, were comprehensively subaltern. After centuries of being rendered destitute, Dalits required affirmative action.Though empirical theories have long recognized the exceptional nature of India’s democracy, political philosophy has largely ignored the country’s remarkable democratic founding. By grounding Indian constitutional debates in political philosophy, Khosla has given an entirely novel perspective to India’s democratic origins. Perhaps now political philosophers will have reason to more intimately engage with India’s constitutional ideas—ideas addressing codification, the conceptualization of separation of powers, and balancing individual and group representation—critical areas of thought for any modern polity and constitution.India’s constitutional history also presents lessons about creating democracy in unlikely settings, highlighting that progressive politics and careful institutional engineering can be used to sustain democracy. In a society that is deeply unequal, democracy will have a great deal of difficulty unless the architecture of the polity devises means to address its inequalities. Clearly the value of such lessons has not yet disappeared.
1a : government by the people especially : rule of the majority. b : a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.
What are the 3 types of democracy?
Consensus democracy – rule based on consensus rather than traditional majority rule. Constitutional democracy – governed by a constitution. Deliberative democracy – in which authentic deliberation, not only voting, is central to legitimate decision making.
[A] pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit no cure for the mischief of faction.
What are the main features of democracy?
Some of the major features of a democracy are:
The final decision making power rests with those elected by the people.
It must be based on a free and fair election.
Each adult citizen must have one vote and each vote must have one value.
It should rule within limits set by constitutional law and citizens' rights.
It intends to measure the state of democracy in 167 countries, of which 166 are sovereign states and 164 are UN member states.
Examples of Different Types of Democracy
When it comes to governments, you might know there are several types out there like a democracy, totalitarian, a monarchy or a theocracy. A democracy is an example most people are familiar with, especially if you live in the U.S. Use examples to learn about the different types of democracy governments.
What Is Democracy?You might have heard the word "democracy" thrown around on the news or by politicians. A democracy is a form of government, just like a monarchy or oligarchy. In a democracy, the power to run the government is placed in the hands of the people. However, how direct those people get to run their government is what makes different types of democratic government.
Types of Democracy
Democracy is a complicated thing. Most scholars will state there are two main types of democracy around the world, including direct and representative. However, several governments offer their own specific take on democracy, making for different democracy government constructs.
To clear up the confusion, check out examples of eight democratic governments from around the globe.
Direct Democracy
When you think of a democracy where people run everything, you are thinking of a direct democracy. For laws and government changes, people vote directly rather than having anyone represent them. Everything from fixing the roads to raising taxes requires the people's vote. If a large group thinks something is an issue, it can be brought to the government.
While direct democracies are hard to find in reality, Switzerland is close to the best example. The government of Switzerland uses popular initiatives, optional referendums and mandatory referendums to oppose amendments and demand bills. The nation also votes on all issues through popular vote.
Types of Direct Democracy
There are two schools of thought when it comes to a direct democracy.
- A participatory democracy is one where the people use initiative and referendums to make a contribution to their government. This allows every person to make a meaningful contribution, like what you find in Switzerland.
- Another direct democracy theory is the deliberative theory. In this theory, citizens would deliberate government policies and reforms among themselves to generate the best policies and laws for everyone.
Depending on the governing body, a representative government can be broken down into different subsets of a democratic government.
Parliamentary Democracy In a parliamentary democracy, the power is given to the legislative branch of the government through the parliament and the prime minister. These governments also have an executive branch but with less power.
The United Kingdom is a great example of a parliamentary democracy. The U.K. parliament is broken down into the House of Commons and House of Lords. These houses, along with the prime minister, work to make laws, check government spending and review the work of the government. The judicial branch is headed by a monarch.
India also uses a parliamentary democratic government. Unlike the U.K., India's head of state is the president.
Presidential Democracy A presidential democracy is the opposite of a parliamentary democracy. In a presidential democracy, the executive branch has the power. The people elect a president to head the government. However, the president is kept in check by the legislative branch.
The United States and Nigeria are examples of presidential democracies. The executive branch includes the president and his cabinet. Along with the judicial and legislative branch, the three branches of government work to keep checks and balances, but the president has final say.
Authoritarian Democracy In an authoritarian democracy, some people, specifically the wealthy and elite, direct the power of the government. These regimes adopt the government models that are generally associated with a democracy, including executive and legislative branches, but the government itself is not in the hands of the people. Additionally, if it is a small group of elites who are governing, then it might be called an elite democracy.
There are not many examples of an authoritarian democracy. Many will point to Russia since it includes elections and a legislature, but the government is currently led by the Vladimir Putin regime.
Religious Democracy This is where secular laws and the people meet to create the principles of the government. The most common example is an Islamic democracy. This is where the laws of Islam are what guide policy creation. The leaders of this democracy must also follow the teachings of Islam. However, these leaders are elected to their positions by the people.
Afghanistan and Pakistan have executive, judicial and legislative branches of government that are guided by the laws of Islam and the Qur'an. These governments also have a constitution and representatives are chosen by the people.
Exploring Democracy
Democracy is far from perfect. But, it does work to create a government that values every individual. Find out how this is different from fascism where only one dictator rules all.
