Research on the welfare state often examines social policies in democratic regimes separately from social policies in authoritarian regimes. Two bodies of research have emerged, as the extant literature views these political systems as sufficiently distinct to merit the division of analysis. In this article, we challenge the existing approach by showing that differing regime types can indeed be analysed together. By looking for patterns of similarities, rather than differences, we bring the two literatures into conversation and show how a common factor can trigger social policy expansion in both regime types. Using case studies of India and China, the two most populous democratic and authoritarian regimes, this article illustrates how the expansion of policies that serve low-income groups – India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (NREGA) and China’s Minimum Livelihood Guarantee Scheme (dibao) – were both prompted by social mobilisation.
Political science and economics have dominated the study of corruption. Recently, anthropologists have questioned traditional definitions of corruption and have conducted a deeper inquiry into the interplay of cultural dynamics and corruption. However, despite the existence of two strands in anthropology—interpretive and political economy—anthropological contributions to the study of corruption have come primarily from interpretive anthropology. Anthropologists studying corruption have focused on narratives and on understanding corruption’s embeddedness in cultural logics. Ethnography, however, has also revealed the importance of fixed price in many instances of corruption. This paper argues that fixed price is an indicator of the systematization of corruption. Consequently, greater attention needs to be paid to how corruption is also embedded in political economy.
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