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Educational democratic (ED) values and their manifestation in school are related to the school context and the socio-political-cultural setting. In-depth interviews were conducted with nine participants, including two principals, four teachers, and three students in two secondary schools in Da Nang city, Central Vietnam. The participants indicated sixteen ED values, either instrumental (e.g., friendliness, autonomy) or terminal (e.g., fairness, equality). These ED values can be recognized in both formal and informal school spaces. The findings shed light on the Vietnamese stakeholders' views on ED values, their manifestation, and their contribution to the democratic school, which could be a premise for further exploring stakeholders' democratic commitment in the Vietnamese educational context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Research on contentious politics tends to overlook the significance of local elections in supporting social movements and democratisation. This article analyses how the pro-democracy opposition in Hong Kong had tried to use the institutional positions and resources of the District Councils, after their landslide victory in 2019, to support the Anti-Extradition Movement and push for grassroots democracy reforms. Through a study of meeting documents and interviews with councillors, this study recapitulates the state–opposition struggle around the grassroots reform initiatives in the District Councils in 2020–2021. Efforts to support the Anti-Extradition Movement, promote grassroots participation, reform public finance, and counter clientelism were short-lived and met with strong state resistance. Institutional constraints, internal struggles, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic severely limited the reform efforts. The study of this reform experience sheds light on the possibilities and limits of using local councils to support reforms and promote grassroots democracy in hybrid regime settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traditional marine fisheries management practice in Kerala is a communitybased Co-management arrangement with local variations. These systems affect local villages’ resource management and entire social structure via their abundant bonding social capital. The latest three-tier Fisheries management councils are a new experiment in Kerala’s marine fisheries management, which can unify the management practices across the state coast. The researcher explored the composition and working of the councils at various levels, especially the village level councils at Kannur, Kozhikode, Kasaragod and Ernakulam districts. This research used telephonic interviews and in-depth personal interviews as the research methods. Viability of the new practice was examined with the use of Elinor Ostrom’s principles of Enduring Common Property Regimes (CPRs) and in the light of second-generation collective action theories, which focus on the role of social capital in CPRs. The researcher has found that no recognition was given to the traditional community management arrangements like the Kadakkodi (Sea court) system in Kasaragod. A provision for nomination to the village-level fisheries management councils leads to corrupt practice and politicisation, especially in Kannur District. Fisheries management councils have to be reconstituted more democratically and should consider traditional community arrangements in their composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the mobilization of indigenous peoples and traditional communities for the recognition of their right to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) provided for in ILO Convention 169, as a strategy of resistance and strengthening of their social organization in defense of their traditionally occupied territories. It takes as reference observations in the field, during visits and consultations carried out in five traditional communities, and testimonies of leaders of these territories, in the state of Pará. Sixty-one community autonomous protocols approved in Brazil, between 2014 and 2022, were also consulted, available at the Observatory of Autonomous Protocols. It is concluded that the appropriation of the FPIC has strengthened organization and resistance in indigenous territories and have become potential instruments for the exercise of local grassroots democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Democratic decision-making in land reform improves villagers' trust for town and county cadres. • Mass participation in land reform decision-making improves villagers' trust towards village cadres. • This participatory democracy helped decrease unresolved inter-village land disputes, but no such impact on within-village disputes. • Democratic decision-making has a more pronounced effect in improving trust for the poorer and politically disadvantaged. • Attention should be placed further to grassroots democracy and village autonomy. This study explores how the application of democratic rule in land reform decision-making determines villagers' political trust towards different levels of the government in China. Analyzing a two-period household survey dataset, we find that in China's recent Collective Forest Tenure Reform, which has devolved the tenure rights of the village collective-owned forestland to households, democratic decision-making increases trust for town and county cadres. The impact on trust towards village cadres is significant only when democracy involves all villagers in a village. We show two mechanisms that improve villagers' trust: the "privatization" effect, where democratic decision-making leads to more land devolved to villagers, and the "conflict-resolving" effect, where improved information and cohesion by mass participation helps resolve inter-village land disputes. Heterogeneity analyses show that democratic decision-making has a more pronounced effect in improving trust for villagers with lower income, and those without affiliation with the Chinese Communist Party or village committees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reviews three books by Xu Yong that examine three critical historical processes of political transformation in rural China: the politicization of society due to urban–rural disparity, the government's efforts to encourage political integration in rural areas, and the development of rural grassroots democracy. Urban–rural disparity has been a structural characteristic of China's politicized society since the establishment of the monarchy. The analysis of this inequality focuses on uncovering grassroots society (as opposed to Chinese society's upper echelons) and examining its evolutionary logic. Since 1949, China has faced the historical task of building a modern state. The government aggressively