The 15th President of the Republic of China (Taiwan) Tsai Ing-wen delivered her official inauguration speech on May 20, at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic continues to raise significant concerns about the future of the rules-based international order, the status of global democracy, and the trajectory of cross-strait relations. Taking the speech as a reflection of President Tsai’s vision for her second administration, Taiwan’s priorities will be strengthening cooperation with allies, accelerated development of asymmetrical defense capabilities, and managing tense cross-strait relations.
Foreign policy: Strengthened cooperation with allies and like-minded countries
President Tsai announced that Taiwan will participate more actively in regional cooperation mechanisms, strengthen mutually beneficial cooperation with its allies, and bolster ties with the United States, Japan, Europe, and other like-minded countries. Taiwan’s achievements in preventing the spread of COVID-19 and providing medical assistance to other countries has shown its strength in the field of public health and further highlighted the urgent need of being included as a member in the World Health Organization. With these foreign policy priorities in mind, Taiwan will likely maintain and expand three regional and global roles moving forward: Advocator of universal values: Democracy, freedom, and human rights are Taiwan’s core values. Taiwan may look to form more democratic partnerships with like-minded countries and play a constructive role in the US Indo-Pacific strategy.Node of economic activity and trade: The security of sea lanes of communication (SLOCs) is key to ensuring protected trade and economic activity. Taiwan’s unique geographic location, excellent global competitiveness, and open and transparent society can empower it to serve as a hub for economic and trade transactions in the Asia-Pacific region and promote the development of international trade.Platform for regional security cooperation: Taiwan is one of the safest countries in the world. Its stable politics and good governance can serve as a platform for organizing various forms of security cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region. Taiwan can provide vital assistance on the issues of counter-terrorism, humanitarian aid, and non-traditional security.National defense: Accelerated development of asymmetrical capabilities President Tsai also gave recommendations for national defense reforms over the next four years. As military threats from China increase, Taiwan must accelerate the construction of deterrence forces and strengthen its self-defense capabilities. In this vein, Taiwan must increase its security cooperation with the United States through the following actions:Advocate for an invitation to participate in the regional multilateral joint military drills, such as the Rim of the Pacific Exercise (RIMPAC). These exercises help enhance mutual trust between relevant countries while deepening regional multilateral security cooperation. If Taiwan can participate in RIMPAC, it can also provide a certain degree of logistical support and assistance in counter-terrorism, natural disasters, humanitarian relief, and other projects to the rest of the Indo-Pacific region.Active strategic communications via think tanks and academic institutions: Faced with a Chinese military threat for decades, various academic institutions and think tanks such as the National Defense University of the Republic of China (Taiwan), Graduate Institute of China Military Affairs Studies of NDU, or the “the Institute for National Defense and Security Research,” have been extensively studying the united front of China and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Coupled with Taiwan’s language and cultural advantages, their research can play a vital role in providing insights into Chinese military capabilities, doctrine, and strategy. In the long run, Taiwan and the United States should boost military cooperation and personnel exchanges to create a safer environment in the Indo-Pacific region.Cross-strait relations: Guided by the principle of “peace, parity, democracy, and dialogue”
The Taiwan Strait, the Korean Peninsula, and the South China Sea are the three major hot spots for regional conflicts in the Asia-Pacific region. In her speech, President Tsai stated that cross-strait relations had reached a historical turning point. She also reaffirmed that Taiwan would not accept Beijing’s use of “one country, two systems” to downgrade Taiwan and undermine the cross-strait status quo.Moreover, the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to diplomatically and militarily coerce Taiwan have surged in recent years. These threats have further damaged perception of China among the Taiwanese public. According to the latest survey from Focus Taiwan, 73 percent of the Taiwanese respondents disagreed with the statement that “the Chinese government is a friend of Taiwan’s,” suggesting that the intensifying CCP threat.
AUGUST 4, 2020
Since it was written, the world has changed beyond recognition. Millions have been quarantined or sickened by COVID-19. Hundreds of thousands have died. In the United States, pandemic lockdowns were the most astonishing event of 2020 — until the streets filled with protesters demanding the defunding and demilitarization of police departments, the protection of Black lives, and an end to white supremacy.
Between the cruel indifference of Washington’s pandemic response and the monstrous violence used by police, it’s clear that authorities have abdicated their responsibilities to all but the wealthy and the well connected. The work of mutual care has fallen back onto neighborhoods and local communities. Ordinary people have taken it upon themselves to collect medical gear and deliver meals to front-line health-care workers, to provide refuge to protesters and put their bodies between their fellow citizens and state violence.
It’s hard not to wonder how these things are related — if the experience of lockdown hasn’t in some way replenished the human solidarities now driving the protests. Both pandemic and mass protest teach us that daily democratic habits are not luxuries. They’re essential for individual survival and collective resilience.
