Democracy beyond Elections: Citizen Claim-Making in Rural India
Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner
Boston College
Date:听February 13, 2014
Abstract
How do citizens of the world鈥檚 largest democracy make claims on the state? Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner will explore the processes through which rural citizens of India seek to secure public services from the state. Her research helps shed light on the understanding of distributive politics (who gets what from the state) and democratic practice (who participates and how). Drawing on fieldwork in the state of Rajasthan, she documents various claim-making practices. Socioeconomic status or caste category can not alone explain why different groups differ in how they make claims on the state. Kruks-Wisner argues, rather, that claim-making practice is shaped by the degree to which a person is exposed to people and settings across social and spatial cleavages. Expanded social and economic opportunities go together with the expanded knowledge necessary for citizen-state engagement, increasing both the likelihood and breadth of claim-making practice.
Speaker Bio
Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner听is an assistant professor of political science at Boston College. Her research focuses on issues of political participation, local governance, and social welfare in developing countries, with an emphasis on South Asian and Indian politics. Her current book manuscript,听Claiming the State: Citizens鈥� Mobility & Demand for Public Services in Rural India,听asks whether and how marginalized citizens of the world鈥檚 largest democracy make claims on the state for essential public services. She earned her doctorate in Political Science and a Masters in International Development Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a B.A. in Sociology and Anthropology from Swarthmore College. Prior to joining 51茶馆, she was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies at Harvard University.
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Event Photos
51茶馆 Political Science professor Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner at the Boisi Center
Professor Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner and Erik Owens. (Photos by MTS photography)
Event Recap
On a snowy February day, 51茶馆 political science professor Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner spoke about democracy in rural India to an engaged audience of students, professors, and community members at the Boisi Center. Kruks-Wisner focused her discussion on the fieldwork she had conducted in Rajasthan, India, where she performed 400 qualitative interviews and 2,210 surveys over a period of eighteen months. Through this research, she sought to ascertain how rural citizens feel about the state and how they make claims for basic public services like water and electricity.
Kruks-Wisner found that three-fourths of those interviewed and surveyed make claims, a figure that far surpassed what democratic theory predicts. Individuals make these claims through a plethora of avenues, including Gram Panchayat (local government), parties, bureaucracy, village associations, caste associations, NGOs, and prominent individuals. She found no statistical difference between classes or castes in the incidence of claim-making, but did find that gender was significant, as men are more likely to make claims than women and wealthy women are less likely to make claims than poor women.
To account for her findings, Kruks-Wisner theorized that exposure beyond one鈥檚 immediate community will broaden one鈥檚 access to avenues for claim-making, ability to make effective claims, and expectations of how a claim will be received. She determined that socio-spatial exposure is a key driver of claim-making incidence and repertoire. At the conclusion of her presentation, Kruks-Wisner posed a question for the audience to contemplate: is this high incidence of claim-making indicative of active citizens in a robust democracy or of active citizens facing a democratic deficit?
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Further Reading
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