The Journal of Comparative Politics

Volume 53, Number 4, July 2021

Jimena Valdez, What Capital Wants: Business Interests and Labor Market Reform in Portugal and Spain

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.

Iosif Kovras and Stefano Pagliari, Crisis and Punishment? Explaining Politicians’ Appetite for Retribution in Post-Crisis Europe

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.

Anna Lührmann and Bryan Rooney, Autocratization by Decree: States of Emergency and Democratic Decline

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.

Kelly M. McMann, Matthew Maguire, John Gerring, Michael Coppedge, and Staffan I. Lindberg, Explaining Subnational Regime Variation: Country-Level Factors

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.

Harris Doshay, Solidarity or Distancing? How Official Status Influences Chinese Protestant Reactions to Repression

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.

Gregory M. Thaler, Equifinality in the Smallholder Slot: Cash Crop Development in the Brazilian Amazon and Indonesian Borneo

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.

Henry E. Hale and Volodymyr Kulyk, Aspirational Identity Politics and Support for Radical Reform: The Case of Post-Maidan Ukraine

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.

Jared Abbott and Benjamin Goldfrank, Review Article, Scaling-Up and Zooming-Out: Understanding How and When Participatory Institutions Matter

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.

Volume 53, Number 4, July 2021jmcorby2025-07-02T17:31:05+00:00

Volume 53, Number 3, April 2021

Virginia Oliveros, Working for the Machine: Patronage Jobs and Political Services in
Argentina

Conventional wisdom posits that patronage jobs are distributed to supporters in exchange for political services. But why would public employees comply with the agreement and provide political services after receiving the job? Departing from existing explanations, I argue that patronage employees engage in political activities because their jobs are tied to their patrons’ political survival. Supporters’ jobs will be maintained by the incumbent, but not by the opposition. Supporters, then, have incentives to help the incumbent, which makes their original commitment to provide political services a credible one. Using survey experiments embedded in a survey of 1,200 Argentine public employees, I show that patronage employees are involved in political activities and that they believe their jobs are tied to the political success of the incumbent.

Denise van der Kamp, Can Police Patrols Prevent Pollution? The Limits of Authoritarian Environmental Governance in China

China’s high-profile anti-pollution campaigns have fueled theories of authoritarian environmental efficiency. In a regime where bureaucrats are sensitive to top-down scrutiny, central campaigns are expected to be powerful tool for reducing pollution. Focusing on China’s nationwide pollution inspections campaign, I assess these claims of authoritarian efficiency. I find that central inspections (or “police patrols”) have no discernable impact on air pollution. I argue that inspections were ineffective because environmental enforcement requires a degree of sustained scrutiny that one-off campaigns cannot provide. The deterrent effect of inspections is also undercut by the regime’s ambivalence towards independent courts and unsupervised public participation. These findings suggest that China’s obstacles to pollution enforcement may be greater than anticipated, and theories of authoritarian efficiency overlook gaps in authoritarian state capacity.

Kristen Kao and Lindsay J. Benstead, Female Electability in the Arab World: The Advantages of Intersectionality

Many studies of women’s electability in the developing world focus on single traits such as gender, ethnicity, or religion. Employing an original survey experiment in Jordan, we examine the impacts of multiple, intersecting candidate identities on voter preferences. We show empirically that existing theories of electoral behavior alone cannot account for women’s electability. An intersectional lens that considers how power structures shape electability and produce complex effects that must be empirically verified in different contexts is needed. Although less electable overall, female candidates fare as well as males from similar social identity groups. Our findings underscore the need to apply intersectionality to theories of electoral behavior in the developing world and lay the groundwork for a larger research agenda explaining women’s electability in Arab elections.

