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People in Villages: Micro-level Studies in Political Economy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Robert H. Bates
Robert H. Bates
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Abstract

Recent micro-level studies of rural communities in the developing areas address themselves to three basic issues: (1) What are the major external forces that determine the welfare of persons residing in rural areas? (2) How do peasants respond to these forces? (3) What ethical evaluations are to be made of the outcome of the encounter between peasant communities and the forces intruding upon them from their environment? By addressing these questions, and by formulating and utilizing explicit models of peasant behavior, these studies provide a coherent approach to the study of the developing areas.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , October 1978 , pp. 129 - 149
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1978

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References

1 Perhaps the best review and critique of this literature is contained in Popkin, Samuel L., The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Change in Vietnam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1978)Google Scholar. The book is also important for the contribution it makes to developing rational models of collective behavior in peasant society.

2 As a result of isolating the process of succession from the distribution of preferences among the kingdom's citizenry, the rigid rules of genealogical determinism permitted the adoption of unpopular policies. Ironically, while the rules were adopted in part to increase predictability in public affairs, they did in fact lead to radical shifts in public policy. The rules determined who secured office but did not determine what the office holders' policies would be. Under more democratic procedures, of course, the content of policy would be determined—it would be the policy of the legendary median voter; the winning candidate would be indeterminate—it would be whoever selected the median policy position. See Ferguson, Phyllis and Wilks, Ivor, “Chiefs, Constitutions, and the British in Northern Ghana,” in Crowder, Michael and Ikime, Obaro, eds., West African Chiefs: Their Changing Status Under Colonial Rule and Independence (New York: Africana Publishing Company 1970), 326–69Google Scholar.

3 It has been pointed out that Scott's model does emphasize unwillingness to innovate, other-regarding behavior, and shunning of material gain. True. But Scott's model is one of individual rationality, and it allows him to derive and to account for these kinds of behavior. He attempts to explain them, rather than positing them as inherent tendencies. In this, Scott differs from earlier writers on “traditional man,” who built similar behavioral tendencies into their basic model. Unlike his predecessors, Scott is able to argue that under different circumstances, persons behaving in the risk-averse manner he describes will no longer insure themselves by observing the norm of reciprocity, etc.; when such behaviors are built into the model, however, there is no latitude for predicting that they will change. Scott's approach can thus be considered to be qualitatively different from that of his predecessors, despite the apparent similarities.

4 I have used this model myself, and am therefore subject to the same criticisms that I will make of these other works. See Bates, , Rural Responses to Industrialization: A Study of Village Zambia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1976)Google Scholar.

5 At this point we may note that Scott and many others are guilty of a major error. Peasants, it is contended, seek to keep the external market at arm's length and to use only local markets; for, it is held, the external market is subject to uncontrollable fluctuations. It is true that fluctuations cannot be controlled in the larger, external market; but they will be smaller. If it is risks that the peasants seek to avoid, they should therefore prefer to trade in larger markets.

The reasons the fluctuations will be smaller are as follows: concentrating on the supply side, say that the primary determinant of the level of supply is the occurrence of droughts. The larger the market, the greater the chance that at least some suppliers will be spared; products can then be moved into areas where they are relatively scarce and therefore command higher prices; this movement will continue to take place until the products command the same price everywhere, save for the cost of transport. The result of the movement of goods is thus a dampening of the rise in prices. Where the market is small, however, the chances are greater that all suppliers will be affected, and no movement of goods could reduce the rise in prices. Although this extreme case is rare, insofar as it is approximated, price rises will be greater. If they prefer small fluctuations, peasant consumers would then prefer larger markets.

6 Reports indicate that the Senegalese peanut farmers consume imported rice. I am indebted to Bruce F. Johnson for this point.

7 See Friedman, Milton and Savage, L. J., “The Utility Analysis of Choices Involving Risk,” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 56 (August 1948), 270–304CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 See, for example, the argument presented in Marglin, Stephen, “The Social Rate of Discount and the Optimal Rate of Investment,” Quarterly journal of Economics, Vol. 77 (February 1963), 95–111CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 It has been argued that the transfer of resources out of agriculture should receive the assent of the rural dwellers themselves, as they or their descendants will share in the benefits of the economic growth which these resources engender. But this argument assumes the very thing whose absence made coercion inevitable in the first place: the ability of a high regard for the welfare of future generations to induce voluntary savings. In other words, it ignores the public-goods feature of the welfare of future generations.

10 This argument appears most strongly in O'Brien (chaps. 3, 5, and 6), and Dunn and Robertson (chap. 8).

11 Olson, Mancur Jr., The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1965)Google Scholar; Crenson, Matthew A., The Un-Politics of Air Pollution (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins Press 1971)Google Scholar; Mayhew, David R., Congress: The Electoral Connection (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1974)Google Scholar; Fiorina, Morris P., Congress: Keystone of the Washington Establishment (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1977)Google Scholar; and Morris P. Fiorina and Roger G. Noll, “Voters, Bureaucrats, and Legislators: A Rational Choice Perspective on the Growth of Bureaucracy” (California Institute of Technology, Social Science Working Paper No. 159, June 1977). The approach is perhaps most completely and convincingly developed by Barry Wein-gast in his “A Representative Legislature and Regulatory Agency Capture,” Ph.D. diss. (California Institute of Technology 1977).

12 In parliamentary systems, the party in power can clearly behave like the single politican. It controls the government, even though it does not hold 100 percent of the seats. Manipulating the supply of divisible benefits, such as schools and clinics, rather than the supply of collective goods, it can then behave like a discriminating monopolist and provide services only to those who are willing to vote for it. As Dunn and Robertson show, the governing CPP behaved precisely in this way in the cocoa-growing regions of Ghana and so broke the hold of the political opposition (chap. 8, and esp. pp. 327 ff.).

13 Perhaps the seminal statement of this distinction is contained in Lowi, Theodore J., “American Business, Public Policy, Case-Studies, and Political Theory,” World Politics, xvi (July 1964), 677–715CrossRefGoogle Scholar.