Usually we think of this as depressing. We’re struck by all the opportunities for enhancing the provision of this or that public good that go begging for far too long. But perhaps the price of a democracy that can hold big – and therefore, in all likelihood, socially and regionally diverse – countries together is indeed fragmented and slow politics. Watching Manmohan Singh smash his parliamentary coalition over the proposed nuclear deal with the US and then scramble in search of a new one in India’s multiparty maze and wondering about how either Barak Obama or John McCain would go about constructing deals with Congress in a time of social division and partisan bitterness, I found myself starting to conclude as much.
One could debate the virtues of economies from political scale as opposed to more timely delivery of public goods. But in these two big democracies that’s not where the action is. For all their differences, in both cases it’s all about who can find ways of negotiating a saleable vision through in inescapably fragmented power structures to achieve some semblance of a coherent policy outcome.