Reconstructing Democracy:
How Citizens Are Building from the Ground Up should be precisely the book for this moment. it’s a smooth, optimistic manifesto about grassroots democratic renewal. But can it reassure us about democracy’s future? Do we still speak the same language?In about 100 pages, the authors present our contemporary democratic crisis as a twofold challenge. First, they write, democracies are getting worse at solving problems. Elected leaders “often don’t know which policies are adequate” for a complex and interconnected world. This failure is compounded by growing distance between regular people and those who rule them. Leaders “are afraid to take drastic measures that might not be supported by their constituents” (e.g., on climate) while voters no longer grasp how politics works. Our only hope, the authors propose, is to “reconstruct democracy from the bottom up.” The book elevates “experiments [in] revitalizing democracy” from North America and Europe, though what they mean isn’t labor activism, protest, or electoral organizing but rather dialogue-driven community planning and new forms of consultation. Guided by an earnest faith in expertise, rationality, and consensus, Reconstructing Democracy is about how ordinary voters can learn to speak in ways that their rulers can understand. “Only if we enhance and reinvigorate democracy at the base,” they argue, “will the citizenry find clarity about what to ask for, or what future to envision.”There are democratic lessons here, but not the ones imagined by the authors. For although it honors ordinary citizens, this is a book for elites. Reconstructing Democracy is a balm to power, a reassurance that the old tools still apply. Already a relic from our very recent past, it speaks volumes about how the powerful are meeting this crisis: equipped with the same faulty assumptions that led us here to start with. It also teaches us to beware. Not all forms of local democracy are made equal.
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In 2004, the Canadian province of British Columbia established a path breaking Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. Balanced by gender and regional representation, with two seats set aside for Indigenous members, this group of 160 randomly selected citizens spent a year learning about electoral systems, reflecting on shared values, and holding public hearings. In their final report, they recommended the province switch from the infamously uneven first-past-the-post system to a form of proportional representation.
The Canadian model has since traveled. Ireland made headlines by legalizing same-sex marriage in 2015 — and then abortion three years later. Both constitutional amendments, endorsed by referendum, emerged from national citizens’ assemblies. The Irish panels are rebooted regularly with new participants and mandates. The third and current assembly is focused on gender equality. Chosen at random, 99 citizens gather monthly to hear expert presentations, listen to testimonials, propose policy changes, and write ballot questions.
Also in 2015, the western Austrian state of Vorarlberg used the citizen assembly model to defuse tensions related to refugee resettlement and integration. A “wisdom council” of 23 citizens, selected at random, met with the help of expert facilitators to identify conditions for peaceful, prosperous coexistence. Members of the gender-balanced council were aged 18 to 75. One-fifth of them had personal or family experience with migration. Feelings of anger and fear gradually gave way to a new consensus: that newcomers and locals should be in regular contact, refugees should be supported in achieving economic independence, and residents should be given more volunteering opportunities to help the process along.
The co-authors propose that these bodies represent a fourth political power they call the consultative (next to the executive, legislative, and judicial branches). Advisory councils of randomly chosen citizens cannot replace elections, nor should they. But they do seem useful for handling divisive issues, practicing deliberative habits, and tackling challenges that extend beyond the terms of a single parliament or presidency. What’s distinctive and important about assemblies or “future councils” like these is that they give regular people new tools for remaking existing political structures. They bring non-elite voices right into the corridors of power.Some of Reconstructing Democracy’s other case studies are less innovative, although not less valuable. The co-authors tell us about Lawrence Community Works, a Massachusetts “community development corporation” that builds networks among low-income residents so that they can provide services to their own even more vulnerable neighbors. Of course, ordinary people have used the bonds of local community to help one another long before they found the vocabulary (social capital, community assets, etc.) to make it attractive to wealthy donors. And a truly decent democracy would ensure that none of its citizens was too poor to live, rather than asking them to arrange meal-sharing services for themselves.Indeed, it’s a strangely private vision of the public sphere that structures Reconstructing Democracy. A project like Lawrence Community Works is evidently important. But even as it testifies to neighborhood vitality, it also draws the eye to a deeper civic predicament, about which the co-authors have extremely little to say: the privatization of public goods, the marketization of our democratic imaginations, and the shunting of shared obligations onto the shoulders of individuals and local communities. This is nothing to celebrate.What it means for an activity to be democratic is not a question the authors ever explicitly answer. They seem to equate democracy with deliberation or dialogue, but it’s not always clear how the forms of participation they write about are assertions of power by free and equal citizens. The strange result is that certain examples don’t feel that democratic at all.
