Volume 52, Number 4, July 2020

This article systematically analyzes how the participatory institution “prior consultation” indirectly gave Colombian indigenous communities a voice in five major hydrocarbon and mining conflicts by creating opportunities to organize around the institution. Mobilized indigenous groups did not express their concerns about extraction within the prescribed prior consultation meetings. Instead, they refused to be consulted, they challenged the lack of, or their exclusion from, prior consultation, and they preemptively achieved environmental protections. Variation in tactics is explained by (1) the stage of the planned extraction, (2) whether the state initially determined that a community was affected by the extraction, and (3) the degree of unity among affected communities. The article further highlights the role of Colombia’s Constitutional Court in interpreting and weighing the rights that underlie prior consultation procedures.

The article looks at Rwandans’ engagement with authoritarianism prior to the 1994 genocide and, more broadly, at life under “soft authoritarian” settings. It argues that Rwandans did not experience state-society relations under pre-genocide regimes as a vertical chain of authority, as is often contended. Instead, they spoke of a felt gap between national and local levels. Engagement with authority was predominantly local and experienced in an ambiguous, yet functional manner rather than simply as coercion. It was also experienced in a more varied manner than is often presumed. Indeed, local experiences of authority were commonly about “making do” with authoritarianism. This should lead scholars to question common frames of authoritarian verticality and the obedience/compliance which authoritarianism is presumed to foster. It should also lead scholars to question simple frames of resistance often proposed when studying authoritarian state-society relations.

Most accounts of franchise extension hold that elites extend electoral rights when they believe expansions will consolidate their political power. Yet, how do elites come to believe this? And how do elites make inferences about the political preferences of the disenfranchised? I argue that elites utilize the cue of “disposition” to determine the consequences of enfranchisement. Disposition refers to the innate characteristics of an individual (or group) that are believed to shape behavior and decision-making. Importantly, because disposition is perceived to be intrinsic, elites assume it is more stable and permanent than party identification or policy preferences. Using historical process-tracing and discourse analysis of primary documents, I determine that disposition was frequently and repeatedly used to either support or oppose women’s enfranchisement in New Zealand.

Courts’ legal-constitutional authority, strategic interactions with elected branches, and ideational factors are acknowledged as rival theoretical frameworks of judicial power, i.e. courts’ legal and practical power to make and enforce decisions, including politically assertive ones. This article presents an alternative explanation for judicial power and assertiveness, arguing that judicial power can be endogenous to judicial processes, as legal-constitutional authority, strategic interactions, and ideational shifts are rooted in the unfolding of a judicialized political conflict. The article assesses the sources of judicial power by examining the Colombian Supreme Court’s rulings and off-bench activism during the parapolitics scandal, in the course of which the Court investigated about one-third of Congress. It finds the parapolitics process itself redefined the justices’ interests, self-perceptions, and, consequently, limits of jurisdiction.

Why do authoritative constitutional courts sometimes thrive even in dominant-party regimes? This article identifies as a key determining factor the constitutional entrenchment of wealth redistribution via private corporate equity transfers. Since the policy threatens private capital, the dominant party would want to avoid massive capital flight by credibly committing to a restrained practice of indirect expropriation through an authoritative constitutional court that can apply a brake to the policy when it goes too far. The analysis is based on an in-depth case study of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. The empirical research includes conducting an expert survey on judicial appointments that tests a crucial observable implication of the theory, as well as performing process tracing that involves interviewing South African business elites.

While much research focuses on social media and urban movements, almost no research explores its potentially divergent effects in rural areas. Building on recent work emphasizing the multidimensional effects of online communication on vertical and horizontal information, we argue that while the Internet may facilitate large-scale urban movements, it inhibits large-scale rural movements. Because social media increases vertical information flows between government and citizens, the central government responds quickly to rural protests, preventing such protests from developing into a large-scale movement. By contrast, social media does less to change the vertical information flows in urban areas. We explore the plausibility of our argument by process tracing the evolution of protests in urban and rural areas in Vietnam in the pre-Internet and in the Internet eras.

Easton’s framework for theorizing political support continues to be influential for pertinent research. However, due to the complexity of Easton’s arguments, there is some confusion on how to classify and measure political support in existing research. Building upon Easton’s arguments, we propose a two-dimensional cognitive framework to examine political support, which not only adequately captures Easton’s essential arguments but also effectively incorporates recent findings in cognitive psychology. Using the framework and multiple national surveys, we assess different instruments widely used to measure regime support in China. We clarify some confusion in the operationalization of political support, establish the salience of institutional settings in shaping its latent structure, assess key survey instruments of regime support, and offer guidelines on how to appropriately interpret related findings.

Based on a critical reading of three recent books, I argue that the exclusion of Jews and Muslims, the two major non-Christian religious groups in Europe and the Americas, has continued on the basis of ethnic, racial, ideological, and quasi-rational justifications, instead of or in addition to religious justifications, since the Reformation. Furthermore, I argue that the institutionally orchestrated collective stigmatization and persecution of Jews and Muslims predated the Reformation, going back to the Fourth Lateran Council under Pope Innocent III in 1215. The notion of Corpus Christianum and Observant movements in the late Middle Ages, the elective affinity of liberalism and racism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the divergence in religious norms at present are critically evaluated as potential causes of ethnoreligious exclusion.