Colonial legacies and the structural constraints of global capitalism pose significant obstacles to building welfare states in the Global South. Yet the past three decades have seen significant progress. In contrast to the literature on northern welfare states, the task of typologizing welfare states in the Global South is in its infancy, made all the more difficult by dramatically different conditions from first-generation welfare states and much greater variation. This paper proposes some broad typologies, but then draws from the cases of Brazil, India, and South Africa to examine the specific type of the democratic social development state. Driven by democratization and new state capacities, the focus on social development is rooted in a rights-based framework and made possible by embedding the state in civil society.

In the past two decades India experienced an unprecedented expansion of the rights-based welfare. This expansion cut across a range of sectors - education, employment, public health, poverty reduction - but was also accompanied by a dramatic expansion and deepening of state institutions and a shift from patronage politics to citizen empowerment. In this paper we show that India was a least likely case for welfare expansion and that contrary to what the traditional welfare state literature suggests, civil society was a key driver of reform, but even more vitally has played a significant role in institutionalizing reforms, especially at the local level. We focus on the case of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, the world's largest public works program, to discuss how civil society in India effectively framed welfare issues, mobilized to defend the law, helped institutionalize new governance structures like social audits by working with the state and are ensuring continuous accountability by cultivating what we call "user publics". We draw on the existing literature, fieldwork on village level welfare reform in different subnational regions of India, direct involvement in civil mobilization around rights based laws for over a decade and an ongoing project in which we are collaborating with some of the key architects of the reforms including an archive of over 3000 primary documents.

Despite receiving less attention than high-income countries, low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) experienced more than 85% of global excess deaths during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the unprecedented speed and scale of the COVID-19 pandemic, which placed large demands on government capacity, many LMICs relied on civil society organizations (CSOs) to assist in implementing COVID-19 response programs. Yet few studies have examined the critical role CSOs played in mitigating the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in low resource settings. This study explored the CSO response to COVID-19 in five of the most heavily impacted LMICs in the Global South. Interviews were conducted from May to August 2021 with a purposive sample of CSO key informants within each of the five countries. A total of 52 CSOs were selected from which 53 key informants were interviewed either via Zoom or by phone. Interviews were coded and analyzed using NVivo or MAXQDA2020. Out of the 52 CSOs selected, 24 were national organizations, 8 were regional, and 20 were local. CSOs fell into six categories: community-based organizations, non-governmental organizations, unions/professional organizations, campaigns/social movements, research organizations/think tanks, and networks/coalitions. CSOs across all five countries adapted their missions, stretched their resources, and performed a wide range of activities that fit into five programmatic areas: food security and livelihood support, public health and medical care, cash transfer programs, risk communication and community education, and needs assessment. This qualitative analysis demonstrates the critical role CSOs played in supplementing government emergency aid response by delivering necessary resources and supporting highly vulnerable populations during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the primary challenges they faced in doing so. Given the generally weak state of public capacity in the LMICs studied, this role was vital to responding to the pandemic.

Despite being among the most successful democracies in the Global South, India, Brazil and South Africa have all recently experienced democratic crises. I argue that these democratic crises result from the formation of social coalitions that have been willing to subvert democratic institutions and practices in order to preserve or restore their social and economic privileges. In structural terms, these reactions are tied to the unresolved problem of the incorporation of popular classes. This problem has in turn been mediated by the balance between political and civil society. In India and South Africa that balance has favoured the dominance of mass-based nationalist parties that have thwarted democratic deepening. In Brazil, a more balanced relationship between civil society and political society has favoured the partial incorporation of the popular classes.

In this chapter, the authors attempt to navigate between the lumpers and the splitters by splicing a set of comparative observations that focus on recurrent practices that, they believe, shape struggles and opportunities for inclusion in post-colonial cities. If land use planning and housing generate the basic parameters of socio-class segregation, generating a differentiated citizenship, the uneven delivery of public services reinforces it. Urban Brazil has thus shown substantial movement on the Tilly democratization continuum and specifically demonstrates how more instituted processes of democratic citizenship and urban governance can act as a countervailing force to the processes of rationing the city. Building on Weber's classic investigation of the city, Le Gales and others treat cities as governed spaces and specifically as mini-societies constituted by "conflicts of authority, the interplay of social groups, and control mechanisms: in other words, the particular division of labor between the market, social structures and political structures".

Research on democracy has shed much light on two kinds of democratic politics: patterns of voting and patterns of associational or movement politics. But there is growing recognition that in order to better understand the quality or depth of democracy, we need to move beyond this dualistic focus to better understand the everyday practices through which citizens can effectively wield their rights; these practices often diverge from the formal equality enshrined in laws and constitutions. We study this question through a large, unique sample survey carried out in a South Indian city. We find that effective citizenship is refracted through the institutional specificities of urban India and that, as a result, the poor access the state through political participation and the rich through particularistic connections to persons of influence. But unlike the conventional celebration of participation as a citizenship-deepening activity, we also find that a substantial part of participation is associated with forms of brokerage that compromise democratic citizenship.

Given the legacies of colonialism and the inequities of the global capitalist system, consolidated democracies in the Global South were the exception prior to the third wave of democratization in the 1970s. As democratization in the Global South grew, a first generation of work by sociologists challenged mainstream political science's preoccupation with electoral and liberal democracy and brought popular mobilization to the center of the analysis. This literature made key contributions to the debate on democratic transitions and consolidation. A more recent wave of work has focused on the democratization of democracy, examining civil society, movements, participatory democracy, transnational activism, and the wide range of political actors and forms of collective action that have emerged in a democratizing Global South. Variation across and within democracies remains high, but there have been clear cases of democratic deepening. Improving our understanding of the fabric of democratic institutions and practices, including recent cases of regression, calls for more research, especially in subnational and local contexts.

