Volume 43, Number 3, April 2011

Two views on the impact of church-state relations on civil society draw competing conclusions. According to the first view, state support of religion encourages faith-based social capital by providing vital resources for religious organizations. In contrast, the competing view holds that state support of religion crowds out religious civic engagement, as responsibilities are transferred from citizens to the state. Based on a sample of twenty-four European countries and combining a wide range of church-state indicators with survey data, it is evident that state support of religion does not foster faith-based social capital. Rather, overwhelming evidence shows that government involvement in religion weakens religious membership, volunteering, and donations.

The core idea inspiring democracy is to empower people. To measure democracy in ways that capture its empowering nature, one must focus on popular rights and take into account rule of law as a state quality that makes these rights effective. Based on this premise, an index of “effective democracy,” tested for 150 states, best represents the empowering nature of democracy because it most clearly captures democracy’s embedding in empowering conditions in the wider society. Effective democracy is shown to be most firmly embedded in (a) empowering socioeconomic conditions that make people capable of practicing democracy and (b) empowering sociocultural conditions that make them willing to do so. People empowerment appears to be a unity of empowering societal conditions and empowering regime characteristics.

Three related arguments can be made about the autonomy drives that have gathered strength in the last decade in the most economically vibrant subnational regions in Bolivia and Ecuador. First, based on analysis of the actions and actors associated with each, these phenomena are classifiable as “conservative autonomy movements.” Second, the disjuncture between the concentration of political power in national capitals and economic power in vibrant subnational regions explains why these movements emerged in Bolivia and Ecuador but not elsewhere in Latin America and why they have emerged now and not earlier in each country. Third, the mobilizing structures that these twin movements draw on, as well as the framing choices that each has made, account for the greater strength of the autonomy movement in Bolivia.

The current theoretical debate about the heightened role of Latin American technocrats centers on their autonomy from other sociopolitical actors, especially their political superiors, international financial institutions, and business interests. Assessment of the independence técnicos wield, based on an in-depth analysis of the work of economic experts in Colombia and Peru, shows that a “technocratic autonomy” perspective best accounts for the activity of experts in these countries. Two crucial factors explain this autonomy: (1) technocrats’ use of expertise to enhance and maintain their influence; and (2) the mutual balance among powerful stakeholders, who prefer technocratic independence to control of economic policy by a competing actor.

A transitional polity in the third wave of democratization may adopt many western institutional forms, yet its minority and disadvantaged groups may continue to face greater obstacles in addressing environmental injustice issues than those in more mature democracies. In a recent case in Taiwan, residents in a disadvantaged community were initially unaware of or reluctant to acknowledge the environmental harms that had been inflicted upon them. They were not mobilized until policy entrepreneurs from outside the community began to press the issue on their behalf by gaining their trust and support and by navigating various political and policy institutions, which at the same time were undergoing democratic transformations toward more inclusiveness. The case illustrates the interactions of identity politics and social movement leadership in the context of changing political opportunity structures.

Political scientists typically study how formal institutions work, yet many of the most interesting political phenomena being investigated today involve informal institutions. The books under review represent advances in an emerging research program on informal politics and the state. They address several important questions, including (1) when does informality undermine the state, and when does it compensate for deficiencies in the state? (2) what are the historical roots of the mechanisms by which informality interacts with the state? (3) what are the sources of cohesion that enable actors to pursue goals informally? and (4) how does the relationship between informal politics and the state change over time? Informal politics is found to be consequential even in the presence of “strong” states, and can sometimes interact with the state in unexpected ways. The theoretical issues raised by these works have broader implications for how informality should be conceptualized and studied within comparative politics.