Welcome to the Journal of Comparative Politics

Comparative Politics, an international journal presenting scholarly articles devoted to the comparative analysis of political institutions and processes,communicates new ideas and research findings to social scientists, scholars, students, and public and NGO officials. The journal is indispensable to experts in universities, research organizations, foundations, embassies, and policymaking agencies throughout the world. 

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A New Era of Editorial Leadership at Comparative Politics

With the first issue of the 58th volume of Comparative Politics, we mark a change in the guard of the leadership of the journal. After more than 45 years of service as members of the editorial committee at Comparative Politics and after 30 years of service as the journal’s Editors-in-Chief, Professors Kenneth Paul Erickson and Irving Leonard Markovitz are stepping down. Both Ken and Lenny, as we know them, have shown extraordinary dedication to the journal and, more generally, to the field of comparative politics. They have modeled integrity, collegiality, hard work, and a commitment to excellence. They have kept the journal strong. Thanks to their leadership, CP is ranked as Q1 among all Political Science journals, while remaining among a handful of independent publications in the industry. We are so grateful to them.

With the approval of the editorial committee, Professors Erickson and Markovitz have passed the baton to Professors Eva Bellin and Nicholas Rush Smith who will now assume the role of Editors-in-Chief. Both Bellin and Smith are committed to making the journal the strongest it can be – a platform for path-breaking research in comparative politics, open to all methods. But we are especially committed to sustaining the journal’s long-standing role as an outlet for excellent qualitative research that explores ambitious theoretical questions in politics, whether that research be rooted in comparative historical analysis, small-n analysis, process tracing, in-depth interviews, or ethnographic field work. We are also dedicated to being a journal that fosters emerging scholars by providing a quick initial decision, high-quality feedback on papers sent out for review, and fair consideration of work submitted by all scholars regardless of their academic rank or institution. Professors Erickson and Markovitz helped launch the publishing careers of many scholars in the discipline and we hope to carry on that legacy. This will be our tribute to our exemplars, Ken and Lenny.

Welcome to the Journal of Comparative Politics2025-10-03T16:59:52+00:00

Volume 58, Number 1, October 2025

Michael Weintraub, Abbey Steele, and Sebastián Pantoja-Barrios, The Bureaucracy of Reparations and Political Engagement

Countries transitioning from civil war and authoritarian legacies often adopt transitional justice measures like reparations, prosecutions, and truth commissions. The success of these efforts depends, in part, on interactions with victims. We propose a framework linking victims’ engagement with reparations programs to political participation. We then use panel survey data from over 12,000 respondents in conflict-affected regions of Colombia to show that those who engage with transitional justice institutions are more likely to contact local leaders or politicians and join grassroots organizations. Mediation analysis reveals that while victimization drives much of this engagement, interactions with reparations programs independently increase contacting leaders and voting. Our findings have important implications for transitional justice, peacebuilding, and democratic participation.

Kai M. Thaler, From Insurgent to Incumbent: Ideology, Rebel Governance, and Statebuilding after Rebel Victory in Civil Wars

Why do some victorious rebels invest in statebuilding and public goods, while others prioritize private enrichment? I theorize that post-victory governance is rooted in rebels’ pre-victory ideologies, distinguishing between rebels’ ideologies on two dimensions: how much they aim to transform society (programmatic or opportunistic) and the proportion of the population they wish to benefit (inclusive or exclusive). Programmatic transformation and delivering inclusive benefits require building infrastructural power and expanding state reach, while opportunistic use of power for exclusive, private gains does not necessitate non-coercive power. Fieldwork-based case studies of three victorious rebel organizations—the more programmatic-inclusive FSLN in Nicaragua, the more opportunistic-exclusive NPFL in Liberia, and the middle-ground NRM in Uganda—provide support for the theory, and the conclusion addresses implications for scholarship and policy.

Kelly Stedem, What State? Political Parties and Non-State Security Provision in Lebanon

Security is the canonical public good provided by the state to its citizens. Yet, many states are incapable or unwilling to provide security in a consistent fashion across their territory. The provision of security, order, and management of crime is a crucial “good” that parties can and do offer their constituents, resulting in widespread variation in security at the neighborhood level. What explains this variation in the provision of security and local policing by political parties? Drawing on 132 semi-structured interviews conducted during eight months of fieldwork in Lebanon, this study suggests that organizational capacity is one determinant of whether political parties step into the role of security providers. It shows that maintaining robust linkages with constituent communities and party members at the local level are necessary to coordinating security measures.