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Take, for instance, the Market Creek Plaza (MCP) project in San Diego’s Diamond Neighborhoods district, a poor and diverse corner of the city tucked among intersecting freeways. In the 1990s, the Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovation acquired a 20-acre industrial site and asked local residents how they’d like to develop it. The Jacobs team imagined a profitable commercial center that would serve the community’s needs (public space, a supermarket, a movie theater, etc.) and that would be owned, in part, by those who lived nearby.Beginning in 2001, community investors (mostly educated African American women homeowners) were allowed to purchase shares in the complex, up to 20 percent of the entire capitalization. A glowing 2007 report in the Stanford Social Innovation Review called it “the people’s IPO.” Reconstructing Democracy holds up MCP, which opened in 2004, as an achievement “of great human and also political importance,” an example of participatory democracy “which has itself something of the nature of an artistic creation.”A quick Google search reveals a sadder story. Since 2010, MCP has been struggling. Pride in ownership has dissolved into disappointment. The movie theater was never built; just a DVD rental kiosk. Many community-owned businesses have vanished. Replacing the craft store and women’s fitness center are Starbucks, Papa John’s Pizza, Subway, and T-Mobile. Here, “reinvigorating democracy at the base” apparently means acquiring a minority stake in an outdoor mall choked with chain stores and run by philanthropists. The idea that expert-guided deliberation (we could call it facilitated democracy) could revitalize economically distressed zones in Europe and the United States, from eastern Germany’s post-communist coal country to the shuttered towns of the American Midwest. These areas are caught in what the co-authors call the Appalachian predicament. Communities suffering economic decline lose their “capacity to self-organize” or “develop new ideas to move forward.” Lacking the cultural and social capital to respond to a changing world, people get worse at understanding “the mechanisms of change” and, left to their own devices, are unable to “collectively take their fate into their own hands and move on.” They turn against democratic institutions that don’t serve them and reject political systems that they no longer understand.Could facilitated democratic deliberation be the answer? The co-authors call our attention to Wisconsin Rapids, the once-thriving seat of Wood County, Wisconsin. Downsizing hit the community hard in the early 2000s. The paper industry contracted and 40 percent of all local jobs were lost. A local community foundation called In-courage moved to address urgent needs (job retraining, transit benefits for students, etc.) while convening a series of “community conversations” about the region’s future. Using this “participatory planning process,” the foundation worked with locals to decide how best to transform the town’s folded Daily Tribune newspaper building into a community center. It’s telling, though, that the co-authors of Reconstructing Democracy single out for praise not citizens but rather the staff of a Louisiana-based firm called Concordia, hired by In-courage to direct public meetings and build consensus. The co-authors frame this project as part of “a democratic counter blow against the current drift to stagnation and xenophobic exclusion.” They assert that the efforts of facilitation firms like Concordia and foundations like In-courage will have a long-term impact on the democratic future of poorer communities by renewing civic bonds and strengthening political habits. “[W]e usually need to start with the question of how to initiate and foster the process from the outside,” Reconstructing Democracy tells the hopeful story of Wisconsin Rapids using surveys and reports that date mostly from the early 2010s. What happened in 2016? Wood County voted overwhelmingly, by a margin of 20 points, for Donald Trump. (One way of explaining that election is that it was a frustrated repudiation of a technocratic neoliberal presidency guided by many of the same assumptions as this little book.) The community project to re-imagine the local newspaper building, however, is still underway.
¤This idea of an “Appalachian predicament” is more than a little condescending. But it tells us something essential about how the co-authors understand democracy — and how they believe regular citizens should participate. One assumption here is that the crisis of democracy is primarily a crisis of knowledge: citizens don’t understand the world, don’t know what they want, and don’t know how to speak to powerholders about what they desire and value. A second belief appears to be that facts are democracy’s cure-all, that when given accurate information human beings will make rational decisions. “In any case,” they write, with all the procedural optimism of a corporate annual report, “well-crafted solutions to recalcitrant problems will draw support.” The third conviction is that citizens need experts, to acquire that knowledge and learn to communicate well. Finally, Reconstructing Democracy assumes that the ideal democratic condition is consensus, that with enough dialogue or deliberation, we can all basically agree on the things that matter. We’re asked to “imagine the synergy created” if downtrodden regions were able to find consensus “around the best direction to go” instead of voting for xenophobic populists. To put it all differently: If former South Bend, Indiana, mayor and presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg were a book about fixing democracy — not the daring generational crusader who entered the race pledging to pack the Supreme Court, mind you, but the technocratic consultant who departed it while warning about the price tag of universal health care — at any rate, if Pete Buttigieg were a book about fixing democracy, he’d be this one. The point, of course, isn’t that expertise is unnecessary for democracy or that deliberative processes don’t work or that consultations aren’t important. If we can’t reason together in public, the democratic game is lost. And so it’s worth developing new ways to master the habits that allow us to rule ourselves, as free and equal citizens, through deliberation and debate and sometimes even consensus, not coercion or violence. But there’s a metonymic quality to the vision of democratic politics guiding this book, a small part standing in for the larger whole. Dialogue and deliberation are critical for democracy, but the procedures alone don’t keep us democratic. How they relate to power makes all the difference.Here are some things that do not appear in this short book, published in 2020, about “how citizens are building from the ground up.” Electoral movements. Black Lives Matter and protests about criminal justice. Climate protests. Women’s marches. Labor activism. The 2018–’19 red-state teachers’ strikes. Surging interest in local elections. Bernie Sanders. It is odd, frankly, that a book selling local engagement as the antidote for illiberal populism would deliberately omit so many vital examples of citizens asserting their public power.More frustrating, however, is that the co-authors look at forms of democratic action that aren’t dialogue-driven and see only failure. Protests and movements, to their mind, can’t achieve real change because they’re not coordinated with existing institutions. But this misses the forest for the trees. In Wisconsin Rapids, the co-authors proudly tell us, more than 500 people attended 75 local planning meetings. How many more residents of south Wood County have, in recent years, attended rallies for populist presidential candidates, or joined marches, or knocked on doors, or made donations to political candidates? What feels more satisfying right now, and more democratic: talking or acting?The expert vision of facilitated democracy offered here is guided by an abiding faith in reason and procedure. But it has little to say about the world as it actually exists for us as we enter this third decade of the 21st century: profoundly unequal, structured by massive concentrations of political and economic power, relentlessly violent, challenged by dark alternate visions of racial and political community, and, at least in the United States, ruled by bad faith actors no longer all that convinced by democracy. Sometimes, we are learning, you can’t argue your way into a fairer distribution of resources or a more just share of power. Democracies do need a certain level of underlying social agreement. The co-authors aren’t wrong. But any meaningful democratic consensus, about the kinds of political action and ideas we wish to allow and the ones we don’t and who’s included and who’s kept out and where those lines are drawn — none of that just exists in the world. It has to be won.