In explaining the authoritarian turn in India, analysts have pointed to electoral realignments and the rise of the BJP's distinct brand of ethno-national populism. This chapter moves beyond these conjunctural factors on the political plane to focus on the deeper socio-cultural transformations at play. In India, democratic backsliding is fundamentally a reaction to the democratic empowerment of popular classes and lower castes of the last several decades. The authoritarian turn has been driven by a growing middle class seeking to consolidate its economic position and hoard its social privileges. The contours of that reaction have been significantly shaped by both the economic and social forces of globalization.

Delhi is India's richest city, and as the capital of the nation, it has long enjoyed a favorable treatment from the center. As the home to the country's national bureaucracies, it also benefits from a large base of secure, well-paid, government jobs. Over the last decade, the city has grown at an average real rate of 10 percent and has benefitted from a dramatic increase in large-scale infrastructure development. Yet, despite these advantages, Delhi is a deeply divided city marked by layers of social exclusion.

Building on existing efforts to theorize and measure state capacity, this paper proposes a spatial measure of equity promotion: developmental state capacity (DSC). We operationalize DSC as the spatial distribution and density of capability-enhancing infrastructure in a given territorial unit. Specifically, we develop a composite index of four types of local basic infrastructure: primary schools, community clinics, piped potable water, and electricity. Unlike territorial approaches or population-based development indicators, this index allows researchers to better understand and evaluate the state's role in human development by visualizing and examining the patterned spatial distribution and density of DSC. We illustrate the advantages of the measure through a case study of Johannesburg, South Africa. Using a unique data set, we calculate DSC index scores for over 600 administrative units. We then map the spatial distribution of DSC, identifying spatial clusters, and quantitatively and qualitatively explore the influence of demographic and political factors on its distribution. We conclude with directions for future research uses of the DSC index.

Two of the largest democracies in the global south – India and Brazil – have witnessed a dramatic turn to right-wing populism. Careful historical comparison reveals that the form of reaction is markedly different from other recent cases of democratic backsliding. In both cases, reaction has been driven by elites in response to a previous expansion of democratic rights and social inclusion. This form of retrenchment populism is rooted in very similar class realignments that are configured both by economic and socio-cultural interests. Globalization has played a role, but not through the conventionally identified pathways of neoliberalism or modernization. Instead, reaction has been driven by an expanded middle class’s efforts to hoard opportunity and public resources and preserve traditional status privileges.

This book investigates participatory budgeting—a mainstay now of World Bank, UNDP, and USAID development programs—to ask whether its reforms truly make a difference in deepening democracy and empowering civil society.

This chapter explores the interaction of politics and business through the lens of the city. The power of business to influence politics in India would suggest that Indian cities are, in the classic sense of the term, growth machines. Yet the chapter argues that fundamental problems of governance in India’s megacities have precluded the possibility of business coalitions exerting cohesive influence over investment policies in cities. The result has been the predominance of what may be called cabals that are expert at extracting rents from the city, but in the end fail to promote development. High levels of growth have not been accompanied by commensurate expansion of the cities’ infrastructure and overall coordination capacities. In the end, what is good for business and politicians has been good for neither dynamic capitalism nor inclusion.

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).

This chapter explores the changing role of the state in Asia from Northeast Asia to China to Southeast Asia and to India, and the contributions that the analysis of the Asian state has made to general theoretical understandings of the role states can play in promoting economic and social transformation. The emergence and evolution of the concept of the ‘developmental state’ is a central focus. The relationship of states to the politics of representation and redistribution is a second central concern. The chapter analyses the ways in which development—defined as enhanced well-being and human flourishing—and democracy—defined as accountability to the deliberatively constructed goals of society—have been facilitated or frustrated by state structures and state action. We consider what general lessons the comparative history of the Asian state offers for development theory and policy possibilities.

Using a comparative frame that draws on the variation of developmental trajectories in Asia from Northeast Asia to China to Southeast Asia and to India, this paper explores the changing role of the state in these countries and the contributions that the analysis of the Asian state has made to general theoretical understandings of the role states can play in promoting economic and social transformation. The emergence and evolution of the concept of the 'developmental state' is a central focus. The ambiguous relation between the developmental state and the politics of representation and redistribution is a second central concern. Building on region-wide comparative analysis, we examine how state structures and possibilities for state action in Asia have been shaped by geo-political context and colonial heritage. We analyse the ways in which development, defined as enhanced well-being and human flourishing, and democracy, defined as accountability to the deliberatively constructed goals of society, have been facilitated or frustrated by state structures and state action. We consider what general lessons the comparative history of the Asian state offers for development theory and policy possibilities.

Over the course of the last several hundred years, human society has arguably been transformed more rapidly and fundamentally than in any comparable era. One of sociology's principle contributions to debates on the concept of development has been to challenge the hegemony of “economic growth” as the dominant metric of development. In its post-World War II infancy, the study of development was dominated by teleological perspectives, including in sociology. These perspectives projected the institutions and practices of Western societies as a road map for “developing” societies. A critical juncture in the sociological study of development came in the 1980s. By then three new developments were forcing a rethinking of both the trajectories and the substance of development.