This document discusses how democratic politics can impact local collective action through three main channels: 1. Political competition and varying voter turnout/margins of victory in elections can negatively influence cooperation levels as communities must spend more on political mobilization. 2. Better representation of politically salient groups like Other Backward Castes in cooperative leadership is linked to higher cooperation levels. 3. Learning to cooperate over time and having more established cooperatives are also associated with greater collective action. Democratic processes may facilitate balancing competing interests for sustainable community management of resources.

1. Democratic Politics and Collective Action Ashwini Chhatre Department of Geography University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign November 12, 2008 Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis Indiana University

6. Himachal Pradesh at a Glance

11. Performance of Cooperatives Wide variation in temporal trends

12. Variation in Cooperation One-way Analysis of Variance for cooperation Number of obs = 1890; Number of groups = 65; Source SS df MS F Prob > F Between coopid 2.190e+10 64 3.422e+08 60.39 0.0000 Within coopid 1.034e+10 1825 5665912.1 Total 3.224e+10 1889 17066134 Intraclass correlation Asy. S.E. [95% Conf. Interval] 0.67143 0.04096 0.59115 0.75170 Estimated SD of coopid effect 3402.671 Estimated SD within coopid 2380.318 Est. reliability of a coopid mean 0.98344 (evaluated at n=29.06)

13. Temporal Trends in Cooperation Random-effects GLS regression: Cooperation over time Number of obs = 1890; Number of groups = 65; Random effects u_i ~ Gaussian; Wald chi2(1) = 17.96; Prob > chi2 = 0.0000 cooperation | Coef. Std. Err. z P>|z| [95% Conf. Interval] year | -26.37698 6.223626 -4.24 0.000 -38.57506 -14.17889 _cons | 55269.19 12389.24 4.46 0.000 30986.72 79551.66 sigma_u | 3234.2834 sigma_e | 2369.7195 rho | .65068954 (fraction of variance due to u_i)

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