Since the mid-1960s social scientists have agreed that, of the countries where democracy has emerged, its flourishing has been most improbable in India. Of course, the health of Indian democracy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, incumbent for the past six years, has caused widespread concern. The Swedish V-Dem Institute’s recent Democracy Report, which laments the decline in democracy globally, warns that India “is on the verge of losing its status as a democracy due to the severe shrinking of space for the media, civil society, and the opposition.” Yet the report also suggests that India’s democracy is in decline, not collapse.
That judgment, in part, reflects the long-recognized exceptional nature of India’s democracy, established where political philosophers thought its emergence impossible. At a time when countries around the world are experiencing democratic backsliding—Freedom House’s widely read annual report warned that “2019 was the 14th consecutive year of decline in global freedom”—we may have much to learn from India’s example. But to understand what it tells us about the prospects for democracy in difficult settings we must first understand India’s democratic founding.
This August India celebrates seventy-three years as an independent nation. During these decades of independence, the country has been run democratically (aside from the twenty-one months of the infamous Emergency from 1975 to 1977). With the exception of Costa Rica, no other developing country has enjoyed as long a democratic run since World War II. And in the case of Costa Rica, it is worth bearing in mind that the country is small, with a GDP per capita six times that of India’s (in 2019 Costa Rica’s GDP per capita was $12,238, while India’s was $2,104). Modern democratic theory holds that democracies generally live longer when their citizens have higher levels of income. And in societies with lower incomes, the mortality rate of democracy is often high. For decades now India has defied this conventional scholarly wisdom.
Surprise at India’s democratic success is well documented. Barrington Moore was the first major social scientist to note the uncommon and the unexpected. In 1966 he observed that “as a political species, [India] does belong to the modern world. At the time of Nehru’s death in 1964 political democracy had existed for seventeen years. If imperfect, the democracy was no mere sham.” Half a decade later, in 1971, Robert Dahl—arguably the most influential figure in democratic theory--wrote that India was a “deviant case . . . indeed a polyarchy.” Polyarchy, so used, was Dahl’s conceptual term for democracy. By 1989 Dahl had no doubt that India was “a leading contemporary exception” to democratic theory. Astonishment at India’s success continued to register among political scientists into this century. On the basis of a massive international dataset spanning 1950 to 1990, Adam Przeworski concluded in 2000 that “the odds against democracy in India were extremely high.”
It then comes as a surprise that Madhav Khosla, author of the new book India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy (2020), remarks that the founding of India’s democracy—particularly, its constitutional founding—has been “neglected within the history of political ideas.” Khosla is a political philosopher, a faculty member at both Columbia Law School in New York and Ashoka University in India. His surprising observation speaks to the divide between political philosophy and the more empirically driven social sciences—a divide that renders both fields intellectually poorer.
There should be some degree of intellectual trespassing between political philosophy and the social sciences; without it, neither field can know the other nor heed the other’s explorations. Khosla forgoes any discussion of India’s representation in empirical democratic theory and instead responds to the intellectual terrain of political philosophy. He begins with G. W. F. Hegel, who thought that India was doomed to be a despotic polity and speculated that Indians lived according to age-old caste rules rather than as autonomous agents capable of making conscious choices. In such a society, made up of citizens supposedly devoid of agency, the older order—hierarchical, oppressive, and despotic—would continue ad infinitum, and a modern political order breaking from tradition was virtually impossible.
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Approximately half a century later, John Stuart Mill considered India through the lens of colonialism. Mill distinguished between colonies that were “of similar civilization to the ruling country, capable and ripe for representative government, such as British possessions in America and Australia” and other colonies “like India (that) are . . . at a great distance” from the British civilization. These polities, so different from that of their colonists, only allowed for “a choice of despotisms.” Following this interpretation, British tutelage in the form of colonization was India’s best option. In contrast, the advanced European civilizations and their cousins—Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and, earlier, the United States—could have democratic rule owing to their higher capability for rational conduct.Khosla’s book largely seeks to remedy political philosophy’s failed portrayal of India. In doing so, the book presents an ambitious and novel claim:
The historical conditions of India’s creation should encourage us to see it as the paradigmatic democratic experience of the twentieth century, in much the same way that Tocqueville had seen the United States as the model nineteenth-century democracy.Khosla concentrates on India’s democratic origins, while the aforementioned empirical theories examine democracy’s persistence. The question of democracy’s persistence is not fundamentally a normative one; it has well-known empirical tests. But when an institutional framework is originally established, the normative visions of the founders—about the kind of society they wish to build and the reasons for its building—are on full display, and an analytic space for political philosophy clearly emerges.
