Overview

Welcome to the Democratic Governance and Policymaking course! In this course, you will learn that all citizens collectively desire public goods such as justice, peace, and welfare, but beyond their individual means. A state is a politically organized society to fulfill citizens’ public good needs. Politics is an activity in pursuit of the collective interests of the citizens. Policymaking is a collective action to identify, adequately provide, and equitably allocate desired public goods. However, arriving at a collective choice on who gets what, when, and how much, and who decides and how, faces joint action problems. This often leads to a policy gap between citizens’ preferences and policy provision, resulting in a loss of well-being. Governance in policymaking is about providing stewardship to these collective efforts through institutional mechanisms to minimize the policy gap. Democracy in governance is about the active participation of citizens, directly or indirectly, at all stages of policymaking. This course aims to provide an applied appreciation of the role of citizen participation in effective policymaking. As it attempts to do so, it juxtaposes democratic principles with empirical evidence to gain insights into what works, what does not, and why in the practice of democratic governance. The course is structured as follows. Module one describes the context leading to the policy gap. Modules two to four examine the institutional arrangements for policymaking in democratic governance. Modules five and six explain how democratic governance can reduce the policy gap. Module seven concludes with approaches for measuring democratic governance and its determinants.

Syllabus

Why Governance in Policymaking

In this module, you will examine the evolution of society from a simple homogeneous unit to a complex heterogeneous state. The module also analyzes how heterogeneity can lead to multi-peaked preferences for the public good needs and the collective action problems in aggregating such preferences into a collective choice for policymaking.

Governance, Democracy, and Collective Action

In this module, you will conceptualize governance as a social mechanism designed to provide stewardship to the collective action by the citizens. Lastly, it explains how institutionalizing the rules (of the game) and their enforcement enables collective action for public goods.

Deliberative Democratic Governance in Policymaking

In this module, you will be introduced to deliberative participation and its guiding and regulatory principles. You will be able to understand how deliberative participation can enable collective action for collective choice in a policymaking context. The module provides an empirical framework that can be used to develop approaches to make participation more deliberative ex-ante and evaluate the deliberative quality of participation, ex-post.

Representative Democratic Governance in Policymaking

In this module, you will gain an understanding of the need for representation in democratic governance through four questions, that is, represent what, represent whom, who can represent, and how should representation happen. The module concludes with a brief analysis of how the nature of representation can bear upon the effectiveness of public policy.

Policymaking in Multi-Order Democratic Governance

In this module, you will examine the rationale for multi-order democratic governance from different perspectives. You will be able to critically analyze the political economy challenges in policymaking in such a context, and how these challenges may influence policy effectiveness.

Does Democratic Governance Reduce Policy Gap: An Empirical Test

In this module, you will empirically test the supposition that democratic governance improves policy effectiveness by reducing policy gaps. Toward this, you will be intrigued to ask the research question: whether and how deliberative participation in policymaking institutions improves the provision of local public goods. Later you will find evidence in a throughput study of the local governments of India.

Determinants of Democratic Governance and Approaches to Measure Them

This module is motivated by the question: what explains the effectiveness of democratic governance? It starts with a critical analysis of popular composite measures of the quality of democratic governance. Following this, it seeks to find answers to the question, in two broad categories of determinants: Attributes of the community, and attributes of the citizens.