ABSTRACT
In developed, industrialized, comparatively affluent societies, the facts of political life ensure that a taste for ‘participatory’ democracy rarely gets beyond the stage of romantic yearning. One deplores what is rather inappropriately called the ‘decline’ of local self-government - the very use of this word implies a golden age mythology. In underdeveloped countries, however, a different set of conditions prevails. Admittedly their politicians and political scientists can get thoroughly romantic about grass-roots democracy, and even persuade substantial segments of public opinion that reconstructions of the national polity, based on the self-governing village republic. In a country engaged in a politico-economic revolution, participation at the grass-roots level is enormously important as a means both of enabling people to identify themselves with the regime. The ‘absorptive capacity’ of the province for rural works, it says, ‘relates primarily to the extent to which the people can be mobilized and involved in local development projects’.
