Elite Participation in Sociopolitical Reforms

This session examines how elites adapt to significant sociopolitical changes. The two presenters will interrogate how elites shape state-building and social reform focusing on the role of power and ideology.
Lunch provided.
Presenters
Anju Parvathy Biju

Bio: Anju Parvathy Biju is a PhD student in the Comparative Literature and Literary Theory program at the University of Pennsylvania. She is working towards a dissertation on the cultural and literary conceptions of childhood and their relation to the form of the postcolonial nation-state during the early decades after Independence. Her broader fields of interest include postcolonial literature, childhood studies, and theories of the state.

Title: Between Service and the State: The Indian Women’s Movement and the Question of Childhood, 1940-1948
Abstract: This paper offers an analysis of the complex relationship between women’s organizations and child welfare in the transitional moment between colonialism and postcolonial nation-building through a study of the All-India Women’s Conference’s (founded in 1927) approach towards questions of children and their care. Using archival material on the activities of the AIWC when it comes to child welfare as well as the memoirs of prominent figures (Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, 1978, and Hansa Mehta, 1981) associated with it, I trace ideas about children generated by the organization in the crucial period of the 40s and the 50s where the child emerges as a simultaneously public and private concern for an imagined and, later, realized free state. A fledgling rights and welfare based framework surrounding the child that emerged during this period was activated not by an imagination of state-centric planning that sought to actively intervene. Instead, as crucial scholarship by Geraldine Forbes (1996) and Taylor Sherman (2021) show, it is a complex relationship between the Indian state and “state feminism” that imagines this child-subject. Such activations of public and private divisions of childbirth and rearing, I argue, are also crucial to understand the emergence of certain public roles for women during this transitional period. I elaborate upon one such role: that of women as wielders of professional expertise in public regarding their seemingly private affinity for child-rearing as mothers. My contention, building on the work of Rosalind Parr (2022), is that child welfare allows complex mobilizations of domestic knowledge by bourgeois Indian women activists who activated intra-national and international networks that gave new meaning to the amalgamation of ‘women and children’. What does an attention towards childhood allow for our own understanding of women’s histories during the crucial period of decolonization?
Igor Kolesnikov
Bio: Igor Kolesnikov is a PhD candidate in political science at UC Berkeley studying fiscal development in weak and authoritarian states. My dissertation examines three cases: France's 18th-century salt tax enforcement overhaul, Russia's 1864 zemstvo reform that created elected assemblies empowered to tax elites, and the Russian Empire's imposition of communal land tenure after emancipation. Using archival data, formal theory, and causal inference methods, I analyze how governments design extractive institutions in response to fiscal shocks and their consequences for state-society relations
Title: Capturing the State: Decentralization and Elite Representation in the Russian Bureaucracy
Abstract: At face value, decentralization brings governance closer to the people, increasing the efficiency and quality of public goods and services by reducing monitoring costs, increasing oversight, and leveraging accountability by empowering local communities . However, the close examination of decentralization reforms reveals a surprising gap between the theoretical benefits of local policymaking and the attained results. We hypothesize that private groups most affected by the capacity gains of decentralized local government will invest more to capture administrative positions or bypass them altogether by taking over other local enforcement agencies. To support this theoretical claim and develop it further, we explore the effects of the 1864 local self-government reform in the Russian Empire, which affected the lives of more than 40 million people and enfranchised locally hundreds of thousands.
Drawing on a comprehensive list of wealthy serf owners (socioeconomic elites) and the first ever large-N sample of individual members of local (district-level) officialdom, we are able to identify members of the socioeconomic elite within the local bureaucracy. We hypothesize that local self-government reform in the Russian Empire made the bureaucracy less representative of local society by giving landowning elites the incentive to capture local offices to defend their traditional privileges. This undermined the ability of the newly created local assemblies to redistribute power and resources in the interests of the median voter but shifts the costs of governance away from the central government to the localities. By leveraging the adoption of the reform and variation between administrative, coercive, judicial, and rural institutions within the local bureaucracy, we demonstrate how powerful socioeconomic actors respond to decentralization reforms and quantify the resulting policy bias of direct state capture by socioeconomic elites.

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