This August India celebrates seventy-three years as an independent nation. During these decades of independence, the country has been run democratically (aside from the twenty-one months of the infamous Emergency from 1975 to 1977). With the exception of Costa Rica, no other developing country has enjoyed as long a democratic run since World War II. And in the case of Costa Rica, it is worth bearing in mind that the country is small, with a GDP per capita six times that of India’s (in 2019 Costa Rica’s GDP per capita was $12,238, while India’s was $2,104). Modern democratic theory holds that democracies generally live longer when their citizens have higher levels of income. And in societies with lower incomes, the mortality rate of democracy is often high. For decades now India has defied this conventional scholarly wisdom.Surprise at India’s democratic success is well documented. Barrington Moore was the first major social scientist to note the uncommon and the unexpected. In 1966 he observed that “as a political species, [India] does belong to the modern world. At the time of Nehru’s death in 1964 political democracy had existed for seventeen years. If imperfect, the democracy was no mere sham.” Half a decade later, in 1971, Robert Dahl—arguably the most influential figure in democratic theory--wrote that India was a “deviant case . . . indeed a polyarchy.” Polyarchy, so used, was Dahl’s conceptual term for democracy. By 1989 Dahl had no doubt that India was “a leading contemporary exception” to democratic theory. Astonishment at India’s success continued to register among political scientists into this century. On the basis of a massive international data set spanning 1950 to 1990, Adam Przeworski concluded in 2000 that “the odds against democracy in India were extremely high.”It then comes as a surprise that Madhav Khosla, author of the new book India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy (2020), remarks that the founding of India’s democracy—particularly, its constitutional founding—has been “neglected within the history of political ideas.” Khosla is a political philosopher, a faculty member at both Columbia Law School in New York and Ashoka University in India. His surprising observation speaks to the divide between political philosophy and the more empirically driven social sciences—a divide that renders both fields intellectually poorer.There should be some degree of intellectual trespassing between political philosophy and the social sciences; without it, neither field can know the other nor heed the other’s explorations. Khosla forgoes any discussion of India’s representation in emprical democratic theory and instead responds to the intellectual terrain of political philosophy. He begins with G. W. F. Hegel, who thought that India was doomed to be a despotic polity and speculated that Indians lived according to age-old caste rules rather than as autonomous agents capable of making conscious choices. In such a society, made up of citizens supposedly devoid of agency, the older order—hierarchical, oppressive, and despotic—would continue ad infinitum, and a modern political order breaking from tradition was virtually impossible.Approximately half a century later, John Stuart Mill considered India through the lens of colonialism. Mill distinguished between colonies that were “of similar civilization to the ruling country, capable and ripe for representative government, such as British possessions in America and Australia” and other colonies “like India (that) are . . . at a great distance” from the British civilization. These polities, so different from that of their colonists, only allowed for “a choice of despotisms.” Following this interpretation, British tutelage in the form of colonization was India’s best option. In contrast, the advanced European civilizations and their cousins—Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and, earlier, the United States—could have democratic rule owing to their higher capability for rational conduct.Khosla’s book largely seeks to remedy political philosophy’s failed portrayal of India. In doing so, the book presents an ambitious and novel claim:The historical conditions of India’s creation should encourage us to see it as the paradigmatic democratic experience of the twentieth century, in much the same way that Tocqueville had seen the United States as the model nineteenth-century democracy.
Khosla concentrates on India’s democratic origins, while the aforementioned empirical theories examine democracy’s persistence. The question of democracy’s persistence is not fundamentally a normative one; it has well-known empirical tests. But when an institutional framework is originally established, the normative visions of the founders—about the kind of society they wish to build and the reasons for its building—are on full display, and an analytic space for political philosophy clearly emerges.
So how did India’s founders come to imagine a democratic polity in a setting that conventional wisdom had ruled wholly unfit for democracy? Who, after all, thinks of universal franchise when the literacy rate (at the end of British rule) was a mere 17 percent (Mill thought literacy had to be the foundation of franchise), when more than 60 percent of the country was below the poverty line (Mill was unconvinced that the poor should have the right to vote), and when more than twenty languages were spoken in the country (Mill thought that all citizens must speak the same language if democracy was to function)? At independence in 1947, India possessed each of these disqualifying conditions. But India’s early leaders did not view these as insurmountable obstacles. Instead they decided that voting rights would not be based on literacy, income, property, or gender. Each citizen, however deprived, could be assumed to know their own interests as well as the privileged knew theirs. And, respecting India’s linguistic diversity, citizen education was made multilingual to generate a public sphere diverse in language.
The founders had confidence in these historically unprecedented interventions. At the time of independence, as Khosla strikingly puts it, India’s political leadership held a Hobbesian view of politics, and “at the heart of the Hobbesian project was the independence of politics.” The notion of necessary democratic preconditions—literacy, income, language--implied that “human behavior was not the consequence of politics, but instead its cause … a scenario that Thomas Hobbes would have regarded as placing the cart before the horse.” Rather than understanding social conditions as a creator of politics, India’s democratic project was based on the notion that politics could change adverse social and economic conditions—that “the practice of democracy would create democratic citizens.” If politics was supreme, the improbable could be achieved.
