Democracy and Party Systems in Developing Countries: A Comparative Study of India and South Africa by Clemens Spiess

Author:Clemens Spiess [Spiess, Clemens]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethnic Studies, Social Science, Political Science, Regional Studies, General
ISBN: 9781134033492
Google: pnF8AgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17475010
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2008-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

Selective mobilisation and entrepreneurship on the electoral market

The second process of ensuring continued control over the electorate is selective mobilisation (Arian and Barnes 1974: 598). It involves basically two processes: purchasing support by positive discrimination of, or granting resources to, certain societal groups, and by aggregating a large range of interests in society whilst giving voice only to certain spokesmen of these interests. Moreover, since the dominant party claims to represent the nation and therefore must recruit, or appear to recruit, support from all segments of society, selective mobilisation is most often coupled with the dominant party’s increasingly indispensable entrepreneurship on the electoral market. This is especially relevant, for the fixed identities that once held the party together as a quasi-mass-party are no longer available after the common goal has been reached, though the need to retain the catch-all image remains. Therefore, party leaders and activists of the dominant party must be engaged as entrepreneurs on the electoral market, meaning they must actively seek support in the most pragmatic fashion available. This involves the positioning of the image of the party in such a way that it radiates the greatest electoral appeal and attracts the recruitment of leaders with strong local or regional followings. This is especially important, for the countervailing forces to a party’s dominance do not only emerge from the activities and mobilisational efforts of opposition parties, but also from changes and shifts within society.8

Selective mobilisation in India was to a great extent, though not solely, played out in the area of preferential policies or positive discrimination. The rationale of this strategy has clearly been based on hindsight, that the vast mass of India’s socially disadvantaged groups would sooner rather than later become aware of the ‘plasticity of the social world’ brought about by universal suffrage (Kaviraj 1996: 127). The display of concern for minorities and backward communities was thus as much a programmatic imperative of a catch-all party propagating social transformation and modernisation as it was due to the dominant party’s electoral arithmetic. Consequently, the constitutionally enshrined right to demographically derived quotas for the traditionally oppressed social minorities of the SCs and STs in jobs in the rapidly expanding public sector, for legislative seats and enrolment in institutes of higher education, especially medical and engineering colleges, developed into a prime instrument of partisan manipulation. In terms of selective mobilisation, this was especially rewarding during the heyday of one-party-dominance in the Nehru era. In reality, there was little advancement as regards the effective implementation of SC and ST quotas (Wilkinson 2000: 777), but the ‘pay-off’ of reservation policies was immense insofar as the INC could claim to hold on to its image as the champion of social transformation and minority concern, securing long-term support from the substrata of Indian society thus affected.

As regards other minorities, the quasi-consociational provisions prevailing in the pre-independence era, such as separate electorates, reserved legislative seats and reservation of government jobs for religious and linguistic minorities, were no longer reconcilable with the secularist and

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