Sasha de Vogel, Hannah S. Chapman, and Lauren A. McCarthy, Authoritarian Information Gathering amid Crisis

How do crises affect information gathering in authoritarian regimes? This study examines how crises impact appeal systems’ ability to collect information on everyday and crisis-related concerns. We argue that crisis immediacy and government repression shape the number and topic of appeals received. Utilizing a novel dataset of appeals submitted to Russia’s Presidential Administration, we analyze four crises: the 2018 pension reform, the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and the subsequent partial military mobilization. High-immediacy crises generate more crisis-related appeals, while repression suppresses everyday appeals on routine governance issues. This study contributes to scholarship on informational autocracies by highlighting the vulnerability of information-gathering institutions. Focusing on citizen behavior rather than regime incentives, we offer insights into how individuals utilize appeals systems under crisis conditions, enriching understanding of state-society dynamics and the limitations of consultative institutions in autocratic contexts.

Benjamin Abrams, Review Article, A Revolution in Revolutionary Theory?

Recently, the field of revolutionary theory has seen a flourishing of novel scholarly efforts that constitute a genuine regeneration of how we conceive of, investigate, and interpret revolutions. The first elements of this regeneration of revolutionary theory have now found their way to print, and the scene is set for a prospective revolution in our field. This article surveys the history of revolutionary theory since 1883, establishes the scope and contribution of the field’s present rejuvenation, and charts the place of these developments in the field’s broader path, before closing by exploring what may be in store for students of revolution in the future. In doing so, the article draws attention to three areas of current rejuvenation: latent patterns of revolution; long revolutionary outcomes; and revolutionary ideas. Moreover, it proposes three areas for fruitful new research: revolutionary programs, revolutions as political systems, and the dynamics occurring within “the fog of revolution.”
Volume 58, Number 1, October 20252025-10-03T16:53:38+00:00

Volume 57, Number 4, April 2025

Camilla Reuterswärd, Policy Commitment as Voter Mobilization Strategy: Clientelist Parties, Interest Groups, and Abortion Policy in Subnational Mexico

Existing research contends that clientelist parties seek alternative voter mobilization strategies when material exchanges no longer guarantee office. This article argues that engaging in strategic interactions with influential interest groups constitutes an alternative way to mobilize support. Pressured by competition, clientelist parties align policy with interest group preferences and obtain support from members and followers in return. Using a comparative subnational design and primary data, I show how Mexico’s PRI passed a restrictive abortion amendment to obtain clergy support in Yucatán but abstained from reform in Hidalgo where it faced similar competition but perceived clergy as unable to bolster votes. The findings shed light on clientelist parties’ voter mobilization strategies and the policy effects of interest group interactions in new democracies and other developing contexts.

Sebastian Diessner, Niccolo Durazzi, and David Hope, Embedding Skill Bias: Technology, Institutions, and Inequality in Wages and Benefits

Is rising inequality an inevitable consequence of the transition to a knowledge-based economy? Departing from existing approaches in labor economics and comparative political economy, we develop an account of inequality in the knowledge economy that foregrounds the role of labor market institutions. We argue that collective bargaining institutions play a critical role in mediating the skill bias commonly associated with the diffusion of information and communications technologies (ICT), because they determine whether employers have the discretion to selectively reward strategically important high-skilled workers with greater wages and benefits. We then test our argument by carrying out cross-country analyses of both wage premia and non-wage benefits in the OECD countries. We find robust evidence in support of our theoretical propositions across a range of model specifications.

Juan J. Fernández, Antonio M. Jaime-Castillo, and Berta Caihuelas Navajas, The Socio-Structural Basis of the Long-Term Decline in Traditional Left-Right Class Voting in Affluent Democracies, 1964–2019

How can we explain the long-term decline in the class-based voting cleavage observed in high-income democracies since the 1960s? The causes of this decline are far from being fully understood. We hypothesize that the decline in this cleavage between the working class and other classes is connected to the shrinkage of the working class, increases in economic prosperity, and a reduction in levels of inequality. To test these hypotheses, we use a newly-assembled dataset including sixteen advanced democracies with a long temporal coverage (1964–2019) and a class voting index based on the difference between the proportion of a particular social class in a party’s electorate and the proportion of this social class in the electorate as a whole. Models using country fixed effects confirm a decline in the class-based voting cleavage across Western democracies. Controlling for several political variables, the size of the working class constitutes the best predictor of declines in class voting in affluent democracies.