India’s leaders were, of course, not alone in assuming the primacy of politics. In China, Mao Zedong, too, had similar beliefs. For example, the underlying tide of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–76) rose from the belief that politics could create a new man—one unconcerned with greed, unselfish, laboring for the country, and obedient to Maoist diktat. But despite the deployment of the world’s largest Communist party, no such transformation came about in China. Only after Mao’s death was China fundamentally transformed, albeit in the opposite way. A few years following Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping took control and spread the dictum that “to get rich is glorious.”
In other words, following a Hobbesian conception of politics does not guarantee political transformation: the result depends on what ends are being pursued and how such pursuits are shaped through institutional designs. Ideas, practices, and leadership matter. If the architecture of the polity is adequately imagined, put in place with resolve and determination, and practiced with nurturing care, the historically exceptional can be realized.
With this understanding of politics, Khosla fixes his gaze on India’s Constitution—produced in 1949 after three years of intense deliberation by a Constituent Assembly and still intact today. He focuses on three central constitutional elements: the codification of formal rules as opposed to a reliance on tradition, the centralization of political authority as opposed to villages governing themselves as self-sufficient democratic units, and the prioritization of individual representation as opposed to that of communities.
Today India has the longest constitution in the world. This is largely owed to B. R. Ambedkar, the chair of the Constitution Drafting Committee of the Constituent Assembly (1946–49). Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first and longest-serving prime minister (1947–1964), was opposed to extensive codification. However, Ambedkar had other ideas and, in the end, Ambedkar triumphed. As a central figure in Constitution-making, Ambedkar’s intellectual persona and personal history were both imprinted in the democratic imagination that formed the Constitution. Having received two PhDs—one from Columbia and another from the London School of Economics—Ambedkar was the most highly educated leader in India in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet, according to caste background, he was Dalit. This label relegated him to the lowest social tier, deeming him “untouchable” at that time. Though Dalits were not legally bought and sold as commodities as the slaves were in the United States, the institution of “untouchability” deprived Dalits of basic rights and elemental dignities for centuries. The symbolic significance of Ambedkar leading the making of the Constitution is monumental. Imagine W. E. B. Du Bois as a key architect of the U.S. Constitution, were he alive in the 1780s. Ambedkar knew that caste prejudices were deeply entrenched in India, with group and human inequality the system’s governing idea. Brahmins—at the top—enjoyed unencumbered privileges, and Dalits—at the bottom—enjoyed none at all. In both government and socio-economic life, Brahmins and the other upper castes dominated positions of power. Regardless of whether those in power were raving casteists, the hegemonic hold of caste-based beliefs in India made it clear to Ambedkar that an insidious form of caste prejudice was only to be expected.As a result, Ambedkar did not want to give discretion to legislators. Rather, he believed that “constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated.” From his perspective, the Constitution had to be an elaborate document with extensive codification containing not only the larger framework within which the legislature and government would function, but also specific laws. It also had to include the details of pivotal administrative arrangements.In India—a starkly unequal society attempting to institute a democracy—the Constitution needed to function as a kind of political teacher. This could only be accomplished if it went beyond the two standard and contrasting constitutional doctrines: the constraining of executive/legislative power (“legal constitutionalism”), or the enabling of executive/legislative power (“political constitutionalism”). At its deepest level, the Constitution had to nurture a system of “meanings” that all actors in the polity—executives, legislatures, bureaucracies, citizens and even courts—would share. The Constitution had to be a “textbook . . . a pedagogical apparatus,” not solely a “rulebook.”The unprecedented length of the Indian Constitution was thus dictated by the country’s undemocratic social circumstances: the necessary restriction of legislative and judicial discretion in a land of caste prejudice, and the need to create both democratic powerholders and democratic citizens. Ambedkar knew that democracy and its democratic citizens would not organically emerge; they had to be created by design.
