Abstract
This article argues that democratic deepening is shaped by shifting civil society-state relations that can only be understood by disaggregating democratic deepening into its component parts of participation, representation, and stateness. This frame is used to explore the divergent democratic trajectories of Brazil, India, and South Africa. Through the examples of local government transformation and social movement mobilization, I argue that a “project” civil society in Brazil has deepened democracy and transformed the state. In contrast, in South Africa and India civil society is increasingly being subordinated to political society. In South Africa, an active civil society has largely been sidelined as a politically consequential actor (containerization) and in India much of civil society has been fragmented and instrumentalized (involution).
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The removal of PT (Workers’ Party) and Bolsonaro’s victory is a clear reversal addressed in the conclusion, but should not obscure the very real realignments of social and political power that occurred in the period under review.
Out of Kadivar’s data set of eighty countries that became democratic after 1960, there is not a single case of democratic breakdown (out of a total of forty-eight) in a country that had a period of mobilization for democracy of more than five years. Kadivar puts Brazil at six years of popular mobilization, and this group includes Argentina (7), Bolivia (6), Chile (6), Poland (6), and South Africa (13). There are only three countries with two or more years of popular mobilization that suffered breakdowns: Bangladesh (3), Haiti (4), and Russia (5).
For an extended and highly innovative argument about the many ways in which civil society can “infiltrate” the state, see Klein and Lee (2019).
Distinguishing political from civil society, Cohen and Arato write that “The political role of civil society in turn is not directly related to the control of conquest of power but to the generation of influence through the life of democratic associations and unconstrained discussion in the cultural public sphere” (Cohen and Arato 1992, pp. ix-x).
In his first inaugural address (January 1, 1995), the sociologist-turned-president Fernando Henrique Cardoso noted that “Brazil is not poor: it is unequal.” In his autobiography Cardoso predictably paints a rosy picture of democratic and economic progress during his two administrations, but throughout keeps returning to the problem of inequality.
The 1990s has been described as the decade of “council democracy.” By one estimate there were at least eighty-four national councils at this time, and thousands of local level councils, including 1167 councils in Sao Paulo state alone (Alvarez 1997, p. 27).
Interviews with Cardoso in 2008 and 2009.
The exception here is Kerala, where CITU (the CPM-affiliated labor federation) has made significant inroads into the informal sector (Heller 1999). In a very different pattern, new non-aligned movements have emerged in the informal sector, most notably SEWA (Self-employed Women’s Association) and small but significant organizing efforts in the construction and bidi industries (Agarwala 2013).
Most notably the cultural organization the Vishva Hindu Parivad (VHP) has nurtured and propagated the ideology of Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) and the paramilitary Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has provided training and social support to Hindu youth and a pipeline of cadres to the BJP, including Modi himself.
As political theorist and public intellectual Pratap Bhanu Mehta surmises, India’s identity politics are increasing “creating a culture where each life is reduced to, and completely foretold in, its identity.” Indian Express, Op-ed, Feburary 24, 2019.
During the campaign Modi himself strategically downplayed his traditional communal rhetoric, but at the level of parliamentary constituencies the BJP actively played on communal divisions. Most remarkably, of the 282 BJP candidates elected to parliament in 2014, not one was a Muslim, marking the first time in India’s democratic history that Muslims have no representation in the ruling party. During Modi’s government, there has also been a marked uptick in nationalist discourse, including use of colonial-era sedition laws to silence critics and the use of national security laws to detain human rights activists.
“The assassination surge on those fighting corruption” Mail and Guardian, October 3, 2014. Accessed July 1, 2017. https://mg.co.za/article/2014-10-03-the-assassination-surge-on-those-fighting-corruption
In October 2012 the government released a report that claimed that protest activity had increased dramatically that year and that 80% of the protests were violent (Hart 2014, p. 49).
The centrist parties that most observers assumed would benefit most from Rouseff’s removal and Lula’s imprisonment were in fact decimated in the election. Bolsonaro’s party was itself entirely new and has no coherence other than opportunistic ties to Bolsonaro and his family. The only major traditional party that secured a significant vote share was the PT, the only Brazilian party with roots in organized civil society.
