Making Redistributive Direct Democracy Matter

Abstract

Existing sociological theories highlight five explanations of development, which focus on leftist political parties in state power, women’s office-holding, state capacity, social capital and resource mobilization, and state expenditure. Increasingly, however, the execution of development schemes by large democratic states of the global South relies on citizen participation in what I define as Redistributive Direct Democracy (RDD). RDD institutions devolve formal authorities and create political opportunities for participants to themselves allocate and claim development benefits. Within India’s approximately two million local governments, a permanent RDD institution called the gram sabha offers all participants the formal, constitutional authority to directly select recipients of state benefits such as public housing and latrines. Drawing on fixed-effects, multivariate OLS analyses of data collected in a stratified random sample of 72 Indian local governments with active gram sabhas, I argue for a sixth, complementary explanation of development in democracies of the global South: women’s participation in RDD. My analysis demonstrates strongly positive and highly significant effects of women’s gram sabha participation on local development and a contrasting absence of support for longstanding explanations. These findings suggest that women’s participation in RDD can make these new and popular, but poorly understood institutions matter for development outcomes.