Beyond Paper Tigers: Municipal Politicians and Democratic Resilience at the Grassroots

Abstract

Why do local elected representatives facing similar institutional constraints choose different strategies? This dissertation develops a theory of strategy choice under incomplete decentralization, where municipal councilors remain electorally accountable but depend on bureaucratic and higher-level political actors for implementation, finance, and approval. Administrative, fiscal, and political constraints define the institutional setting, while leverage, the capacity to induce response, and cover, protection from sanction, capture councilors’ unequal positions within it. Drawing on more than 450 interviews, 67 municipal council meeting transcripts, and an original survey of 506 current and former councilors in urban India, I distinguish collaborative strategies based on coordination and follow-up from combative strategies based on public pressure and cost-imposition. Collaboration overwhelmingly dominates. Perceived bureaucratic discretion is the strongest correlate of movement toward combativeness, while leverage and cover do not reliably predict the binary shift between strategies. Instead, leverage more clearly distinguishes procedural from discretionary forms of collaboration. These findings show that incomplete decentralization does not eliminate local representation. It channels representation through continued dependence on actors councilors do not command and shifts attention from whether councilors collaborate to how they collaborate and when they escalate.