Discuss the role of social movements in strengthening the democratic processes in developing societies. (2022, 15 Marks)
A social movement, in Sidney Tarrow‘s sense, is a sustained collective challenge by people with shared purpose, pursued largely outside routine institutions. In developing societies, where parties are often weak, clientelist or elite-captured, movements perform much of the work democratic theory assigns to representation. Their role is substantial, but conditional on institutions able to absorb their demands.
How movements strengthen democratic processes
- Voice for the excluded. Dalit, Adivasi, women’s and peasant movements bring in groups parties neglect. Rajni Kothari‘s non-party political process (1984) described grassroots formations occupying the space parties had vacated for the poor.
- Agenda-setting. Movements raise what coalition arithmetic keeps off the table: displacement, gender violence, forest rights, the costs of a development model.
- From street to statute. The Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, founded in Rajasthan in 1990 by Aruna Roy and others, turned wage-muster transparency into the Right to Information Act, 2005. Parallel campaigns produced MGNREGA (2005), the Forest Rights Act (2006) and the National Food Security Act (2013).
- Accountability between elections. Social audits, jan sunwais (public hearings) and protest scrutinise power continuously. The farmers’ movement secured repeal of three farm laws in 2021; youth protests over the NEET-UG 2026 paper leak forced Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign on 25 July 2026.
- Effective citizenship. Partha Chatterjee‘s political society (The Politics of the Governed, 2004) shows populations negotiating recognition before they are treated as rights-bearing citizens; movements convert paper rights into usable claims.
- New elites and parties. Movements train leaders and sometimes become parties: the anti-corruption mobilisation of 2011 produced the Aam Aadmi Party (2012).
- Democratisation itself. Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan (Why Civil Resistance Works, 2011) found that nonviolent campaigns of 1900–2006 succeeded about 53% of the time against 26% for violent ones, and more often left democracy behind. Bangladesh’s student uprising ousted Sheikh Hasina in August 2024; Nepal’s Gen Z protests of September 2025 led to elections on 5 March 2026, in which the Rastriya Swatantra Party won 182 of 275 seats.
Limits and risks
- Unrepresentativeness. Intensity is not numbers, and movement leaders face no electoral test.
- Anti-institutional capture. A campaign against corruption can turn into one against representative institutions, a path populists exploit.
- Repression. CIVICUS recorded detention of protesters in at least 82 countries in 2025 and rates India’s civic space “repressed”. Myanmar’s peaceful resistance to the 2021 coup hardened into armed conflict.
- Toppling without building. Leaderless digital movements remove governments more easily than they build accountable successors; Chenoweth notes success rates fell sharply in the 2010s.
- Co-optation and NGO-isation. Party capture and donor dependence blunt a movement’s edge.
Conclusion
Movements strengthen democracy in developing societies by widening participation, inserting neglected claims and enforcing accountability between elections. Their effect depends on the receiving institutions: where parliaments, courts and parties convert mobilisation into law, as India’s rights-based statutes show, movements deepen democracy; where those institutions are hollow, a movement’s victory can open a new crisis rather than settle the old one.