Working Papers

“Too Much Democracy”: Insights from India into the Link between National Identity and Democratic Backsliding (2022)

India’s success as a postcolonial, plural, liberal democracy has long been a source of national pride and international status. The recent downgrading of its democracy in international rankings marks a surprising departure from long-term trends. How do we understand this backsliding in a polity where liberal democracy was considered to have consolidated? I use an original interpretivist mapping of national identity discourses in India from 1950 – 2020 to systematically ‘overhear’ how the democratic identity is described overtime. The analysis confirms the importance of procedural elements, especially elections, as essential components of democracy but also reveals variations in the meaning of democracy across different sections of Indian society over time. Specifically, it not only identifies a loss of faith in the ability of democratic institutions to deliver public goods, but also identifies the absence of liberal values in mass discourses. The widening gap between elite preoccupations with liberal values against mass frustrations about persistent corruption, inequality, and incompetent governance provides important insights into the dynamics of backsliding. The study points to the crucial role of ideas in enabling or hindering the maintenance of democracy over time and demonstrates the value of tracking societal discourses over time for understanding momentous political shifts.

The Logic of Prudence (2021)

International Relations (IR) theory acknowledges several logics of action: consequentialism, appropriateness, practicality, habit, and arguing. These logics combine both the cognitive and the evaluative bases of action, i.e. whether actors think about what to do and the criteria they use for determining the value of alternatives. The reflective practical ethics of prudence, however, goes beyond the instrumental ethics of consequentialism, normative ethics of appropriateness, inarticulate know-how of practices, routinized taken-for-grantedness of habits, and truth-seeking of arguing. I explore the logic of prudence and its value for guiding political action, especially under uncertainty, drawing on diverse accounts from IR and political theory. I claim that the logic of prudence involves finding a balance between practical and representational knowledge by engaging reflective reasoning. Prudence is fed by habits and practices, considers the relative consequences of alternatives, and takes into account standards of appropriateness through a deliberative process aided by arguing and truth-seeking. Yet, as a cognitive process for informing successful action, prudence involves a distinctly situation-specific reflective logic of action. Conceived as a normative theory of how to think, the logic of prudence also offers a perspective on the cognitive basis upon which agents draw and identify the objects of their reasoning, and addresses remaining gaps in mainstream practice theory by returning reflective reasoning and action to the center of analysis.

Emerging Markets and Rising Powers in the International Economy: Liberalization without Globalization? (2017)

(with Rajeev Arumugam, Soo Yeon Kim, and Florian Winkler)

Despite the growing importance of ‘emerging markets’ and ‘rising powers’ in shaping global outcomes, especially since the outbreak of the 2008 financial crisis, we lack fundamental knowledge about the composition of these groups beyond the BRICS. We also know little about their common attributes – political and social – that go beyond levels of economic growth and development. This study seeks to address this gap. We introduce an original dataset of countries classified as emerging mar- kets and/or rising powers from three different sources: scholarship in International Relations; scholarship in Economics; and materials from private sector investment funds dealing with investment in emerging markets. We identify which countries are referred to as emerging markets and how often across these sources, so as to evaluate the prominence of particular countries as emerging markets in our current state of knowledge. The empirical analysis examines the importance of political and social globalization as well as economic fundamentals as determinants of these memberships. We find that while emerging markets are well-integrated into the international economy through trade and investment linkages, many of these countries exhibit low levels of social and political globalization. This suggests that emerging markets may still lack the political will and embeddedness in international society to achieve prominence as influential actors in global economic governance.

All content and pictures are ©Manali Kumar, 2022.