Mobilizing for Democracy : Citizen Action and the Politics of Public Participation

Mobilizing for Democracy is an in-depth study into how ordinary citizens and their organizations mobilize to deepen democracy. Featuring a collection of new empirical case studies from Angola, Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, this important new book illustrates how forms of political mobilization, such as protests, social participation, activism, litigation and lobbying, engage with the formal institutions of representative democracy in ways that are core to the development of democratic politics.

No other volume has brought together examples from such a broad Southern spectrum and covering such a diversity of actors: rural and urban dwellers, transnational activists, religious groups, politicians and social leaders. The cases illuminate the crucial contribution that citizen mobilization makes to democratization and the building of state institutions, and reflect the uneasy relationship between citizens and the institutions that are designed to foster their political participation.

“A welcome and timely engagement of cases of participatory democracy from Africa, India, and Latin America that have not, on average, been subject to the levels of intensive study common in the wealthy democracies.” —Mark E. Warren, University of British Columbia

“Mobilizing for Democracy makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of how citizen mobilization can deepen democracy. The book is original because of the sophistication with which it disaggregates the complexities of citizen mobilization, recognizing both the extraordinary variety of contextual dynamics that condition mobilization and the range of outcomes.” —Patrick Heller, Brown University