This article follows a municipal councillor in Ahmedabad (Gujarat, India) on his daily routine in order to explore the various ways in which politicians in India operate as mediators between state institutions and citizens. Political mediation is deeply entrenched in the procedures, policies and habits that guide the daily functioning of Gujarat's state institutions. This article argues that this institutionalization of political mediation is the outcome of a dialectic between the limited capacity of the state to provide public services and the strategies that local politicians employ to win elections.
What kind of economic development curtails clientelistic politics? Most of the
literature addressing this relationship focuses narrowly on vote buying,
resulting in theories that emphasize the importance of declining poverty rates
and a growing middle class. This article employs a combination of ethnographic
fieldwork and an expert survey to engage in a first-ever, more comprehensive
comparative study of within-country variation of clientelistic politics. I find
a pattern that poorly matches these dominant theories: Clientelism is perceived
to be less intense in rural, poverty-prone Java, while scores are high in
relatively wealthy yet state-dependent provincial capitals. On the basis of
these findings, I develop an alternative perspective on the relationship between
economic development and clientelism. Emphasizing the importance of societal
constraints, I argue that the concentration of control over economic activities
fosters clientelism because it stifles the public sphere and inhibits effective
scrutiny and disciplining of politico-business elites.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.