Poverty, Participation, and Democracy: A Global Perspective, Anirudh Krishna, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 208 pp., $80 cloth, $24 paper.

This volume—the outcome of a group project at Duke University, headed by the political scientist and former development planner Anirudh Krishna—aims to upend the traditional proposition that economic inequality neatly explains patterns of political participation in the developing world, where, we have often been told, “Poor people make poor democrats” (p. 3). The group's findings suggest that it is the lack of education, and not wealth, that stands among the most significant barriers to democratic participation.

This empirically rich volume offers several powerful normative stories. One is that the enemy of democratic development is not the poor themselves—who, so runs the conventional wisdom, do not have the time to develop an interest in democracy, and may even be vulnerable to authoritarian appeals—but rather their general inability, under current circumstances, to learn how to become “discerning consumers” of political opportunities (p. 149). The project's data strongly suggest that the poor often value democracy no less than their richer compatriots. “Those who wish to promote democracy,” writes Krishna (with John Booth) in a concluding compilation of prescriptions for researchers and policy-makers, “would wisely invest in promoting education” (Ibid.).

Distinct and distinguished in their regional diversity, three empirical chapters draw on survey data from 35, 000 respondents in twenty-four countries in, respectively, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. The three studies are followed by an intervention by the eminent scholar of democracy, development, and income distribution Adam Przeworski, where he finesses their discussion of the parity between rich and poor in terms of political sensibilities and participation with a cautionary argument about the enduring relevance of economic inequality in explaining (and thus avoiding) democratic breakdown. “Democracy is the best hope that poor people have for improving their lives,” Przeworski concludes. “If democracy is fragile in some countries, it is because this hope has not been fulfilled” (p. 146).