In her book, Anjali Thomas Bohlken shifts the focus of elite-led theories of democratization from national-level to local-level institutions, and in the process, proposes a novel explanation for why national political elites initiate democratic reforms at the local level. This shift is an important innovation. Most academic literature on democratization focuses on national institutions, as do international actors seeking to promote democracy abroad. Yet whether or not local institutions are democratic can have a significant impact on the lives of citizens. Localities can affect a diverse set of political and socioeconomic issues, including development, education, justice, security, and so forth. Moreover, local democracy does not necessarily coincide with national-level democracy. That is, not all countries with democratic institutions at the national level have democratic institutions at the local level (or in every locale), and vice versa.
According to Bohlken, local-level democracy originates, ironically, from the need of national-level elites to maintain power. The reasons, she proposes, that national-level elites initiate democratic reforms at the local level are distinct from the reasons why they adopt them at the national level. National-level elites, she hypothesizes, adopt democratic reforms at the local level in order to control local intermediaries, who mobilize votes, target patronage, and serve as conduits of information for national-level elites, when political parties are unable to effectively monitor and discipline local intermediaries. In this context, local elections help national elites accomplish both by identifying those intermediaries most effective at serving their constituencies based on their electoral success.
Unable to directly observe the motivations of politicians, Bohlken thoroughly tests the observable implications of her argument using a mixed-methods approach. The two main implications that she analyzes concern the relationship between elected local institutions and the structure of political parties, and the relationship between the electoral success of state-level elites and their discretion over targeted resources. In terms of the former, Bohlken hypothesizes that national-level elites have a greater need for local intermediaries when intraparty competition is high and chief executives face competition for control over their parties’ key organizational networks. In regards to the latter, she hypothesizes that local elites are more likely to mobilize votes for national- and state-level elites when the latter have significant discretion over resources that can be targeted toward local governments.
Bohlken’s empirical analysis of these relationships is very rich. Within India, her primary case, the author analyzes these relationships both across states and over time. Her qualitative analysis draws on a diverse set of sources, including newspapers and parliamentary documents, to establish an interesting and complex picture of local-level reforms and party structures in India. Bohlken does not limit her analysis to India, however. To evaluate the generalizability of her claims, Bohlken analyzes both relationships in 68 developing countries around the world between 1945 and 2010. For her cross-national quantitative analyses and her India-specific ones, she also takes on the formidable challenge of constructing original measures of intraparty competition and local democracy. In these analyses, Bohlken finds results generally consistent with her arguments.
While there is much to appreciate in Democratization from Above, the significance of the author’s findings for understanding local democracy is, unfortunately, limited by how she conceptualizes and measures local democracy. Bohlken defines local democratization as actions that “establish, or increase, the ability of citizens to select members of local governments through popular elections or to hold them accountable” (p. 5; emphasis added). The latter, she adds, includes reforms to existing elected governments to ensure the regularity of elections, to decrease the role of higher-level governments in choosing lower-level government appointees, and to introduce participatory budgeting, or other similar procedures, at the local level.
Democracy, however, requires more than just popular elections. The term “popular” only refers to the fact that the citizenry elects their political officials. It does not mean that these elections are open and competitive, which is a requirement of even the most spartan definitions of democracy. Bohlken astutely anticipates this criticism, remarking that “by most definitions, the presence of elected local government [sic] is a minimal requirement for the presence of local democracy” (p. 6). While she is no doubt right that elections are a necessary component of democracy, they are still not a sufficient one.
Not distinguishing between elections that are open and competitive and those that are not also conflates decentralization with democratization. Decentralization is commonly viewed as the dispersion of administrative, political, and/or fiscal decision-making authority among multiple, territorially based, and hierarchically organized levels of government. Accordingly, states can be decentralized if local-level institutions are elected, even if the elections are not open and competitive, but states cannot be described as locally democratic unless local elections are open and competitive.
The latter aspects of Bohlken’s definition regarding accountability also conflate democracy with decentralization. Although the regularity of elections is an important aspect of accountability, the role of higher-level governments in selecting local government appointees, and the presence of participatory budgeting procedures at lower-level governments, are better indicators of local-level government autonomy and, thus, of decentralization than of accountability. Ultimately, however, the issue of accountability versus autonomy is inconsequential to the empirical analysis since Bohlken’s measures of local democracy are based only on whether or not local-level institutions are elected.
The distinction between elections and open and competitive elections is also important for the author’s theoretical argument. For national-level elites to need local intermediaries for the purposes that she describes, national elections would have to be democratic. Local intermediaries, according to Bohlken, mobilize votes, target patronage, and serve as conduits of information for national-level elites. National elites would only need local intermediaries to mobilize votes for them if national elections were at least partially open and competitive. National elections would not have to be democratic for national elites to target patronage to their supporters, or for local intermediaries to serve as conduits of information for national-level elites, depending on the information provided and the means by which the information is collected (Lust-Okar 2006; Blaydes 2010).
At the same time, for local intermediaries to effectively fulfill the functions that Bohlken ascribes to them, local elections would have to be undemocratic. If local elections are not democratic, whether local intermediaries win elections provides limited information to national elites about the extent to which local intermediaries serve their constituencies. However, having open and competitive local elections limits the ability of national-level elites to discipline local intermediaries by giving citizens the power to determine whether local elites stay in office or not, and by splitting the local intermediaries’ loyalty between national elites and their local constituents.
Moreover, if local elections are open and competitive, I would conjecture that the risk of losing the elections for national-level elites would outweigh the benefits derived from local intermediaries. I would further conjecture that local intermediaries would be most likely to lose local elections when national elites are most in need of them—that is, when national elites do not have access to effective party networks to monitor and discipline local intermediaries. These are only conjectures, though. Additional analyses would be needed to test my claims.
Despite these and other theoretical and empirical issues, Democratization from Above is important because it represents and issues a clarion call for deep micro-level thinking about subnational-level processes of democratization. Such analyses can also provide valuable insights into other significant issues, such as the relationship between decentralization and democratization at the local level, and the relationship between democratization at the national level and the local level. The book also serves as a critical reminder, ironically, that democracy can, and often does, arise from undemocratic intentions.
