In this chapter, we examine the almost uniquely powerful position the British prime minister is in compared to heads of government abroad, and the long list of the PM’s powers and resources. With so much in their favour, why is their performance often so underwhelming? Premierships can go by in a blur of frenzied activity. Prime ministers typically only reflect fully on the powers and resources they possessed after their period in office is over, when they are writing their memoirs, ruefully reflecting on what might have been. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t precise powers, some formal, others informal, accumulated over the years, and it is these that we consider in this chapter. The most successful prime ministers, like Thatcher or Attlee, knew, by study or osmosis, how to use them.

Summary: Policies targeted at disciplining moneylenders was one approach to dealing with the problem of limited supply and high prices; the other was establishing alternative sources of affordable credit. Following rounds of discussion among colonial officials in the late nineteenth century on the type of credit supplier most suited to cater to demand in rural India, the government embarked on an ambitious project to transplant credit cooperatives as designed in Europe to Indian villages in 1904. The chapter explores the phase of transplant and how the cooperative enterprise in India differed from the European model. It examines how cooperatives performed, evaluates profit and loss statements and analyses whether expansion in the number of cooperatives led to inclusive development. The chapter finds negative outcomes in each measure. Prevailing political objectives prioritizing equity over efficiency led to a cooperative structure operating with low savings and weak regulation. The regulatory problem ultimately led to the exclusion of poorer peasants from accessing credit and overleveraged cooperative banks. Injections of public money into rural cooperatives embedded moral hazard in the sector. These problems became more severe in the 1940s and 1950s.

This chapter details this book’s theoretical contribution. It develops the notion of mobilizational citizenship, which synthesizes an innovative framework that explains how and why mobilization endures over time in highly inhospitable conditions at the urban margins. This framework’s conceptualization of citizenship goes beyond traditional, liberal approaches. It relies on a more flexible and informal notion of political incorporation, which depends on the ways in which collectives build their identity and rescale community-building beyond the framework of the nation-state. In other words, it captures an alternative type of politicization that is often neglected in studies of collective action. Mobilizational citizenship involves the dynamic interaction between four components: agentic memory, mobilizing belonging, mobilizing boundaries, and decentralized protagonism. The chapter’s framework also outlines the barriers to mobilization in the urban margins. It explains how political institutions regularly withdraw and control political capital within urban communities in the aim of demobilizing them. When mobilizational citizenship fails to develop, local dwellers engage in political capital hoarding dynamics within their neighborhoods, which further deactivates collective action.

This chapter explains how activists in the urban margins decentralize protagonism to transform a mobilizing collective identity into citizenship-building. It uses Gamson’s typology of micromobilizing acts to analyze their face-to-face interactions within three types of encounters: organizing, divesting, and reframing acts. Based on interviews and observations, it shows how activists conceive their collective identity of mobilization as political capital and consequently strategize to diffuse it. In other words, the activists teach each other the identity symbols and values that both promote and validate collective action locally. Within the local social movement community, political capital usually flows from informal leaders to younger, less experienced activists and potential challengers. This socialization process progressively certifies young local activists as community-builders, both individually and collectively. It also makes it more likely for individual leaders to be replaced by others once they decide to quit their role. In turn, this decentralization of protagonism promotes citizenship-building and enduring mobilization, thus creating mobilizational citizenship.

This chapter tests the key mechanism: the political status of a legislator sends a credible signal of strong political connections to low-level bureaucrats, which deters expropriations. This mechanism is supported by interview evidence, a case study and two national audit experiments on local government officials. I show that Chinese bureaucrats are much more likely to respond to entrepreneurs with connections to local legislatures, while being a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) member does not trigger any preferential behavior of bureaucrats toward entrepreneurs.