Dina Bishara, Precarious Collective Action: Unemployed Graduates Associations in the Middle East and North Africa

Why did unemployed university graduates form collective associations in some countries in the Middle East and North Africa but not in others? Despite similar levels of grievances around educated unemployment, reversals in guaranteed employment schemes, and similarly restrictive conditions for mobilization, unemployed graduates’ associations formed in Morocco and Tunisia but not in Egypt. Conventional explanations—focused on grievances, political opportunities, or pre-existing organizational structures—cannot account for this variation. Instead, I point to the power of ideologically conducive frames for mobilization around the time that grievances become salient. A strong Leftist oriented tradition of student unionism in Morocco and Tunisia was necessary for the emergence of a rights-based discourse around the “right to work.” This was not the case in Egypt, where Islamists, not Communists, dominated student politics at the time that grievances around educated unemployment became salient. This article offers one of the first comparative studies of the mobilization of the unemployed in a non-Western, non-democratic context.

Cesar Zucco Jr. and Timothy J. Power, Fragmentation Without Cleavages? Endogenous Fractionalization in the Brazilian Party System

This article investigates the causes of party system hyperfragmentation in Brazil. We ask why hyperfragmentation—understood as extreme multipartism that continues to fractionalize—occurs despite significant changes to social cleavages or to electoral rules. Using survey data from federal legislators, we rule out the possibility of new issue-based multidimensionality. Using new estimates of the ideological position of legislative parties, we show that new party entry was not driven by polarization or convergence among traditional parties. We advance an alternative explanation of “fragmentation without cleavages,” arguing that changing dynamics of electoral list composition, federal party funding, and coalition management have changed the context of political ambition. For strategically minded elites, it is more attractive than ever before to be a dominant player in a small party.

Alexander Hudson, Political Parties and Public Participation in Constitution Making: Legitimation, Distraction, or Real Influence?

Over the past three decades, participatory methods of constitution making have gained increasing acceptance and are now an indispensable part of any constitution-making process. Despite this, we know little about how much public participation actually affects the constitution. This article investigates the impact of participation in two groundbreaking cases: Brazil (1988) and South Africa (1996). This analysis demonstrates that public participation has relatively small effects on the text, but that it varies in systematic ways. The theory advanced here posits that party strength (especially in terms of discipline and programmatic commitments) is the key determinant of the effectiveness of public participation. Strong parties may be more effective in many ways, but they are less likely to act on input from the public in constitution-making processes.

Alexandre Pelletier, Competition for Religious Authority and Islamist Mobilization in Indonesia

This article seeks to explain variations in the success of Islamist mobilization. It argues that Islamist groups do better where competition for religious authority is intense. These religious “markets” are conducive to Islamist success because they 1) lower the barriers of entry to new religious entrepreneurs, 2) incentivize established leaders to support Islamist mobilization, and 3) push moderate leaders into silence. The article develops this theory by examining sub-regional variations in Islamist mobilization on the Indonesian island of Java. Using newly collected data on Java’s 15,000 Islamic schools, it compares religious institutions across more than 100 regencies in Java. It also uses dozens of field interviews with Indonesian Islamists and Muslim leaders to show where market structures have facilitated the growth of Islamist groups.

Rehan Rajay Jamil, Review Article, Understanding the Expansion of Latin America’s New Social Welfare Regimes

Latin American countries have been described as truncated welfare states. However, the recent expansion of innovative social welfare programs have brought millions of excluded citizens access to social benefits. This review article examines a new body of scholarship that studies how democratic political competition has created the institutional context for social welfare expansion. This literature makes several important contributions to the study of distributive politics. It moves beyond regime type and party ideology and focuses on the nature of domestic political institutions and citizen-state linkages within Latin American democracies. Countries with robust political competition and denser ties to constituents have had the most extensive welfare expansion, and non-partisan programs have undermined clientelism. In single party dominated settings, the political incentives for informal and clientelist provision remains significant.