Neil Loughlin, Is Chinese Investment Driving Authoritarianism? Evidence from the First Decade of the Belt and Road in Southeast Asia

This article investigates the impact of Chinese investment on authoritarianism through the lens of authoritarian linkage, focusing on the first decade of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Southeast Asia, particularly Cambodia and Malaysia. While both countries were electoral autocracies when the BRI was launched in 2013, their regime trajectories diverged. In Cambodia, Chinese investment reinforced elite patronage networks and coercive state-society relations, stabilizing the regime during political unrest. Conversely, in Malaysia, it contributed to the collapse of the long-ruling authoritarian coalition by exacerbating elite fragmentation and popular discontent over corruption, which has led to greater political competition. These findings demonstrate how domestic political economy dynamics mediate the effects of Chinese investment, revealing its variable influence on regime outcomes.

Yang Yan and Zhusong Yang, Portraying Competence, Benevolence, or Party Loyalty? Political Propaganda and the Image-Building of Political Elites in China

How do political elites in authoritarian regimes shape their public image? Drawing on a unique dataset covering official news releases of the daily public activities of all provincial party secretaries in China from 2016 to 2022, this study finds that authoritarian elites manipulate the propaganda apparatus to project various public images. Text analysis shows that provincial leaders employ a variety of themes and narratives to highlight their activities, resulting in four types of images: competence-oriented, benevolence-oriented, party-loyalty-oriented, and versatile. Case studies reveal how the configuration of conditions, such as the official’s age, professional background, political connections with the top leader, and the socioeconomic characteristics of their province, relate to their image-building strategies. The findings, which are supported by methods including topic modeling, machine learning, and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, contribute to the literature on political propaganda by emphasizing the diversity of public images among senior political elites in non-democratic systems.

Omar Báez and Kent Eaton, Recentralization in Mexico: Reconfiguring the Center in Intergovernmental Relations

Understanding recentralization as a vertical phenomenon requires careful attention to the horizontal distribution of power at the national level. We articulate a theoretical argument that emphasizes the content of the coalition that enacts recentralization, demonstrating that politicians can return power to the center without empowering the president. In Mexico, the pluralism of the coalition that pushed for recentralization from 2007 to 2018 led to institutional designs that avoided investing authority in the presidency and opted instead to empower a series of autonomous constitutional bodies. The Mexican case thus points to a simple but powerful hypothesis to add to the literature on multilevel governance: the broader that coalitions that push for recentralization, the wider the set of actors who will be empowered at the center of the political system.
Volume 57, Number 4, April 20252025-07-02T17:26:33+00:00

Volume 57, Number 3, April 2025

Luicy Pedroza and Pau Palop-García, Tracing the Pathways for Labor Migrants in Thirty States: The Nexus between Immigration Regulations and Immigrant Rights

Academia and policy worlds consider the skill-based discrimination of migrants at entry as legitimate and unproblematic. Yet, the apparently neutral criterion of “skills” is under increasing scrutiny and, we contend, rightly so: its blurriness is impractical for comparative purposes and conceals that selection endures after immigration. With a new dataset encompassing thirty diverse states from Asia, Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean, we examine how entry regulations connect to immigrant rights and access to permanent residence. We identify four clusters of countries displaying varying relations of immigration selections at entry with packages of rights and the possibility to settle, thereby largely defining the trajectories that are possible for different categories of migrant workers. Variation matters: some states carefully select by “skills” at entry and control access to rights, but several others provide fairly equal rights to ample groups of migrants regardless of skills.

Patricia L. Maclachlan, Mechanisms of Resistance: Informal Institutional Impediments to Japanese Postal Privatization

Why has Japan failed to fulfill the mission of its 2005 postal privatization legislation? The answer is informal institutions that empower the postmasters within the electoral system and facilitate the mobilization of elites on behalf of anti-reformist goals. To support this claim, I analyze three such institutions: the postmasters’ ownership of postal facilities; the re-employment of former bureaucrats by the postal system and of top postal employees elsewhere in the system; and sales and vote-mobilization quotas. Theoretically, this study analyzes four sources of informal institutional resilience following formal institutional change: the heretofore understudied participation of officialdom in the introduction, communication, and enforcement of informal institutions; the establishment of such institutions prior to new formal rules; institutional duplication across economic sectors; and institutional complementarities.