entered the countryside through large-scale political mobilization and social integration with the Chinese Communist Party as the driving force. The goal was to create a strongly integrated communist nation. Since the 1980s, the Chinese countryside has not only experienced economic liberalization but also received an opportunity for political democratization through the creation and practice of village autonomy. Self-government in autonomous villages has provided Chinese peasants with a wide range of democratic rights. In addition, calls for transformation and promotion of the democratic paradigm have increased. Xu's three books effectively present many critical aspects of China's rural political transformations. However, questions remain concerning the consistency of the theory and the accuracy of the analysis, which leaves room for further research and discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this paper, the concept of "people as the roots" (of the state) is explored through its myriad expressions in Vietnamese history: the emphasis of Vietnamese feudal rulers on fulfilling the people's will, loving the people, and ensuring peace for the people. From these historical examples, the authors argue that in the politics of Vietnamese traditional Confucianism, there has been the presence of democratic elements. Yet, they do not reflect a full-fledged democracy and should be seen only as signs of village democracy. This view holds an important implication for the process of democratization of modern Vietnamese society: while the concept of "people as the roots" is essential for a village democracy and is valuable for building a democracy, it does not necessarily mean a straightforward translation to a modern democracy. Here, the authors suggest that civil society will play an important role in making this transition smoother. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The success of democratic institutions at the grassroots level in allocating public benefits to the target groups depends on people’s political participation. Applying logistic regression, ordinary least squares (OLS), and the Heckman model based on a data set collected from 30 panchayats from three districts of Assam (India), this article addresses three questions: (a) who participates? (b) who gets the public benefits? and (c) whether participants get more benefits. The results suggest no overwhelming elite capture and clientalization, and contributes to the current debate on the association between democracy and development by way of establishing that democracy at the grassroots does, indeed, deliver. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nominal democratic institutions under non-democratic regimes vary across countries. This study intends to advance our understanding of such institutions by exploring the relevance of one aspect of the authoritarian regimes, government hierarchy. Focusing on village-level democratization in China, we investigate the intermediary role of the provincial level governments in shaping the variant outcomes of grassroots democracy across the country. Through an analysis of a national sample, we find that divergent provincial legislative interpretation of central policies is a key determinant of public access to power and democratic governance of village-level governments. Our finding suggests that authoritarian states can employ various institutions to gather information, accommodate local variations, and thus contain potential intra-government disagreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turn-taking in political settings faces the problem of how to enable the participation of larger numbers of speakers in orderly ways; solutions have been described as offered by constrained formats like the turn-type pre-allocation system or the mediated turn-taking system. This paper describes another specific solution, a table-based turn-taking system. The study describes how facilitators managing brainstorming sessions in a participatory project exploit the spatial distribution of the citizens around tables scattered in the meeting room. By organizing discussions table by table, rather than selecting next individual speakers, the facilitators select groups and attributes specific rights and obligations to talk to "tables", which are then treated not as a mere spatial location but as a political entity. The table-based device does not just solve problems of turn-taking management but also fosters the expression of collective opinions of the "table" as a place for building consensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the strangest phenomena in today's China is that a thinker as liberal as Tocqueville has become well-known due to the recommendation of a top leader of China's authoritarian regime. No matter how one interprets this phenomenon, Tocqueville's theoretical and historical reflections on democracy and revolution provide a framework to understand how democratic China has been and might be. The democratization of Chinese society as reflected in the diffusion of equality as a value and ongoing individualization is facilitating both centralization and empowerment of the state. The limited and dysfunctional grassroots democracy, the weakness of civil society, and the rise of illiberal political Confucianism present serious obstacles to political democratization in China. However, with the possible failure of statism, political democracy would be an alternative. The fragile but increasing demand for freedom in civil society might contribute to the advancement of a long, unsteady and difficult democratization in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Greens' impact on German politics and public life has been enormous and massively disproportional to the size of their electoral support and political presence in the country's legislative and executive bodies on the federal, state, and local levels. After substantiating the Greens' proliferating presence on all levels of German politics with numbers; the article focuses on demonstrating how the Greens' key values of ecology, peace and pacifism, feminism and women's rights, and grass roots democracy-the signifiers of their very identity-have come to shape the existence of all other German parties bar none. If imitation is one of the most defining characteristics of success, the Greens can be immensely proud of their tally over the past thirty plus years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) adopted grassroots democracy as a political tool to reduce inequality which was a causal factor prompting farmer protests in Thái Bình in 1997. At the international level, the nexus between democracy and inequality has attracted extensive scholarly research over the last two decades. By revisiting the case of Thái Bình, on the one hand, the article attempts to assess the impact of grassroots democracy after 15 years on inequality reduction thereat, and on the other, to contribute to the general discourse on the nexus between these two concepts. The article is organized in two major parts: the first being the literature review and theoretical framing, and the second, findings presentation. It concludes that grassroots democracy has contributed to inequality reduction in rural Vietnam, but is far more likely to meet the demand to avoid a challenge for the CPV again due to the inequality that remains. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper studies the District Councils and community development in Hong Kong by comparing institutional regulations and practical operations. Interview data is included to contextualize what role the District Councils play in grassroots politics. This paper intends to prove that though District Council members do not have real power, the importance of District Councils manifest itself in other realms of political practice, which makes the District Councils a feature of grassroots democracy in Hong Kong. Also, concerning the co-opetition relation between communities and the government, District Councils play an important role in community development since they represent not only the population's feelings and attitudes toward the government, but also affect how and why local residents participate in political activities in Hong Kong. In short, the District Councils are key to understanding the future development of Hong Kong's democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Recent research in Bangladesh highlights an interesting paradox: impressive development outcomes combined with extremely poor quality of governance. The country’s active development NGO sector has been credited with some of the more positive development achievements. The question that this paper sets out to address is why the sector has not made an equivalent contribution on the governance front. It draws on primary survey data to explore the hypothesis that the problem lies in the increasing homogenization of NGOs around the delivery of services, primarily microfinance services, and its shift away from social mobilization organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grassroots democracy has been practised in rural China for more than a decade. However, despite the existence of a mountain of evidence, evaluations of the quality of China's rural grassroots democracy, particularly electoral institutions, have unfortunately been inconclusive, due to primary reliance on case studies and local surveys. Moreover, the lack of comparable data over time prohibits effective studies on the evolution of grassroots democracy in Chinese villages. This article tries to provide some systematic information on how village committee elections are practised and have evolved in China, using two village surveys based on comparable national probability samples, implemented in 2002 and 2005 respectively. It further explores the validity of some key theories in contemporary literature on the uneven implementation of village committee elections in China with the help of an integrated regression model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The residents' committee is the lowest level of the administrative hierarchy in China's cities, but it is also an important part of the political system. Under the rubric of community construction and grassroots democracy, residents' committees are undergoing certain democratic reforms such as improved procedures for elections and a more open and participatory governance process. At the same time, they are also important resources for the regime in terms of consolidating support and control, especially where maintenance of stability and mass mobilization are concerned. This paper analyzes the multifaceted nature of the residents' committee and its importance in China's political system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a survey conducted in several urban and rural communities of the city of Nanjing, this paper makes an in-depth study on the influences exerted by the trust in neighborhood (village) government on the residents' willingness to offer their service to the community, and examines the facts which affect the residents' trust in their neighborhood (village) government by logistic regression analysis. The analysis shows that there is a close relationship between the residents' trust in the neighborhood (village) government and the residents' community service willingness. Therefore, the Government of Nanjing City should pay more attention to the contextual factors which affect the residents' trust in their neighborhood (village) government and try to foster their trust in and affinity for the government, so as to promote the grassroots democracy by cultivating residents' willingness to make community service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An ongoing inquiry into grassroots democracy is the determination of how it actually occurs in practical terms. Researchers continue to explore the experiences of people working together in neighborhoods to solve common problems in an effort to shed light on the actual practices of citizendriven endeavors. In an effort to advance this line of research, this article explores the experiences of two neighborhood associations in a medium sized city in the middle western part of the United States and how their members define, devise ways to, and ultimately solve common problems. A discussion of the implications of these findings and their impact on public administration, local governance, and the ability of grassroots group dynamics to "get the job done" is offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China’s policy of reform and opening has led to extraordinary economic and societal changes during the past 30 years. One aspect of this progressive, incremental change has been the remarkable development of democracy—both at the grassroots level and within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The CCP, recognizing that political reforms must accompany economic reforms, began to pursue a distinctively Chinese path to political reform and modernization—a socialist democracy with Chinese characteristics. Inspired by leadership from Deng Xiaoping to Hu Jintao, Chinese citizens living in the countryside and townships have held competitive elections for local leadership for over a decade. This paper posits that the rise and institutionalization of competitive, popular local elections is indicative of how the CCP, in fostering a Harmonious Socialist Society, has created a viable, Confucian, and uniquely Chinese alternative to Western liberal democracy in local governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, globalisation and decentralisation are taking place simultaneously