Volume 53, Number 3, April 2021jmcorby2025-07-02T17:31:14+00:00

Volume 53, Number 2, January 2021

Christopher Chambers-Ju, Adjustment Policies, Union Structures, and Strategies of Mobilization: Teacher Politics in Mexico and Argentina

This article analyzes the evolving mobilizational strategies of robust unions in contemporary Latin America. The origins of these strategies are rooted in the neoliberal adjustment policies in the early 1990s that compensated and reshaped power relations in labor organizations. With union compensation, a dominant faction concentrated power and embraced instrumentalism; the union exchanged electoral support with various parties for particularistic benefits. When adjustment policies were adopted without compensation, power was dispersed in an archipelago of activists. Unions then relied on movementism, which centered on contentious demand making and resistance to partisan alliances. Comparing teachers in Mexico and Argentina, this article contributes to broader debates about the effects of democracy on contentious politics and the changing partisan identities of workers.

Philip A. Martin, Giulia Piccolino, and Jeremy S. Speight, Ex-Rebel Authority after Civil War: Theory and Evidence from Côte d’Ivoire

How do former armed militants exercise local political power after civil wars end? Building on recent advances in the study of “rebel rulers” and local goods provision by armed groups, this article offers a typology of ex-rebel commander authority that emphasizes two dimensions of former militants’ power: local-level ties to civilian populations ruled during civil war and national-level ties to post-conflict state elites. Put together, these dimensions produce four trajectories of ex-rebel authority. These trajectories shape whether and how ex-rebel commanders provide social goods within post-conflict communities and the durability of ex-rebels’ local authority over time. We illustrate this typology with qualitative evidence from northern Côte d’Ivoire. The framework yields theoretical insights about local orders after civil war, as well as implications for peacebuilding policies.

Yasser Kureshi, When Judges Defy Dictators: An Audience-Based Framework to Explain the Emergence of Judicial Assertiveness against Authoritarian Regimes

Under what conditions do judiciaries act assertively against authoritarian regimes? I argue that the judiciary coalesces around institutional norms and preferences in response to the preferences of institutions and networks, or “audiences,” with which judges interact, and which shape the careers and reputations of judges. Proposing a typology of judicial-regime relations, I demonstrate that the judiciary’s affinity to authoritarian regimes diminishes as these audiences grow independent from the regime. Using case law research, archival research, and interviews, I demonstrate the utility of the audience-based framework for explaining judicial behavior in authoritarian regimes by exploring cross-temporal variation across authoritarian regimes in Pakistan. This study integrates ideas-based and interest-based explanations for judicial behavior in a generalizable framework for explaining variation in judicial assertiveness against authoritarian regimes.

Nicholas Kerr and Michael Wahman, Electoral Rulings and Public Trust in African Courts and Elections

On the African continent, where elections are often surrounded by accusations of fraud and manipulation, legal avenues for challenging elections may enhance election integrity and trust in political institutions. Court rulings on electoral petitions have consequences for the distribution of power, but how do they shape public opinion? We theorize and study the way in which court rulings in relation to parliamentary election petitions shape public perceptions of election and judicial legitimacy. Using survey data from the 2016 Zambian election, our results suggest that opposition voters rate quality of elections lower when courts nullify elections. However, judicial legitimacy seems unaffected even for voters in constituencies where the courts have shown independence vis à vis the executive and nullified parliamentary elections won by the governing party.

Justin J. Gengler, Bethany Shockley, and Michael C. Ewers, Refinancing the Rentier State: Welfare, Inequality, and Citizen Preferences toward Fiscal Reform in the Gulf Oil Monarchies

Against the backdrop of fiscal reform efforts in Middle East oil producers, this article proposes a general framework for understanding how citizens relate to welfare benefits in the rentier state and then tests some observable implications using original survey data from the quintessential rentier state of Qatar. Using two novel choice experiments, we ask Qataris to choose between competing forms of economic subsidies and state spending, producing a clear and reliable ordering of welfare priorities. Expectations derived from the experiments about the individual-level determinants of rentier reform preferences are then tested using data from a follow-up survey. Findings demonstrate the importance of non-excludable public goods, rather than private patronage, for upholding the rentier bargain.