References
Agarwala, R. (2013). Informal labor, formal politics, and dignified discontent in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Alexander, J. (2006). The civil sphere. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Alvarez, S. E. (1997). "Reweaving the fabric of collective action: Social movements and challenges to ‘actually existing democracy" in Brazil." Pp. 83–117 in Between resistance and revolution: Cultural politics and social protest, edited by R.G. Fox, and O. Starn. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Atkinson, Doreen. 2007."Taking to the Streets: Has Developmental Local Government Failed in South Africa?" Pp. 53–77 in State of the Nation: South Africa 2007, edited by S. Buhlungu, J. Daniel, R. Southall, and J. Lutchman. Cape Town: Human Social Science Research Council.
Avritzer, L. (2002). Democracy and the public space in Latin America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Baiocchi, G. (2006)."Inequality and innovation: Decentralization as an opportunity structure in Brazil." pp. 53–80 in Decentralization and local governance in developing countries, edited by P. Bardhan, and D. Mookherjee. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Baiocchi, G., Heller, P., & Silva, M. K. (2011). Bootstrapping democracy: Transforming local governance and civil society in Brazil. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Ballard, R., Habib, A., & Valodia, I. (eds.). (2006). Voices of protest: Social movements in post-apartheid South Africa. Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.
Bardhan, P. (1999)."The state against society: The great divide in Indian social science discourse." pp. 184–195 in Nationalism, democracy and development, edited by S. Bose and A. Jalal. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Beall, J., Crankshaw, O., & Parnell, S. (2002). Uniting a Divided City: Governance and social exclusion in Johannesburg. London: Earthscan.
Berman, S. (1997). Civil society and the collapse of the Weimar Republic. World Politics, 49, 401–429.
Bertorelli, E., Heller, P., Swaminathan, S., & Varshney, A. (2017). Does citizenship abate class? Evidence and reflections from a south Indian City. Economic and Political Weekly, 52(32), August 12.
Braga, R., & Purdy, S. (2019). A precarious hegemony: Neo-liberalism, social struggles, and the end of Lulismo in Brazil. Globalizations, 16(2), 201–215.
Burawoy, M. (2003). For a sociological Marxism: The complementary convergence of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi. Politics and Society, 31, 193–261.
Caldeira, T., & Holston, J. (2005)."State and urban space in Brazil: From modernist planning to democratic intervention." pp. 393–416 in Global Anthropology: Technology, governmentality, ethics, edited by A. Ong, and S.J. Collier. London: Blackwell.
Cardoso, F. H. & Faletto, E. 1979. Development and dependency in Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Castells, M. (2003). The Power of identity. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Chandra, K. (2000). The transformation of ethnic politics in India: The decline of congress and the rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party in Hoshiarpur. Journal of Asian Studies, 59(1), 26–61.
Chatterjee, P. (2004). The politics of the governed: Reflections on popular politics in most of the world. New York: Columbia University Press.
Chibber, V. (2005). From Class Compromise to Class Accommodation: Labor's Incorporation into the Indian Political Economy. Pp. 32–61 in Social Movements in India: Poverty, Power and Politics, edited by R. Ray, and M. Katzenstein. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc.
Chipkin, I. (2007). Do South Africans exist? Nationalism, democracy and the identity of 'the people. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Cohen, J. L. (2007). Civil Society and Globalization: Rethinking the Categories. In L. Trägårdh (Ed.), State and Civil Society in Norther Europe: the Swedish Model Reconsidered (pp. 37–66). New York: Berghahn Books
Cohen, J. L., & Arato, A. (1992). Civil society and political theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Collier, D., & Levitsky, S. (1997). Democracy with adjectives: Conceptual innovation in comparative research. World Politics, 49(3), 430–451.
Corbridge, S., & Harriss, J. (2000). Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu nationalism and popular democracy. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Corbridge, S., Williams, G., Srivastava, M., & Véron, R. (2005). Seeing the state: Governance and governmentality in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Coslovsky, S. V. (2014). Flying under the radar? The state and the enforcement of labour laws in Brazil. Oxford Development Studies, 42(2), 190–216.