Miguel Carreras, Sofia Vera, and Giancarlo Visconti, Money and Time in Access to Public Services: How Do Citizens Evaluate Different Forms of Bureaucratic Corruption?

There is extensive research about how bureaucracies in the developing world depart from the Weberian ideal and the ways in which corruption distorts the provision of public services. However, less is known about how citizens respond to the corruption they encounter in daily life. In this study, we implement a conjoint experiment to investigate how citizens evaluate different forms of corruption in the public sector. We find that they prefer “speed money” corrupt bureaucrats and reject “petty theft” corrupt bureaucrats when seeking a government service. In addition, this preference for “speed money” is not more salient among citizens who perceive the bureaucracy as inefficient. Instead, those who can afford to pay bribes are more accepting of bureaucratic corruption.

Nathalia Sandoval-Rojas, Conversion from Below: A Comparative Analysis of Colombian Indigenous Peoples’ Transformations of FPIC

This article examines how previously excluded social actors transform democratic institutions that offer limited, subordinated inclusion. It introduces the concept of “conversion from below,” which refers to endogenous institutional change driven by historically marginalized groups. By comparing three indigenous mobilizations aimed at broadening Free, Prior, and Informed Consultation and Consent (FPIC), the article demonstrates that institutional changes from below occur when there is ambiguity in the definition of the institution; this ambiguity can be exploited in favorable venues and when groups can signal their disruptive power. This study enhances our understanding of endogenous institutional change and sheds light on the dynamics of engagement and resistance of newly included groups with inclusionary institutions in Latin America.

Laura García-Montoya, Isabel Güiza-Gómez, and María Paula Saffon, Entering the Political Arena in Exclusionary Settings: A Grassroots-Led Turn to the Left in Colombia

Under what conditions can the Left become electorally competitive in exclusionary contexts where actors championing redistribution face barriers to entry? We argue that leftist parties can significantly increase electoral support during inclusionary institutional openings, such as peace processes, when previously excluded grassroots actors find new spaces to mobilize for redistribution. By engaging in hinge institutions—non-binding, nationwide platforms—grassroots movements strengthen their organizational and ideational endowments, becoming potent brokers for heretofore weak leftist parties. Using a difference-in-differences design and a novel database on citizen proposals to the Colombian peace table, we show that grassroots mobilization mainly increases the Left’s vote share in post-accord presidential elections at the municipal level. We unpack the mechanisms through in-depth interviews with key actors and party manifesto analysis.

Daniel Carelli, Research Note, Shifts of Administrative Power: Competence Trumps Aristocracy in Swedish State-Building

This study explores the transition from patrimonial structures to the inclusion of ordinary citizens in public office, focusing on Swedish state-building. Analyzing newly collected data on 1,351 civil servants, the research reveals how the demand for competence led to the adoption of meritocratic recruitment starting in the seventeenth century. This shift contributed to Sweden’s elimination of systemic corruption by the nineteenth century. Key factors in this transition include the increasing complexity of public administration tasks, which drove education policies; the ennoblement of individuals to broaden the pool of qualified personnel; and tensions within the expanded noble class. Conceptualized as “administrative democratization,” this process initially enhanced competence at lower ranks and progressively empowered ordinary citizens in senior positions, underscoring education’s role in developing effective public administration.
Volume 57, Number 3, April 20252025-07-02T17:28:45+00:00

Volume 57, Number 2, January 2025

Nicolai Goritz, Prompting Peasant Protest: Cashews, Coalitions, and Collective Action in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire

Political scientists have historically viewed smallholder farmers in low-income countries as lacking the capacity to collectively oppose adverse policies. This article argues that they can if they are able to attribute price distortions to government action. Apart from direct taxes, however, this is likely to occur only when traders inform smallholders of unfavorable policies. When traders are also significantly harmed by a price-distorting policy (e.g., by an export ban), they are motivated to use their networks and financial resources to inform farmer protest. When traders can pass on price distortions to farmers (as with low export taxes), they will not. The article probes this argument through a controlled comparative case analysis of export bans and taxes on raw cashew nuts in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.

