Who has voice in a deliberative democracy? Evidence from transcripts of village parliaments in south India

Ban, Radu; Jha, Saumitra; Rao, Vijayendra

doi:10.1016/j.jdeveco.2012.05.005

Cited by 42 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 26 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Moreover, while o cials o en read a set of announcements at the beginning of meetings, these statements are generally in response to issues raised by citizens, not e orts to direct conversation. is is consistent with previous work (Ban et al, 2012), which nds that India's gram sabhas are more than mere "talking shops, " and that conversation within the sabhas actually re ects median household preferences within the village.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Deliberative Inequality: A Text-As-Data Study Of Tamil Nadu's Village Assemblies

Parthasarathy¹,

Rao²,

Palaniswamy³

2017

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The resurgence of deliberative institutions in the developing world has prompted a renewed interest in the dynamics of citizen engagement. Using text-as-data methods on an original corpus of village assembly transcripts from rural Tamil Nadu, India, this paper opens the "black box" of deliberation to examine the gendered and status-based patterns of influence. Drawing on normative theories of deliberation, this analysis identifies a set of clear empirical standards for "good" deliberation, based on an individual's ability both to speak and be heard, and uses natural language processing methods to generate these measures. The study first shows that these assemblies are not mere "talking shop" for state officials to bluster and read banal announcements, but rather, provide opportunities for citizens to challenge their elected officials, demand transparency, and provide information about authentic local development needs. Second, the study finds that across multiple measures of deliberative influence, women are at a disadvantage relative to men; women are less likely to speak, set the agenda, and receive a relevant response from state officials. Finally, the paper shows that although quotas for women on village councils have little impact on the likelihood that they speak, they do improve the likelihood that female citizens are heard.

show abstract

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Deliberative Inequality: A Text-As-Data Study Of Tamil Nadu's Village Assemblies

Parthasarathy¹,

Rao²,

Palaniswamy³

2017

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…While early conversations about public deliberation were of a conceptual or deductive nature, debate in the last 10 years has increasingly drawn on empirical studies (Elstub, ). Both proponents (Ban, Jha, & Rao, ; Fishkin, He, Luskin, & Shiu, ; Niemeyer, ; Yetano, Royo, & Acerete, ) and opponents (Mutz, ; Ryfe, ; Schkade, Sunstein, & Hastie, ) sought to strengthen their argument with data collected through surveys, case studies, and experiments. Yet, the conclusion most often drawn from empirical research is that it all depends.…”

Section: Deliberative Processes and Deliberative Democracymentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the Contributions of Cultural Theory for Improving Public Deliberation about Complex Policy Problems

Ney¹,

Verweij²

2014

Policy Studies Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this article, we argue that the Cultural Theory pioneered by Mary Douglas can help resolve two pressing issues in the study and practice of public deliberation. The first of these issues concerns how best to structure deliberative processes (or "minipublics") that have increasingly been implemented around the world. We use Cultural Theory's analysis of social relations to derive a hypothesis concerning the ideal design of minipublics, and outline research strategies to test the hypothesis. The second issue pertains to scaling out minipublics. We describe John Dryzek's and Simon Niemeyer's influential proposal for deploying discourses to make public deliberation more representative, and discuss the limits of their proposal. Furthermore, we show how Cultural Theory's analysis of people's cultural biases (i.e., collectively shared perceptions, beliefs and norms) may help overcome these limits and how the design of minipublics can generate trust in and legitimacy of public deliberation.

show abstract

“…On average, the sampled gram sabhas were attended by approximately eighty-three people, and one third of the attendees were women. Thirty-seven percent of attendees were 'schedule caste' (a majority of the attendees were from 'other backward castes', which are the dominant castes in South India) (Besley, Pande and Rao 2005;Ban, Jha, and Rao 2012).…”

Section: Context: 'Gram Sabha' and 'Shgs' In South Indiamentioning

confidence: 99%

Oral Democracy and Women's Oratory Competency in Indian Village Assemblies: A Qualitative Analysis

Sanyal¹,

Rao²,

Prabhakar³

2015

Policy Research Working Papers

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In democracies, innovative political institutions have opened up scope for direct public participation often in the form of talk: citizens talking to the state and mutual talk among citizens on matters concerning community development. A prominent example is the Indian gram sabha, or village assembly, which occurs in a highly stratified context. This paper undertakes a talk-centered analysis of the gram sabha with a focus on examining the oral participation of women in general and women affiliated with microcredit self-help groups who have access to an associational life. The qualitative analysis of 255 gram sabha transcripts from four South Indian states finds that women associated with microcredit self-help groups employ a wider variety of narrative styles and utilize a more multilayered structure to convey their messages compared with all women taken together. Thus, the difference is not so much in the numerical instances of talking or in the types of issues raised, but rather in the quality of participation. The paper makes an important theoretical contribution by proposing the concept of oral democracy as an alternative to deliberative democracy, and urges an analytical focus on the oral or oratory competency of subordinated groups as they participate in these important institutions.

show abstract

Who has voice in a deliberative democracy? Evidence from transcripts of village parliaments in south India

Cited by 42 publications

References 26 publications

Deliberative Inequality: A Text-As-Data Study Of Tamil Nadu's Village Assemblies

Deliberative Inequality: A Text-As-Data Study Of Tamil Nadu's Village Assemblies

Exploring the Contributions of Cultural Theory for Improving Public Deliberation about Complex Policy Problems

Oral Democracy and Women's Oratory Competency in Indian Village Assemblies: A Qualitative Analysis

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About