Suzanne E. Scoggins, Rethinking Authoritarian Resilience and the Coercive Apparatus

A state’s coercive apparatus can be strong in some ways and weak in others. Using interview data from security personnel in China, this study expands current conceptualizations of authoritarian durability and coercive capacity to consider a wide range of security activities. While protest response in China is centrally controlled and strong, other types of crime control are decentralized and systematically inadequate in ways that compromise the state’s coercive power and may ultimately feed back into protest. Considering security activities beyond protest control exposes cracks in China’s authoritarian system of control—an area where it is typically perceived to thrive—and calls into question our understanding of regime resilience as well as our current approach to assessing the role coercive capacity plays in authoritarian resilience elsewhere.

Catherine Reyes-Housholder and Gwynn Thomas, Gendered Incentives, Party Support, and Viable Female Presidential Candidates in Latin America

Women hold less than 10 percent of chief executive positions worldwide. Understanding how women democratically access these posts requires theorizing how they gain resources from established parties to mount viable electoral campaigns. We argue that in stable regimes marked by representational malaise parties respond to gendered incentives and nominate female candidates. Drawing on Latin American cases, we show how diverse parties nominated women in order to signal change or novelty, to credibly commit to “feminine” leadership and issues, and to mobilize female voters. A negative case depicts how a lack of representational critiques can fail to incentivize parties to back women instead of men. Our focus on gendered incentives provides a new framework that places political parties at the center of questions about women’s electoral opportunities.

Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, Review Article, Domestic and Global Dimensions of Post-Communist Institution-Building

This article reviews four recent books that inquire into the nature and challenges of institution-building in the post-communist region. The main lessons learned from this scholarship relate to the complexity of establishing effective domestic institutions securing property rights and the role of various domestic and global factors that shape these processes. Domestic variables include political connections, bargaining power, and the nature of a social equilibrium that shapes norms, expectations, and behavior of economic actors. Global factors include structural constraints and opportunities associated with the global financial system and institutions.

Volume 53, Number 2, January 2021jmcorby2021-01-19T01:28:36+00:00

Volume 53, Number 1, October 2020

Merike Blofield and Michael Touchton, Moving Away from Maternalism? The Politics of Parental Leave Reforms in Latin America

Policies to address reconciliation of work and family have come to the political forefront around the world. One key policy is extending paid parental leaves. We construct a database on paid parental leaves for Latin American countries from 2000 to 2016. Quantitative analysis finds that higher per capita GDP, higher women’s labor force participation, and more programmatic political parties increase the likelihood of parental leave reform, while political ideology, share of women in the legislature, and gender of the executive do not emerge as significant. We process-trace reforms in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay and show how programmatic party systems enable social demand to influence executive commitment to pursue policy reform and evidence-based expertise to design policy that facilitates more paternal involvement and social equity.

Whitney K. Taylor, Constitutional Rights and Social Welfare: Exploring Claims-Making Practices in Post-Apartheid South Africa

When do individuals choose to advance legal claims to social welfare goods? To explore this question, I turn to the case of South Africa, where, despite the adoption of a “transformative” constitution in 1996, access to social welfare goods remains sorely lacking. Drawing on an original 551-person survey, I examine patterns of legal claims-making, focusing on beliefs individuals hold about the law, rights, and the state, and how those beliefs relate to decisions about whether and how to make claims. I find striking differences between the factors that influence when people say they should file a legal claim and when they actually do so. The way that individuals interpret their own material conditions and neighborhood context are important, yet under-acknowledged, factors for explaining claims-making.

Joan Carreras Timoneda, Institutions as Signals: How Dictators Consolidate Power in Times of Crisis

Formal institutions in dictatorship are known to improve authoritarian governance and promote power-sharing. Yet institutions also act as tools of information propagation and can be used by autocrats for signaling purposes. In this article, I argue that in times of weakness, dictators follow an expand-and-signal strategy, expanding the ruling coalition to decrease the relative power of coup plotters and then create visible formal institutions to signal strong support. Doing so decreases (1) the probability that a coup is launched and (2) that one succeeds if staged. I propose a formal model to unpack the mechanisms of my argument and use the case of the Dominican Republic during Rafael Trujillo’s rule to illustrate my theory.

