Volume 55, Number 1, October 2022

Conflicts between local communities and their governments over natural resource development are not new in Latin America. When mining and oil companies move in, communities have blocked roads, staged protests, and undertaken other forms of direct action. More recently, however, communities have expanded their tactics, turning toward the state and its participatory institutions to contest claims over their land. This article investigates this trend and the conditions that facilitate it by analyzing an original database of 102 attempts by communities in Colombia to implement one participatory institution—the popular consultation—to challenge large scale extractive projects. I argue that communities’ ability to contest extractive projects by leveraging participatory institutions depends on the balance of power between two external players—private firms and expert allies.

What explains why some governments advanced decentralized education in the 1990s while others shied away from such efforts? Some arguments suggest that decentralization was pursued to improve the coverage and quality of education. Others point to partisanship, ideology, or diffusion. Drawing on case studies of El Salvador and Paraguay, I argue instead that governments pursued education decentralization in part because it could be deployed as a political weapon to weaken teachers’ unions affiliated with the opposition, thus depressing mobilization and votes for their rivals. These findings contribute to the literature on decentralization by highlighting a new political motivation fueling decentralization efforts across the developing world—the demobilization of the opposition.

What are the consequences of election violence for citizens’ political attitudes? We argue that in polarized contexts, citizens’ interpretation of electoral violence depends on their partisan affiliations. When presented with information alleging co-partisans’ involvement in violence, people with strong partisan identities become more likely to assert that elections were free and fair. We test this expectation with a vignette experiment in West Bengal after India’s 2019 elections, presenting respondents with information about violence while varying the partisan identity of the perpetrator. Consistent with expectations, supporters of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) increased their evaluations of election quality when hearing about co-partisan violence. We find no evidence of disconfirmation bias for Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) supporters; their recent shift to the party plausibly explains this finding.

What explains variation in labor militancy and trade union tactics across similar oil regions? Existing literatures on the resource curse and labor in resource extraction provide contradictory expectations that do not account for variation. By comparing two prominent oil regions, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, Russia and Mangystau, Kazakhstan, I find labor militancy is explained by more contingent factors than broader theories suggest. This article identifies oil privatization as a critical juncture that led to diverging path-dependent processes, finding that privatizing to foreign or domestic owners and the relative independence of the legal system explain the differing manifestations of labor militancy observed. These findings are potentially generalizable to post-communist and developing countries that privatize their extractive sectors and have a history of state control of labor relations.

What are the sources of incumbent parties’ superior financial resources in parliamentary election campaigns in Africa’s clientelistic democracies? Scholars have emphasized ruling parties’ access to state resources. We document a different mechanism, where government parties attract candidates willing and able to devote their personal resources to parliamentary (and by extension presidential) campaigns in the hope of gaining access to central resources. We support our theory with data from an original survey of candidates in the 2019 Malawi parliamentary election. Our findings show that government party candidates receive more resources from their party. More importantly, government party candidates also spend more of their own money in campaigns. The findings have implications for political competition and representation in Africa and beyond.

Although once the subject of intense theoretical debate, the lumpenproletariat is largely missing from class-based analyses of popular resistance under authoritarianism. This article introduces a new definition of lumpenproletarians in the developing world, focusing on the nature of their work. It then argues that, given their socioeconomic position, these people should eschew participation in conventional social movements but ought to back protests over state abuse. We evaluate this theory using quantitative and qualitative data from two authoritarian developing countries with large grey economies but different histories of unrest: China and Egypt. In both places, we find lumpenproletarians indeed tend to join demonstrations over government and police mistreatment. Moreover, the Egyptian experience shows that the group is susceptible to mobilization for both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary ends.

A prevalent viewpoint is that wealth inequality leads to political inequality and that economic elites are more powerful when they control a larger wealth share. However, as wealth inequality changes are often endogenous, studying the political consequences of wealth concentration is challenging. I study a 1919 Danish land reform that confiscated 20 to 25 percent of the value of entailed estates, which were old aristocratic land and capital holdings. Using difference-in-difference estimation, I assess the political effects of this shock to local wealth inequality. I find no effect of a wealth inequality decrease on pro-elite political outcomes. These results question the degree to which wealth inequality matters for political equality under widely held political rights and strong rule of law.

Dominant political parties rule for prolonged periods of time by winning successive multiparty elections. However, the term “dominant party” encompasses an extremely diverse set of parties, ranging from ones winning unremarkable vote shares in established democracies to those garnering massive popular majorities in free but unfair elections. To grapple with such heterogeneity, this article proposes a three-part typology based on the foundations of a party’s electoral dominance—whether extremely high votes shares, steadfast support from legislative allies, or a favorable translation of votes into seats or office. These three types are internally homogenous but distinct from one another in ways predicted by the typology. The puzzles posed by each dominant-party type and the kinds of answers required to address those puzzles differ markedly.