and also reinforcing each other. Local governments have been repositioned both in the industrialised and developing countries in tune with new requirements. Failures of the market and democracy eroded the trust of the people in the existing system of governance and leadership. The search is on for a new paradigm of governance. Devolution of powers seems to be the logical and natural answer to meet the extant crises of governance. However, devolution and decentralisation have to be processed and implemented only through the existing institutional arrangements. Hence, one finds a lot of bottlenecks in the process of devolution. Very often there is no correlation between the nature of devolution and its content. Different models have emerged with different perspectives in local governance. When power moves from the top to bottom, individuals and groups who enjoyed power hitherto will evolve strategies to retain their power. At the same time, the people hitherto marginalised mobilise themselves to get their due share in power. There are many players in this process and conflicts of interests become inevitable. These struggles for devolution of powers vary from country to country because the local bodies are viewed with different perspectives in different nations. A new brand of federalism and leadership could emerge throughout the world once self-governance at the grassroots level becomes functional. While the three layers of governance emerged in the framework of new federations, there will be clash of interests among the structures. Judiciary also differs in interpreting the status and position of local bodies within the framework of federal governance. The devolution of powers will have far-reaching implications on the society and governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper studies the impacts of village elections on the accountability of the village committee, local fiscal sharing, and state taxation in rural China using data of 48 villages for the period of 1986–2002. Elections are found to substantially increase the share of public expenditures in the village budget, but reduce the shares of administrative costs and income handed to the township government. These findings suggest that elections have enhanced the accountability of the village committee, but weakened local fiscal sharing and the state’s grip. No strong evidence is found that state taxation is affected by elections, nor is it found that the role of a more competitive election is different from that of a closed election. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The author discusses efforts to promote women's effective participation in electoral politics in rural India as an illustration of feminist politics and participatory democracy. She argues that feminist rethinking of politics and democracy can catalyze women's effective participation and challenge the structures of patriarchy that limit political action and social mobility. The opportunity for women's widespread participation in local elections came as a result of the 73rd Amendment to the Indian Constitution in 1993, reserving 33 percent of elected seats in village councils for female candidates. That alone, however, is not enough, as women are limited by a variety of social, cultural, economic, and political factors, such as traditional gendered expectations of the role and position of women in the family and community, caste and class inequalities, lack of education, and lack of knowledge of the laws. In this article, the author analyzes the role of social movement organizations engaged in participatory action research, training, advocacy, and networking with and for women at the grassroots level. Detailed exposition of the work of Aalochana, a feminist organization in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, provides insight into the possibilities and challenges of feminist politics to engender grassroots democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research attempts to understand women and politics in the context of market reforms and democratic elections in a rural Chinese village. More specifically, it examines how marketization, which started in 1978, and democratization, which was initiated in 1987, together have influenced women's participation in local village elections. Based on qualitative information collected from interviews and focus groups conducted over a three-year period between 2002 and 2004, it is evident that although women's political participation is strong, there is gender inequality in political participation at this grassroots level. Further, political participation is mediated by interactions between the state, the community, and individual families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines new directions of Taiwanese social movements during the last decade — their promises, struggles, agendas and obstacles. Ranging from loosely knit collective protests to the activities of well-structured organizations, these grassroots actions seek to change society in ways deriving from a variety of socio-cultural imaginings — some utopian, others firmly grounded in either political and economic analyses or cultural criticism. I find that the processes by which people mobilize, organize, and involve themselves engage a wide array of motivations, meanings, opportunities and limitations. This article investigates various perspectives on Taiwanese social movements through an ethnography of democracy as a process of social struggle for survival, citizenship and meaning, rather than as an abstraction of liberalism. I mainly focus on urban social movement organizations, which began to emerge on the public scene in the 1980s and flourished in the 1990s, situating them within a culture of protest in the making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The villagers’ autonomy in China, which started from the 1980s, has been limited by the social, especially the political and legal, conditions. Only a partial realization was eventually realized amid the inevitable influence from the central power. As the experience of some rural Chinese areas demonstrates, autonomy by law is the only direction of institutional development of villagers’ autonomy. However, in the current environment of historical habits, legal practice, mental thoughts, economic and social mortality, and politics, the villagers’ autonomy is more easily prone to the power rather than laws. To facilitate autonomy by law, the following strategies thus bear particular importance: (1) improve the legislation system to pave the way for the rule of law; (2) change rural governments’ attitude towards villagers’ autonomy and replace the intrusion by the macro direction; (3) abandon redundant government regulations to guarantee autonomy; (4) establish the system of legal remedy as a legal protection.