Informal democratization: brokers, access to public services and democratic accountability in Indonesia and India

This article compares the role of brokers in mediating access to public services in India and Indonesia. Brokered state-citizen interaction is generally considered to be detrimental to democratic accountability and governance. Yet recent studies are emphasizing that brokers can also be empowering. Reconciling these contrasting assessments, I argue in this paper that the character of brokerage networks shapes the capacity of citizens to hold their politicians and bureaucrats to account. Employing over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in both India and Indonesia, I develop a comparative framework that compares brokerage networks in terms of their degree of fragmentation, institutionalization and levelling. In Indonesia the versatile and more state-centered nature of brokers networks plays into the hands of incumbents, while the fragmented and more levelled nature of India's brokerage networks strengthens democratic accountability. I use this comparison to advance the argument that the evolution of brokerage networks constitutes an important, yet little-noticed dimension of democratization processes. When citizens gain access to public services through networks that are fragmented, institutionalized and less marked by social hierarchies, politicians and bureaucrats face stronger pressures to perform.