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My name is Chamnan Wattanasiri form the Center for Civil Society
Promotion in Kamphaeng Phet. I have two questions for Leena and Dr. Rajeev.
First of all, about indexes of democracy, I think there are a lot of factors
involving in democratization, but my first question is that:
If you have to prioritize or choose strategically leading factors like no. 1,
no. 2, I know that there are so many factors, but if you have to prioritize, what
would be no. 1 and no. 2 factors for successful democratization?
My second question, I didn’t hear about the role of education as a social
institution for democratization, so my question is the role of education system
within a country. You may think at education as a socialization machine or
engine of the society. So, would you elaborate a little bit that how important
education play role in successful democratization. Thank you.
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We don’t prioritize in a sense of saying that which aspect of the attribute
is more important than the others, the representative government, or
fundamental rights, participatory engagement. We don’t make that as an
institute or organization. We don’t make that judgement as such. We look at
these five aspects and all many sub-attributes that are there. But if you ask me
personally, I would say, perhaps, there are two, which is, one is the state-
building or ensuring that institutions are strong, and the second one is the
citizen engagement and civic empowerment. And I think not in this order, but
so that these two do take place simultaneously because, often, there is
discussion whether we should have first good governance and then on the
civic… citizen engagement, or first citizen engagement moving on to leading
good governance, or state-building exercise. I think there are quite a lot of
studies these days showing that if you concentrate on state-building alone, that
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often leads to strengthened elite and non-participation. But if you only look at
the citizen participation and engagement, you have empowerment of citizens,
but in case, the state institutions are not able to respond, if you are not able to
deliver the basic services, that also leads to disillusionment of citizens. So,
these two need to go hand in hand. And in our indices we do include basic
welfare as an attribute and, under that, the issue of schooling and the level of
schooling is also included.
In principle, I do believe that obviously education and schooling is an
important aspect of democracy, but I don’t think personally that you can have
democracy also without very high level of formal education. India being a very