Kathryn Hendley and Peter Murrell, The Formation and Resilience of Law-Abiding Attitudes Under Authoritarianism: The Case of Russia

Authoritarian leaders frequently send mixed messages about law. While official rhetoric typically emphasizes obeying law, leaders have proven willing to sidestep the law when it proves inconvenient. We explore the impact of this duality on the attitudes of Russian citizens, drawing on three rounds of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey. To identify the separate effects of cohort, age, and survey year, we use existing estimates of a function relating age to the predisposition to form new attitudes. Our results indicate that one factor driving Russians’ attitudes on law-abiding is the strength of the Kremlin’s messaging on the importance of obeying the law especially in their formative years. This effect would have been strongest for the oldest Russians. Yet, ceteris paribus, more years lived in Russia lead to declines in law-abiding attitudes. The net result of these two effects is that older Russians profess greater law abidingness. Putin’s emphasis on obeying the laws on the books has left its mark in the increasing prevalence of law-abiding attitudes.

Kurt Weyland, Why Populist Authoritarians Rarely Turn into Repressive Dictators

Why do most authoritarian regimes installed by populist chief executives not become full-scale, repressive dictatorships? As explanation, scholars argue that populist leaders base their rule on charismatic appeal and voluntary mass support; therefore, they do not need harsh coercion, which would undermine their popular legitimacy. While corroborating this argument, I highlight a crucial complementary factor: populist chief executives find it difficult to marshal large-scale political repression. After all, their insistence on personalistic autonomy and unconstrained predominance creates tension with the military institution, the mainstay of organized coercion. Due to this inherent distance, most populist rulers lack the dependable military support to sustain the imposition of harsh autocracy. I substantiate these arguments with relevant cases from contemporary Latin America, especially Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, and Peru.

Eduardo Alemán, Tiffany D. Barnes, Juan Pablo Micozzi, and Sebastián Vallejo Vera, Gender, Institutions, and Legislative Speech

Speechmaking is a vital resource for legislators and holds particular importance for women lawmakers, who frequently constitute a numerical minority and face constraints on their political influence. We argue that formal and informal institutions, district characteristics, and issue priorities shape women’s speech participation. Analyzing twenty-eight years of speeches from Chile’s Chamber of Deputies, we first show that women’s speeches constitute a small share of all speeches, directly corresponding to their numeric representation. Proportionally, however, women are over/under-represented in speechmaking across different policy areas. After controlling for various factors correlating with gender, including committee assignments, tenure, and district characteristics, women’s relative participation is similar to men’s in most topics but exceeds men’s in areas that disproportionately affect women’s lives, reflecting their commitment to substantive representation.

Nagyeong Kang, DaEun Kim, and Chong-Sup Kim, A Global Assessment of Gender Quota Facilitating Mechanisms: Placement Mandates, Sanctions, and Financial Incentives

How do facilitating mechanisms affect the share of women in parliament? Specifically, is there an ideal combination of quota types and facilitating mechanisms that leads to greater female representation in parliament? This research uses a comprehensive dataset covering 186 countries in 2021 to provide a global landscape of the gender quota types and their facilitating mechanisms. Employing the OLS regression, we identified positive associations between placement mandates and strong sanctions and women’s parliamentary presence in legislative candidate system. In contrast, financial incentives under the reserved seat system showed a negative association. Our country-level analysis reveals that female aspirants face multifaceted challenges, suggesting that multiple issues should be addressed for financial incentives to effectively improve female representation.

Consuelo Amat and Claire Trilling, Review Article, Who Gains from Nonviolent Action? Unpacking the Logics of Civil Resistance

Research in conflict studies comparing nonviolent and violent collective action has gained widespread attention due to the counterintuitive finding that nonviolent movements succeed more often than armed movements. However, rising repression and authoritarianism worldwide, alongside declining success rates for protest movements, highlight the need to further theorize and test the conditions under which nonviolent action succeeds. This article distills the different logics by which excluded minorities are advantaged or disadvantaged in nonviolent action. It also reviews three new books that advance the field of movement effectiveness in the short and long runs, and that demonstrate that success is context-dependent, with few characteristics universally conferring advantage or disadvantage. We conclude by outlining areas for future research, including the role of digital technologies.
Volume 57, Number 2, January 20252025-01-12T17:55:43+00:00

Volume 57, Number 1, October 2024

Alex Dyzenhaus, Sweetening the Deal: The Political Economy of Land Redistribution in South Africa’s Sugar Sector

Under what conditions do land transfers occur under land reform? Theories of land redistribution focus on demand-side explanations for land transfers where the state allocates land in exchange for support from voters or rural elites. In this article, I argue that land transfers under market land redistribution are driven by supply-side characteristics of landholders. Using the case of South Africa’s sugar sector, I show that landholders chose to sell their land via redistribution when they had the economic incentive to preserve existing state-support frameworks and had collective capacity from centralized institutions. To understand when and why land redistribution occurs, one must pay attention to the landholders’ relationship to the state and their internal sectoral organization. In some cases, landholders may have an incentive to redistribute their land.

