Volume 55, Number 3, April 2023

This article analyzes changing patterns of worker protest and mobilization in France, with particular emphasis on the post-1970s era of neoliberalism. It argues that processes of state-led disembedding of labor have underpinned major changes in the leadership, content, and class bases of worker contestation. Drawing on more than forty original interviews as well as extensive secondary sources, it highlights a long-term shift in the dynamics of labor’s political engagement, in which unions’ role has been increasingly displaced by broad-based, anti-systemic social movements. Protests have called into question the legitimacy of French capitalism and the state, revealing the dysfunctions of political representation with troubling implications for the stability of French democracy and the governability of advanced capitalist economies.

Why are citizens in some communities able to protest to bring attention to their grievances, while not in others? While a long literature has contended that informal civil society institutions facilitate contentious collective action, not all organizations do so, and some might even discourage it. I argue in this article that inclusive institutions—open to everyone in a community—facilitate protests, while non-inclusive institutions uniting some particularistic sub-groups within communities hinder them. The former provide communities with broad social networks fostering communal unity, while the latter erode communal unity through provoking internal conflicts. I provide evidence for this theory in the sub-municipal context of Mexico, using statistical analysis of data from an original survey of sub-municipal community presidents and qualitative fieldwork evidence from Puebla and Tlaxcala.

In this article, I examine the factors that influence the amount and content of news media reporting on violence against women (VAW) in Brazil. VAW was not considered a relevant political problem until very recently when states began to respond to feminist demands by adopting policies to criminalize VAW and providing resources to survivors. I theorize that the process of improving state action on VAW increases news media attention to these stories. I also argue that heightened political attention to VAW increases news media discussion of policies and laws addressing VAW. Employing time series analysis and computer text analysis of an original dataset from Brazil (2004–2019), I find that strong legislation and congressional bill introduction exert significant positive effects on news media reporting of VAW.

How do authoritarian regimes punish ordinary opposition voters? I argue that elected community politicians help make “punishment regimes,” which discourage opposition support, credible. Strengthened by decentralization reforms, community politicians have information and leverage necessary to identify and punish opposition supporters. When the regime wins community elections, these politicians extend the regime’s reach deep into communities. When opposition parties win, their reach is constrained weakening their electoral control. Using mixed-methods evidence from Tanzania, I show regime-loyal community politicians use their distributive and legal-coercive powers to “deliver the vote” leading voters in these communities to fear individual reprisals for opposition support. In contrast, voters fear individual punishment in opposition-run communities significantly less. This study demonstrates the importance of local institutions and elections when understanding regime durability.

This article investigates whether the Chinese public possesses structured political preferences or ideology. We show that ideology in China is organized around a state-market economic dimension and an authoritarian-democratic political dimension. The most politically informed individuals are the least likely to constrain their ideological preferences to one dimension, which we argue is a product of the Party’s propaganda efforts. We find that younger and better- educated individuals are the most likely to favor free markets and that while members of the Communist Party no longer possess any sort of distinct economic preferences, they are markedly more authoritarian. We conclude that the diffuse character of the Chinese public’s preferences provides the Party with an opportunity to divide and rule.

How do parties historically dominated by one group diversify their representatives? I argue that ethnic parties adjust their strategies according to the institutional rules in place and the demographics of relevant constituencies. I study South Africa, which has a Mixed-Member Proportional electoral system, where parties nominate Single Member District and Proportional Representation candidates. Using original data on the racial, ethnic, and career background of over 10,000 local candidates nominated by the historically white Democratic Alliance party, I find that the party engages in vote-based inclusion by nominating black candidates to predominantly black districts. And while the DA symbolically includes non-whites on its PR lists, white candidates dominate electable list positions. These findings provide a demonstration at the micro-level of why ethnic parties struggle to meaningfully diversify.