Programme 2: Mobilising Public Action. Rights, Representation and the Poor: Comparisons across Latin America and India.
Abstract
This study is the first systematic, cross-national examination of local popular organisations and political participation, in cities, or parts of cities, which have been differently affected by liberalisation and globalisation. The central concern is with how changes in the state and in the world of work, provoked by globalisation, are altering whether people (i) organise to make demands on the state to solve collective problems, or engage in self-provisioning/ regulation (i.e. have changed perceptions of what are 'public' and 'private' problems); (ii) make claims on the state at the national or local level; and (iii) use as the principal arena of representation the party system, the labour-relations system, or civil society. The cities are in three large developing democracies - São Paulo-Brazil, Ciudad de México-Mexico, and Chennai, Coimbatore, Indore, and Pune-India - and in four smaller Latin American democracies - Lima-Peru, Buenos Aires-Argentina, Santiago-Chile, Caracas-Venezuela. The project-aims are two fold: (1) create a rich comparative data-set of the forms of association, claim-making, and representation; and (2) use this data, along with case study work, to develop more firmly grounded analyses of the forms of political participation and representation that are emerging today.
Citation
Working Paper 02-31, DESTIN, London School of Economics, 13 pp.
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