An Associational Advantage? Public Trust and Urban Governance in Delhi, India

• In Event: Trust, Solidarity, and Participation in South Asian Politics

Abstract

Cities in the Global South are sites where 55% of world’s population (World Bank 2022) engages in democratic contestation and claim-making with government institutions. In India, megacities such as Delhi continue to offer the promise of economic and social mobility, putting immense pressure on local institutions buckling under the demands of decentralization. While existing literature on democracy and decentralization establishes that citizens’ trust in local institutions is essential for effective delivery of public goods and services, we also know that the ability of these institutions to respond to India’s rapidly urbanizing population remains uneven. This paper aims to answer the following question: what explains variation in trust in local democratic institutions among the poor in rapidly urbanizing cities characterized by high levels of urban informality?

Based on 11 months of fieldwork in Delhi, India, I offer a novel typology of trust at the local level. I focus on public trust in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) among residents of unauthorized colonies that house approximately 30% of the city’s population. The paper develops a theory of localized trust-building and trust maintenance through horizontal ties among households, and vertical ties between households and neighborhood-level organizations. In addition, it explores the everyday trade-offs residents face between engaging with the state directly, through existing neighborhood-level organizations or other forms of collective action.

The findings have implications for our scholarly understanding of how perception and legitimacy at the local level influence subnational democratic outcomes. It makes three principal contributions to existing research. First, it contributes to literature on urbanization India, particularly scholarship on urban municipal politics in Delhi (Oldenburg 1978; Chakravorty and Sircar 2021), by empirically demonstrating the networked role of trust in fueling citizen engagement and perception at the neighborhood level. In doing so, it invites scholars to think about micro-level dynamics that undergird citizen involvement in urban local governance. Second, it extends existing work on performance and cultural theories of trust predominantly based on evidence from advanced industrialized countries (Dodsworth and Cheeseman 2020; Katzenstein 2018; Kim, Lee, and Kim 2020), by offering evidence from a major capital city in the Global South. Third, it offers empirical evidence for scholars to better understand how and why neighborhood networks matter for active citizenship and responsive governance, paving the way for scholarship that is more responsive to patterns of information exchange and legitimacy at the neighborhood level across diverse contexts in the field of comparative politics (Auerbach et al. 2018).

Trust also preserves peace in democratic societies. The positive relationship between political trust and peace is well-established (Hetherington 2005; Cox 2009; Sriwarakuel 2006; Hutchison and Johnson 2011; Chatagnier 2012; Wong 2016; Dyrstad, Bakke, and Binningsbø 2021). The findings of the paper further contribute to our understanding of the citizen-state trust relationship as the basis of political stability, citizenship and belonging in diverse societies, influencing micro-determinants of human security at the sub-national level.

Author

• Shagun Gupta, American University-SIS