Dagnino, E. (1998). "Culture, Citizenship, and Democracy: Changing Discourses and Practices of the Latin American Left." Pp. 33–63 in Cultures of politics, politics of cultures: Re-Visioning Latin American social movements, edited by S.E. Alvarez, E. Dagnino, and A. Escobar. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Dagnino, E. (2007). Citizenship: A perverse confluence. Development and Practice, 17(4–5), 549–556.
De Ferranti, D., G. E. P., Ferreira, F. H., & Walton, M. (2004). Inequality in Latin America: Breaking with history. Washington, DC: The World Bank.
Desai, A., & Pithouse, R. (2004). “But We Were Thousands”: Dispossession, Resistance, Repossession and Repression in Mandela Park. Journal of African and Asian Studies, 39(4), 239–296.
van Donk, M., Swilling, M., Pieterse, E., & Parnell, S. (2008). Consolidating developmental local government: Lessons from the South African experience. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press.
dos Santos, W. G. (1979). Cidadania e justiça: A política social na ordem Brasileira. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Campus.
Emirbayer, M., & Sheller, M. (1999). Publics in history. Theory and Society, 28(1), 145–197.
Esping-Andersen, G. (1990). The three worlds of welfare capitalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Evans, Peter. (2018). “Brazil: An unfolding tragedy,” Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies. Fall. https://clas.berkeley.edu/node/4092Accessed 24 March 2019
Evans, P., & Heller, P. (2015). Human development, state transformation and the politics of the developmental state. In The Oxford handbook of transformations of the state (pp. 671–701) edited by S. Leibfried, F. Nullmeier, E. Huber, M. Lange, J. Levy, & J. Stephens. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fox, J. (1994). The difficult transition from Clientalism to citizenship. World Politics, 46(2), 151–184.
Fraser, N. (1992). “Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy.” Pp. 109–143 in Habermas and the public sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Friedman, E. J., & Hochstetler, K. (2002). Assessing the third transition in Latin American democratization: Representational regimes and civil Society in Argentina and Brazil. Comparative Politics, 35(1), 21.
Galvao, A. (2014). The Brazilian labor movements under PT governments. Latin American Perspectives, 41(5), 184–199.
Gandhi, A., & Walton, M. (2012). Where do India's billionaires get their wealth? Economic and Political Weekly (pp. 10–14).
Gasiorowski, M. J., & Power, T. J. (1998). The structural determinants of democratic consolidation: Evidence from the third world. Comparative Political Studies, 31(6), 740–771.
Gethin, A. & Morgan, M. (2018). “Brazil Divided: Hindsights on the Growing Politicisation of Inequality.” World Inequality Lab Issue Brief 2018/3. Retrieved from https://wid.world/document/divided-brazil-hindsights-on-the-growing-politicization-of-inequality-wid-world-issue-brief-2018-3/Accessed 24 March 2019
Gibson, C. L. (2018). Movement-Driven development: The politics of health and democracy in Brazil. Redwood City, CA. Stanford University Press.
Gramsci, A. (1972). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (Vol. [1st). New York,: International Publishers.
Greenstein, R. (2003). State, civil society and the reconfiguration of power in post-apartheid South Africa. Unpublished paper, University of Witswatersrand.
Habermas, J. (1996). Between facts and norms: Contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Habermas, J. (2001). The Postnational constellation: Political essays. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Habib, A. & Valodia, I. (2006)."Reconstructing a social movement in an era of globalisation: A case study of COSATU." Pp. 225–254 in Voices of protest: Social movements in post-apartheid South Africa, edited by R. Ballard, A. Habib, and I. Valodia. Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.
Haggard, S. and Kaufman, R.R. (2018). The political economy of democratic transitions. Princeton University Press.
Harriss, J. (2003). “Do political regimes matter?” pp. 204–233 in Changing paths: International development and the new politics of inclusion, edited by Peter Houtzager and Mick Moore. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Hart, G. (2014). Rethinking the South African crisis: Nationalism, populism, hegemony. Athens, GA. University of Georgia Press.
Heller, P. (1999). The labor of development: Workers and the transformation of capitalism in Kerala, India. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Heller, P. (2003). “Reclaiming democratic spaces: Civics and politics in post-transition Johannesburg,” pp. 155–184 in Robert Beauregard and Richard Tomlinson (eds.), Emerging Johannesburg. New York: Routledge.
