High-profile water contamination crises like the one in Flint, Michigan, shake confidence in US water systems. This chapter examines the links between tap water failure, reduced trust in utilities and government, and increased demand for commercial water. We show that negative experiences with basic service quality erode overall trust in government and increase demand for private alternatives. Analyses of data from three independent national surveys demonstrate that individuals who experience problems with their local water such as dirty, bad-tasting, or low-pressure water service also report lower trust in local, state, and federal government. The relationship between water service quality and trust in government persists after controlling for party identification, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. We also find that tap water failure correlates with increased demand for commercial water sold from water kiosks, privately owned commercial water vendors. Taken together, these findings suggest that basic service failure erodes performative trust in government and increases demand for commercial drinking water.

Outside of geographic factors and pathways from Europe, there are a wide range of other theories about the roots of democracy. Chapter 14 surveys this wide literature and looks at theories on: agricultural transitions, modernization, inequality, labor scarcity, marriage and family patterns, feudalism, parliaments, Christianity, Catholicism, state size, state–society relations, and ideas. A brief summary of the literature and basic empirical tests of each are provided. The chapter concludes with a discussion of challenges related to causal inference and the relationship between the theory advanced in this book and these alternatives. It is concluded that most of these factors are best considered as proximal causes of democracy and are not necessarily at odds with the book’s framework.

Existing research has considered other geographic factors, outside of harbors, that may influence regime type. Other authors have considered the effects of climate, irrigation, agriculture, mountains, and islands, among others. Chapter 12 explores each of these alternatives in turn. The chapter includes statistical tests of each of the theories in the same form as the tests of our primary theory on harbors. Of the alternatives, we find support for distance from the equator as an explanatory variable for democracy, although its effect is entirely mediated by European ancestry. Other geographic factors have tenuous relationships with democracy when tested at the global level.

The villages, as noted in the previous chapter, rapidly changed into spaces that defied terminologies. They were not slums, nor were they apartment-style neighbourhoods. Instead, they emerged as one of the several forms of spaces that the precariat labour in big cities inhabit. But the 1963 exemption had not just changed the village physically. In the absence of the state following the exemption, the village community banked on its own informal set of institutions to fill the vacuum. In this chapter, I explore two such community institutions—the panchayat and the kunba, which work as economic institutions; and two economic institutions—committees and ‘financing’, which in turn function as social institutions. The bhaichara form of social cohesion, deeply ingrained in the panchayat and kunba relations and even in the ethos of the local financing forms since the 1960s, was further strengthened in the absence of the state. In the shadows of the state and its laws, these institutions flourished and became dynamic entities that could respond to the changing political economy of the city surrounding the villages.

In the next pages, we examine how these institutions were able to interweave their community and economic interests. One functioned like a cartel, another like a joint-stock company and the committees work like localised banks. These new solidarities allowed them to oppose the state during demolitions, consolidate their economic interests, manage the circulation of money and assert themselves as a social group in changing times. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the modern state finds itself co-opted and even interrupted in these spaces where new kinds of sociabilities emerge to sometimes collude with the state and at other times to oppose it. In this chapter, we delve into how a specific kind of accumulation, a vernacular kind, based on the ownership of land, begins to forge itself on the lines of community solidarity.

Chapter 9 presents a narrative history of European ancestry around the world. It begins by considering the maritime roots of empire-building before turning to the European diaspora. The chapter looks at the imperial ambitions that drove Europeans around the world, as well as other factors that affected the demographic balance between Europeans and non-Europeans in the places where they arrived. It then turns to ways of defining Europe and measuring European ancestry through time.

This chapter examines the relationship between moral trust in government and the choice of citizen-consumers to exercise voice and exit. We find that when faced with tap water failure, ethnic and racial minorities are less likely to voice their concerns to utilities due to their historical marginalization in the United States. This disparity in the likelihood of exercising voice is most prevalent among poor populations, with the effect especially pronounced among Hispanics. Further, we find that citizen-consumers who lack moral trust in government are more likely to consume bottled water, signifying exit from publicly provided services. Exit from public services has downstream political effects. Citizen-consumers who drink bottled water are less likely to engage in politics. As bottled water consumption increases, voting rates decrease. The consequences of declining trust in government and the turn away from public services strikes at the heart of democracy itself. When individuals do not trust government to provide basic services, there is little reason for them to engage in public life more broadly.

Chapter 8 shifts away from harbors and toward the role of European ancestry as another explanatory factor for democratic regimes. Representative democracy is argued to have acted as a club good that Europeans extended when they were numerous relative to indigenous populations and withheld otherwise. European ancestry may encourage democratic regimes through three possible pathways: exposure to democratic ideas, increased democratic infrastructure (e.g. education, property rights, and a political state), and incentives to control political outcomes.

The villagers were not just mute spectators as the city grew around them. Divested of their farmlands, but armed with compensation money, they were now forced to figure out ways in which the money could give them most returns. Stories of the older generation being cavalier with compensation money abound. Some arguably spent their money on alcohol and new possessions. Some were cheated out of their money. Some others made bad financial decisions. But many were clearly trying to make decisions based on available information to make the most of their situation with varying degrees of success. But irrespective of what the villagers did, their fates were intertwined with the fate of the city. This chapter traces what the early period of this transition —from 1960s to 1980s—looked like for these villagers and how they proceeded to create a stake for themselves in the emerging urban economy.

Making use of life histories or rather ‘stories they tell themselves about themselves’ to narrate an account that spanned generations, of failed endeavours and successful businesses, of pure grit and stray luck, I attempt to tell a story of villages against the backdrop of the urbanising city. Together, the story paints a picture of urban villages, which open up to new businesses, new money and, most crucially, real estate—most of which continue to function in the domain of informality and forge different relationships with the national and global political economy. However, I try to show in this chapter that a process that appears incidental and isolated is deeply linked to a changing political economic landscape of the country.

This story sounds very different from the story of deprivation and dispossession that several other studies have shown. The Jats are able to turn land acquisition into an opportunity, as land acquisition creates an active urban property market.

Distrust in government is contagious. Awareness of drinking water problems can lead the public to distrust their own local water supply, even when people do not personally experience basic service failure. For examlple, lead-testing requests increased dramatically in Providence, Rhode Island, following the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. This chapter examines the ways that water quality problems in one water utility affect customer behavior in other communities. Using an SLX spatial econometric modeling strategy, we show that communities’ demand for commercial water increases in response to other communities’ tap water problems when the communities are demographically and/or socioeconomically alike. Notably, these “spillover” effects are strongest for communities that are socially similar: The physical distance between communities does not affect demand for commercial drinking water in the same way. These findings indicate that problems with tap water anywhere have the potential to cause distrust of tap water everywhere.

Democracy has been conceptualized in a wide variety of ways. Chapter 2 begins with a discussion of the history of the idea of democracy itself. A definition of democracy is then introduced that is based on the dual dimensions of membership and accountability. The rest of the chapter is devoted to tracing the institutional history and evolution of democracy around the world from premodern times through the present. The final sections of the chapter focus on the measurement of this concept and a justification for investigating the deep roots of democracy instead of its proximal causes.