Volume 52, Number 3, April 2020

Did the threat of communism influence income distribution in developed capitalist economies during the Cold War? This article addresses this question by testing whether income inequality in OECD countries was related to events linked to the spread of communism—revolutions and Soviet interventions—around the world. We argue that the threat of the spread of communism acted as an incentive for the elites and governments to keep economic inequality low. This article provides an empirical contribution to the recent literature on inequality, which highlights the role of domestic institutions but ignores the role of the Cold War in redistributing income. We find a robust relationship between income inequality and the distance to communist events. The results, reinforced by cases studied, suggest that the spread of communism fostered income redistribution deals between domestic elites and workers. Finally, we show that these effects were reinforced by strong unions and the presence of strong communist parties.

In this study, we investigate how socioeconomic status is related to people’s commitment to liberal democracy. Based on sociological and psychological theories of social conflict and dominance, we argue that those who enjoy a more privileged position in the social hierarchy tend to develop stronger preferences for the existing social and political order. Conversely, people in underprivileged positions tend to be less supportive of that order. Hence, we expect the relationship between socioeconomic status and commitment to liberal democracy to be context-specific: positive in liberal democracies but negative in autocracies. Furthermore, we argue that income inequality amplifies these dynamics, widening the gap between low and high status individuals. We test our hypotheses using the fifth wave of the World Value Surveys.

It has been sixty years since the first sub-Saharan nation declared independence. Over the past three decades, the region has undergone significant changes. Though few, if any, would question that colonial histories shaped African societies, it is unclear to what extent these legacies continue to be relevant to contemporary inter-group relations. Does it still make sense to speak about colonial legacies? And if so, which ones? This article explores these questions by examining whether ethnic groups who were privileged during the colonial period are more likely to hold political power decades later. To do so, I conduct a multiple case study analysis of twenty-five sub-Saharan countries from which I create an original dataset of how ethnic groups were positioned during the latter stages of colonialism. With these data, I run auto-regressive logistical models correlating former colonial position to executive power since independence. I find that many of the assumptions made in the scholarship about the importance of colonial privilege are not supported by these models. However, colonial institutional legacies may still help us understand inter-group dynamics and be the source of contemporary political grievances.

Religion is one of the most commonly cited explanations for cross-country variation in institutional quality. In particular, Protestantism, and the cultural values that follow from its doctrine, has been identified as particularly beneficial. Nevertheless, micro-level studies provide little evidence for religion producing norms and values conducive to good institutions. We propose an alternate explanation for the observed macro-level variation: historical systems for local religious financing, contrasting the medieval parish system in Northwestern Europe, where members collectively paid for and administrated religious services as public goods, with the Ottoman Empire, where such goods were normally provided through endowments from private individuals and tax collection was comparatively privatized. We argue that a legacy of collective financing and accountability in the former region created a virtuous cycle of high state capacity and low corruption, reverberating to this day as good institutions.

The article develops a typology of revolutions based upon women’s roles over the course of revolutionary struggle. In addition to the patriarchal and the emancipatory models, the study proposes a hybrid model of women’s participation in a revolution, characterized by the diversity and fluidity of women’s roles. According to the hybrid model, women’s involvement in a revolution can follow three different strategies: (1) acquiescence to a traditional gender-based division of labor, (2) appropriation of the masculine forms of resistance, and (3) mixing of diverse modes of action. Using the case of the 2013–2014 Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine, the empirical analysis demonstrates multifaceted forms of women’s activism. The study contributes to the literature by broadening the conceptualization of women’s participation in a contemporary urban revolution.

This article examines the informal dimension of political integration for refugees: how, after a lifetime of authoritarianism, do they make sense of their newfound democratic citizenship? I identify the perceptual lenses that refugees use through a narrative study of North Korean refugees in South Korea. Discourse analysis of thirty-one personal narratives and twenty paired debates on topics about democratic citizenship reveals a surprising phenomenon. For refugees who feel co-national identification with South Koreans, a deeply communal script of duty to the nation—socialized in the authoritarian North—is extended toward South Korea, framing new democratic roles such as voting as a matter of obligation. Those who lack such identification tend to rely on an instrumental approach instead, with implications for divergent integration trajectories.

Scholars of electoral authoritarianism contend that elections make autocratic regimes more durable, while scholarship on democratization states that authoritarian elections can lead to electoral revolutions and regime change. In this article, we argue that these two lenses occlude smaller instances of activism during election periods and the influence that this activism has on bringing about gradual political change. To build our argument, we draw on two presidential elections held in Iran in 2009 and 2013. We show how grassroots activists use elections to abort gains made by hardliners, push centrist and moderate candidates toward more reformist and democratic stances, promote issues that would otherwise be considered beyond the pale of formal regime politics, and encourage solidarity and opposition coalition building.

Understanding why elites extend the franchise is one of the central questions in comparative politics. However, most theories fail to account for subsequent extensions of voting rights to once-excluded groups, including women, racial and religious minorities, and the poor. This article reviews three new books in comparative politics that focus on the struggle for voting rights and representation in the first-wave democracies. These books challenge classic assumptions and show that democratization is punctuated by ongoing struggles over inclusion that continue to this day. Together, these books contribute to debates over modernization theory, democratic responsiveness, and the use of the United States as a case in comparative analysis.