Hipsher, P. (1998)."Democratic transitions as protest cycles: Social movement dynamics in democratizing Latin America." Pp. 152–172 in The social movement society, edited by Sidney Tarrow and David Meyer. New York: Rowan & Littlefield.
Hochstetler, K. (2004). Civil society in Lula's Brazil. In Working paper CBS-57-04. Centre for Brazilian Studies, University of Oxford.
Hochstetler, K., & Keck, M. E. (2007). Greening Brazil: Environmental activism in state and society. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Holston, J. (2008). Insurgent citizenship: Disjunctions of democracy and modernity in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Houtzager, P. P., & Acharya, A. K. (2010). Associations, active citizenship, and the quality of democracy in Brazil and Mexico. Theory and Society, 40(1), 1–36.
Huber, E. & Stephens, J. D. (2012). Democracy and the Left: Social policy and inequality in Latin America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Huber, E., & Niedzwiecki, S. (2015). Emerging welfare states in lain American and East Asia. In The Oxford handbook on transformations of the state.Edited byS. Leibfried, E. Huber, M. Lange, J. D. Levey, & J. D. Stephens. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Huber, E., Rueschemeyer, D., & Stephens, J. D. (1997). The paradoxes of contemporary democracy: Formal, participatory, and social democracy. Comparative Politics, 29(3), 323–342.
Hunter, W. (2007). The normalization of an anomaly: The workers’ Party in Brazil. World Politics, 59(03), 440–475.
Jaffrelot, C., Kohli, A., & Murali, K. (2019). Eds. Business and Politics in India. In Modern South Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jayal, N. G. (2011). “The transformation of citizenship in India in the 1990s and beyond.” In Understanding India’s new political economy, edited by Sanjay Ruparelia, Sanjay Reddy, John Harriss, and Stuart Corbridge. Oxfordshire: Routledge.
Kadivar, M. A. (2018). Mass mobilization and the durability of New democracies. American Sociological Review, 83(2), 390–417.
Kadivar, M. A., Usmani, A., & Bradlow, B. (Forthcoming). “The long march: Deep democracy in Cross-national perspective.” Social Forces.
Kaldor, M. (2003). Global civil society: An answer to war. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Katzenstein, M. & Ray, R. (2005)."Introduction: In the beginning there was the Nehruvian state." Pp. 1–32 in Social Movements in India: Poverty, Power and Politics, edited by Raka Ray and Mary Katzenstein. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc.
Keck, M. E. (1992). The Workers' Party and democratization in Brazil. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kerstenetzky, C. L. (2014). “The Brazilian social developmental state: A progressive agenda in a (still) conservative political society.” pp. 172–98 in The end of the developmental state? edited by M. Williams. New York: Routledge.
Klein, S., & Lee, C.-S. (2019). Towards a dynamic theory of civil society: The politics of forward and backward infiltration. Sociological Theory., 37(1), 62–88.
Levitsky, S., & Roberts, K. M. (2013). The resurgence of the Latin American left. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Linz, J. J., & Stepan, A. C. (1996). Problems of democratic transition and consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and post-communist Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Mahajan, G. (1999). Civil society and its avatars: What happened to freedom and democracy. Economic and Political Weekly, 34, 1188–1196.
Makura, D. (1999). The MDM, civil society and social transformation. Umrabulo, 7(3).
Mamdani, M. (1996). Citizen and subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Mangcu, X. (2008). To the Brink: The state of democracy in South Africa. Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.
Mehta, P. B. (2003). The burden of democracy. New Delhi: Penguin Books.
Mosoetsa, S. (2005). Compromised communities and re-emerging civic engagement in Mpumalanga Towship, Durban, KwaZulu-Natal. Journal of Southern African Studies, 31(4), 857–873.
O'Donnell, G. (1993). On the state, democratization and some conceptual problems: A Latin American view with glances at some Postcommunist countries. World Development, 21(8), 1355–1359.
Oldfield, S. (2008)."Participatory mechanisms and community politics: Building consensus and conflict." Pp. 487–500 in Consolidating developmental local government: Lessons from the South African experience, edited by M. van Donk, M. Swilling, E. Pieterse, and S. Parnell. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press.