Jessica A.J. Rich, Elize Massard da Fonseca, and Liam Bower, What Makes Bureaucracies Politically Resilient? Evidence from Brazil's Covid-19 Vaccination Campaign

This article sheds new light on the drivers of bureaucratic resilience in the face of presidential attacks, an understudied but politically salient topic. Scholars have long shown how political advocacy can protect bureaucracies from presidential attacks on policy regulation. We argue, however, that advocacy is insufficient to defend bureaucracies against attacks on policy implementation, which occurs largely outside the formal political arena. Through a case study of Brazil’s successful Covid-19 vaccination campaign, we call attention to two additional forms of support for agencies under attack—resource provision and social activism—that come into play during the implementation phase of policy. In conjunction with political advocacy, resource provision and social activism bolster bureaucracies under attack by filling in where other forms of support fall short.

Christopher W. Hale, Resource Mobilization, Social Capital, Religion, and Protest across Latin America

What factors predispose an individual to engage in protest? Previous studies argue pre-existing social institutions provide the social capital and resource mobilization that facilitate collective action and protest movements, but less work has examined how this social capital and resource capacity develops. Utilizing more than 200,000 individuals surveyed across eighteen Latin American countries from the years 2002 through 2018, this study finds institutional decentralization by the Catholic Church is positively associated with individual propensities to engage in protest. Catholic decentralization is theorized to overcome free rider problems and enable the development of grassroots social capital and resources that empower collective action.

Amanda Driscoll, Aylin Aydin-Cakir, and Susanne Schorpp, Public (In)Tolerance of Government Non-Compliance with High Court Decisions

Governments’ compliance with high court decisions is a critical factor affecting judicial independence, power, and legitimacy. Under what conditions do citizens tolerate incumbent non-compliance with apex court decisions? Some theories yield predictions that government supporters will be more tolerant towards non-compliance, while others assert that citizens may value judicial review irrespective of their political preferences. Although the underlying logic of both arguments is plausible, the contexts that shape citizens’ non-compliance preferences are not well identified. Focusing on the moderating effect of elite behavior and contextual factors, we demonstrate that supporters of incumbent governments are more tolerant of government non-compliance in the years following high-profile shows of interbranch attacks or government disregard of high court decisions, and in environments where the media is lacking independence.

Julia Smith Coyoli, Inducing Coproduction: Policy Implementation and Teachers

Cooperation with supportive societal organizations has been shown to help states implement policies. This article demonstrates that opposed organizations can also play this role, lending their resources in exchange for inducements (induced coproduction). Whether these organizations accept those inducements is a function of their preferences regarding the policy’s goals and implementation process. Inducements can overcome opposition to the latter but are less likely to respond to concerns about the former. Examining the subnational implementation of an education reform in Mexico, I show that opposition to goals predicts which teachers’ union locals rejected offered inducements. A paired comparison of two most similar Mexican states illustrates how opposition to goals results in a rejection of inducements (Oaxaca), as well as how induced coproduction results in implementation (Coahuila).

Santiago Anria, Candelaria Garay, and Jessica A.J. Rich, Social Movements and Policy Entrenchment

A vast scholarship shows that social movements can play pivotal roles in bringing about policies that benefit marginalized groups. However, the role of social movements in entrenching those policies—ensuring they take root—remains insufficiently studied. We set a research agenda for the study of how social movements shape policy entrenchment by calling attention to three commonly used strategies—occupying state bureaucracies, engaging in pressure and persuasion tactics, and building alliances with political parties—and analyzing the relationships among them. We illustrate these strategies through short case studies of social movements that achieved significant change benefitting marginalized groups in Latin America: the health movement in Brazil, the unemployed workers’ movements in Argentina, and peasant and indigenous movements in Bolivia.
Volume 57, Number 1, October 20242025-07-02T17:29:00+00:00
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