Volume 53, Number 4, July 2021

Under what conditions are governments able to liberalize labor markets? I leverage the cases of Portugal and Spain, two countries hit by the Eurozone crisis and constrained in their policy options, that diverge in the key measure mandated by international creditors to recover—the decentralization of collective bargaining. Against the common assumption that the liberalization of labor is widely embraced by capital, I show that governments are only able to advance labor reforms when there is a leading industrial export sector that benefits from it and provides a powerful domestic social partner. I test this argument with in-depth qualitative data collected during twelve months of fieldwork in both countries, including 129 interviews with politicians, policy-makers, and members of business associations and labor confederations, among others.

This article investigates the politics of holding bank executives accountable for banking crises. The post-2008 financial crisis was characterized by a significant variation in the endorsement of retributive justice. While some countries established special prosecutorial bodies and facilitated prosecutions, others relied on the existing prosecutorial mechanisms to seek out wrongdoing. The comparative experience of Iceland and Cyprus shows that the unfolding of the crisis shapes the appetite of politicians for retributive justice. With a banking collapse, politicians will be most proactive, as voters’ demand for justice is high and the risks for the banking industry are minimal. With a severe yet negotiated crisis following a bailout/bail-in, politicians are more reluctant to endorse policies that may risk the recovery of the fragile banking sector.

States of emergency grant chief executives the power to bypass democratic constraints in order to combat existential threats. As such, they are ideal tools to erode democratic institutions while maintaining the illusion of constitutional legitimacy. Therefore, states of emergency should be associated with a heightened risk of autocratization––a decline in a regime’s democratic attributes. Despite this theoretical link and the contemporary relevance of both autocratization and states of emergency, no prior study has empirically tested this relationship. This article tests this relationship using data on sixty democracies for 1974 to 2016. We find that democracies are 75 percent more likely to erode under a state of emergency. This evidence strongly suggests that states of emergency circumvent democratic processes in ways that might promote democratic decline.

Studies of a small number of countries have revealed that both democratic and non-democratic subnational governments can exist within a single country. However, these works have neither demonstrated how common subnational regime variation is nor explained why some countries are more prone to it. This article does both. We show that subnational regime variation exists in all world regions, in both unitary and federal states, and in both the present and past, using Varieties of Democracy global data from 1900 to 2018. The article also demonstrates theoretically and empirically how social heterogeneity and factors undermining a national government’s ability to extend control throughout a country promote this variation. Specifically, subnational regime variation is more common in countries that are ethnically diverse, rugged, and populous.

When facing state-backed repression, why do groups sometimes band together in solidarity and sometimes fail to do so? This study contributes to the literature on repression by studying how and why repressed groups react to repression, focusing on how registered civil society groups affect solidarity. Specifically, I trace the impact of the Chinese Communist Party’s Cross Demolition Campaign on patterns of solidarity and victim blaming among Christian Churches. I further demonstrate conditions under which repressed group members become more fragmented and scattered rather than more unified. Based on evidence from sixty-four elite and mass interviews, I find that registered groups’ legibility constrains their members, thus enabling dynamics of victim-blaming that hinder solidarity and further empowering the autocrat to divide and conquer potential opposition.

This article presents a comparative ethnography of the smallholder agroforestry projects of an international environmental organization. Migrant ranchers in Brazil sell cattle from private properties in a heavily-deforested landscape. Indigenous farmers in Indonesia rely on subsistence food production on customary lands in a heavily-forested landscape. Despite these differences, the projects identify both migrant ranchers and indigenous farmers as “smallholders” and prescribe cash crop agroforestry as the solution to both their predicaments. In the face of expanding ranches and plantations, this cash crop solution accepts the destruction of forest ecosystems and livelihoods as inevitable, funneling smallholders into market agroforestry in agro-industrial landscapes. This article strengthens the case for comparative ethnography and challenges discursive conflations and political-economic biases of prevailing sustainable development policies.

How does ethnicity influence mass support for radical reforms? Treating ethnicity as a set of cognitively useful categories serving both ethnocentric and inclusive ends, we argue people can strive toward civic visions for their state yet interpret obstacles through “ethnic” lenses. We label this phenomenon aspirational identity politics, prominent when external aggressors exploit identity commonalities with home-state subpopulations. Consequently, ethnic cognition can facilitate radical reform support not only through ethnocentrism, but also by connecting prosocial dispositions to support for in-group favoring reforms. Accordingly, original survey data from Ukraine in 2017 reveal prosocial values better predict support for nine radical reforms––including in-group favoring ones––than does ethnocentrism. Support is also strongest among economically better-off people, indicating backing for radical reform is generally more about aspiration than desperation.

The three books reviewed here represent a new generation of rigorous scholarship on participatory institutions (PIs). They demonstrate that––under certain conditions––it is possible to build large-scale PIs that strengthen democratic governance and improve citizens’ lives. Nonetheless, significant challenges remain. Due in part to the absence of either high-quality national-level comparative data or fine-grained subnational data, and in part to research design choices of existing studies, the literature remains limited in its capacity to make general claims about the causes and effects of large-scale PIs. Ultimately, the key question collectively addressed, but not fully answered, by the works reviewed is whether governments can build PIs that deliver on their promise to improve the quality of democracy and enhance public service provision on a large scale in diverse contexts beyond Brazil.