Olver, C. (2017). How to steal a city: The battle for Nelson Mandela Bay: An inside account. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Omvedt, G. (1998)."The struggle for social justice and the expansion of the public sphere." pp. 130–145 in Democracy, difference & social justice, edited by G. Mahajan. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Paschel, T. S. (2016). Becoming black political subjects: Movements and ethno-racial rights in Colombia and Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Pillay, D. (2013). Between social movements and political unionism: COSATU and democratic politics in South Africa. Rethinking Development and Inequality, 2, 10–27.
Przeworski, A. (1985). Capitalism and social democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme.
Przeworski, A. (1992). The neoliberal fallacy. Journal of Democracy, 3(3), 45–59.
Riley, D. (2005). Civic associations and authoritarian regimes in interwar Europe. American Sociological Review, 70(2), 288–310.
Roberts, K. M. (1998). Deepening democracy? The modern left and social movements in Chile and Peru. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Rueschemeyer, D., Huber, E., & Stephens, J. D. (1992). Capitalist development and democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Samuels, D. J. (2004). "The political logic of decentralization in Brazil," in Decentralization and democracy in Latin America editedby A. P. Monter & D. J. Samuels. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
Samuels, D., & Snyder, R. (2001). The value of a vote: Malapportionment in comparative perspective. British Journal of Political Science, 31(4), 651.
Sandbrook, R., M. Edelman, P. Heller, and J. Teichman. 2007. Social democracy in the global periphery: Origins, challenges, prospects.
Scheper-Hughes, N. (1992). Death without weeping: The violence of everyday life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Seidman, G. (1994). Manufacturing militance: Workers' movements in Brazil and South Africa, 1970–1985. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Seidman, Gay. 2010. Brazil’s ‘pro-poor’ strategies: What South Africa could learn. Transformation (72/73):86–103.
Sen, A. K. (1999). Development as freedom. New York: Knopf.
Sivaramakrishnan, K. C. (2000). Power to the people. Delhi: Konark Publishers.
Somers, M. R. (1993). Citizenship and the place of the public sphere: Law, community, and political culture in the transition to democracy. American Sociological Review, 58(October), 587–620.
Stepan, A. (2000). Brazil’s decentralized federalism. Daedalus, 129(2), 145–169.
Swilling, M. (2017). “Betrayal of a promise: How South Africa is being stolen.” State Capacity Research Project. Pp. 1–63. http://47zhcvti0ul2ftip9rxo9fj9.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Betrayal-of-the-Promise-25052017.pdfAccessed 24 March 2019
Tarlau, R. (Forthcoming). Occupying schools, occupying land: How the landless workers movement transformed Brazilian education. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Telles, E. E. (2004). Race in another America: The significance of skin color in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Tilly, C. (2004). Social movements. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
Usmani, A. (2018). Democracy and the class struggle. American Journal of Sociology, 124(3), 664–704.
Varshney, A. (2000). Is India becoming more democratic? Journal of Asian Studies, 59(1), 3–25.
Veeraraghavan, R. (2017). Strategies for synergy in a high modernist project: Two community responses to India’s NREGA rural work program. World Development, 99, 203–213.
Wampler, B. (2015). Activiating democracy in Brazil: Popular participation, social justice, and interlocking institutions. South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press.
Webster, E., & Buhlungu, S. (2004). Between marginalisation and revitalisation? The state of the trade union movement in South Africa. Review of African Political Economy, 31(100), 229–245.
Weyland, K. G. (1996). Democracy without equity: Failures of reform in Brazil. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Yadav, Y. (2000). Understanding the second democratic upsurge: Trends of Bahujan participation in electoral politics in the 1990s. In Transforming India: Social and political dynamics of democracy (p. 145).
Yashar, D. J. (2005). Contesting citizenship in Latin America: The rise of indigenous movements and the postliberal challenge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Peter Evans, Andreas Wimmer, Chris Gibson, Pauline Jones-Luong, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Elizabeth Wood, Archon Fung, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Marcelo Silva, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Ashutosh Varshney for their comments and thoughts.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Heller, P. Divergent trajectories of democratic deepening: comparing Brazil, India, and South Africa. Theor Soc 48, 351–382 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-019-09351-7
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-019-09351-7