The allocation of power between the judicial, legislative, and executive branches turns on the distribution of horizontal authority. But those making the Constitution also had to consider the vertical distribution of power. Which levels of government—central (federal), state, and local—would have what kind of power? Ambedkar’s response to this question was again informed by a distrust of Indian social norms. Much like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mahatma Gandhi had long argued in favor of empowering local governments and encouraging local participation, asking for “village republics.” Ambedkar fundamentally disagreed with this perspective. In his eyes, villages were “the ruination of India . . . a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism.” Nehru concurred, and, together, the two left behind the Gandhian idea of village republics.Untouchability’s lived effects informed Ambedkar’s perspective on village rule. Unlike race, untouchability was not inscribed in the color of one’s skin, the texture of one’s hair, or the shape of one’s nose. It was given away by one’s name and, often, one’s traditional profession. One could easily recognize castes in a village, less easily in the anonymity of a city, and only with great difficulty at the national level. Caste names tended to be regional or local, because India hosted many languages and names were understood in a linguistic register. Brahmins and “untouchables” were found everywhere, but there were no comprehensive caste names in the country. Brahmin names in the South were very different from those in the North, and the same was true of “untouchable” names. Local or regional knowledge was necessary to correctly identify caste.Though Khosla largely ignores this anthropological reality, his conceptualization of caste allows him to explain the vertical distribution of power in India. To counter the impact of caste and to foster the idea of uniform citizenship and equal rights, Ambedkar thought it necessary to concentrate power at the federal center with less authority given to the states. This would launch a top-down battle against the hierarchical, caste-based, local power structures. He saw no other way to defeat a deep-rooted ascriptive caste hierarchy. This approach did not stray far from that the United States took during Reconstruction (1865–77). Political leaders and citizens all knew that race relations in the South would never reconstitute themselves and federal oversight and push were necessary. The project of racial equality could not be left to the discretion of the southern states.Substituting caste for race, Ambedkar’s mantra pushed for a stronger Delhi and weaker states. This approach had an interesting manifestation for local governments. Ambedkar knew that political power in villages would likely mirror social power—oppressing Dalits. Accordingly, he persuaded the Constitution drafters to not legally require elections for the third tier of government. It was not until 1992, decades later, that two constitutional amendments were passed by parliament, mandating elections for local government. Prior to these amendments, India had only two tiers of elected government: central and state.This came to be known as centralized parliamentary federalism. It received huge support in the Constituent Assembly, but not for the reasons that Ambedkar advanced. Many members worried that, in the absence of a strong national government, some regions might secede. The fact that Muslim-majority states had broken away and formed Pakistan only deepened this anxiety. Indeed, a strong central government was integral to the success of national integration; but, to Ambedkar and Nehru, it was also necessary to shatter the power of tradition.
In writing the Constitution, the final matter to address was political representation: would India be conceptualized as a society composed of communities or individuals? The British were convinced that Indians could not reason as individuals. Rather, they believed that ascriptive communities of religion and caste were so preponderant that they preempted individual agency. Accordingly, the British formed separate electorates at the local and state levels. In separate Muslim electorates, only eligible Muslims could vote and run for office—non-Muslim participation was forbidden in Muslim constituencies.India’s freedom fighters believed that this communal structure of British Indian polity had prevented the emergence of a common political arena, one that could have joined the Hindus and Muslims—India’s two largest religious communities—together as a coherent nation. If anything, they thought the colonial privileging of a group-based polity created the Muslim nation of Pakistan. Separate electorates promoted separatism, not integration.Upon independence India moved to privilege the political representation of individuals, rather than pre-determined group identities. It did away with religion-based electorates. Instead “a model of citizenship centered on the political participation of individuals…would allow the categories of majority and minority to be . . . defined and redefined within the fluid domain of politics.” Individuals needed to form judgements autonomous from their birth-based groups, and this required new rules of representation. Ambedkar, though a proponent of individual autonomy, also favored group-based representation for specific categories. In particular he believed that electoral constituencies should be reserved for Dalits and Adivasis (the tribals) in accordance with their demographic proportions. Because Dalits comprised 16 percent of the national population and Adivasis 6.5 percent, the Constitution reserved 22.5 percent of parliamentary constituencies for these two groups. Each state assembly was also required to make reservations based on the demographic share of these two communities in their state populations.But the reserved constituencies differed from the despised separate electorates. The key difference lay in the conceptualization of the voting public. Like separate electorates, only Dalits and Adivasis could run for office in the reserved constituencies, but all communities, unlike separate electorates, could vote in the elections. In other words, Dalit politicians could not win these seats by appealing only to Dalits. They needed the support of the larger community to win office. Herein lay a significant tension: How could one allow group reservation, however different from separate electorates, if individuals were to be the unit of representation? If religion was to be dropped as a basis for electoral constituencies, why were the lowest castes worthy of special group representation? Khosla’s resolution to this puzzle is noteworthy. He extracts from Ambedkar’s argument a threshold-based reasoning: “Caste based domination was so entrenched that the problem could not be entirely solved by suffrage. . . . the path to individualization of identity lay in permitting special treatment towards members of groups that had remained constrained.” In other words, “for individual liberty to be realized, the stubborn practice of superior groups needed to end.”Groups such as Dalits that had faced centuries of social repression needed state support. Only after a certain threshold had been crossed and some semblance of equality had been reached could one rely on individual agency to climb the economic and social ladder. Muslims did not need the same kind of support, as they were not part of the Hindu caste system and therefore not repressed by the force of tradition. Though many Muslims were indeed poor, Muslim princes and aristocrats had ruled large parts of India for several centuries. Dalits, entirely devoid of such privileges and never part of the ruling class, were comprehensively subaltern. After centuries of being rendered destitute, Dalits required affirmative action.Though empirical theories have long recognized the exceptional nature of India’s democracy, political philosophy has largely ignored the country’s remarkable democratic founding. By grounding Indian constitutional debates in political philosophy, Khosla has given an entirely novel perspective to India’s democratic origins. Perhaps now political philosophers will have reason to more intimately engage with India’s constitutional ideas—ideas addressing codification, the conceptualization of separation of powers, and balancing individual and group representation—critical areas of thought for any modern polity and constitution.India’s constitutional history also presents lessons about creating democracy in unlikely settings, highlighting that progressive politics and careful institutional engineering can be used to sustain democracy. In a society that is deeply unequal, democracy will have a great deal of difficulty unless the architecture of the polity devises means to address its inequalities. Clearly the value of such lessons has not yet disappeared.