Shimaa Hatab, Threat Perception and Democratic Support in Post-Arab Spring Egypt

The article examines the reasons why Egyptian elites and masses withdrew their support for democracy only two years after they staged mass protests calling for regime change in 2011. I draw on basic tenets of bounded rationality and recent advances within the field of cognitive heuristics to demonstrate how cues generated from domestic and regional developments triggered stronger demands for security and stability. Drawing on elite interviews and public opinion surveys, I show how both elites and the masses paid special attention to intense and vivid events which then prompted a demand for the strong man model. Fears of Islamists pushed both elites and masses to update their preferences, seek refuge in old regime bargains, and reinstate authoritarianism.

Lisa Blaydes, Rebuilding the Ba`thist State: Party, Tribe, and Administrative Control in Authoritarian Iraq, 1991–1996

How do authoritarian states establish control in the wake of regime threatening shocks? The 1991 Uprisings—anti-regime protests across Iraqi provinces—were a turning point for Saddam Hussein and the Ba’th Party. I discuss two strategies deployed by the Ba’thist regime to reconsolidate political authority after the rebellion, both influenced by concerns about extending control to geographically-challenging locations. First, the regime collaborated with tribal intermediaries to outsource monitoring and social control of rural areas, particularly in border regions. Second, the regime expanded Ba’th Party influence in Iraq’s “second cities,” like Basra and Mosul, major population centers located near the border of rival states Iran and Turkey. These findings suggest weak states seek to increase their strength through investment in local political actors and in ways that are geographically differentiated across regions.

Nicole Bolleyer, Anika Gauja, and Patricia Correa, Legal Regulation and the Juridification of Party Governance

Although democratic states increasingly regulate political parties, we know little about how legal environments shape parties’ internal lives. This article conceptualizes and measures the “juridification” of party organizations’ conflict regulation regimes: that is, the extent to which parties replicate external legal standards (e.g. norms of due process) within their own procedures. Formulating hypotheses on juridification within different parties and legal environments, we examine intra-party juridification across four democracies with most different party law provisions. While party juridification varies—reflecting parties’ ideological differences—in contexts where organizational governance remains unregulated, once intra-organizational governance is subject to statutory constraints, parties emulate legal norms embedded in the state legal system, transcending what is legally required, which has important repercussions for how the law shapes civil society organizations generally.

Marwa M. Shalaby and Laila Elimam, Women in Legislative Committees in Arab Parliaments

Extant studies have predominantly focused on women’s numerical presence in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)’s legislatures, yet, research examining the role played by female politicians continues to be limited. To bridge this gap, we study one of the most important, albeit overlooked, bodies within these assemblies: legislative committees. Using an original dataset on committee memberships (n=4580), our data show that females are significantly marginalized from influential committees and tend to be sidelined to social issues and women’s committees. To explain this, we develop a theory of provisional gender stereotyping. We argue that the duration of quota implementation shapes women’s access to influential committees. We focus on two mechanisms to support our argument: a redistribution of power dynamics within legislative bodies and women’s political expertise.

Laia Balcells and Daniel Solomon, Review Article, Violence, Resistance, and Rescue during the Holocaust

What do different forms of anti-Semitic violence during World War II teach us about the comparative study of political violence? In this article, we review three recent political science books about the perpetrators of anti-Semitic violence, the responses of their Jewish victims, and the rescue efforts that helped European Jews evade violence. These books demonstrate promising theoretical, empirical, and methodological uses for the rich historical record about the Holocaust. We use these studies to highlight the methodological innovations that they advance, the blurry theoretical boundaries between selective and collective forms of mass violence, and the possibility of agentive action by perpetrators, victims, and rescuers alike. We conclude by highlighting the social-psychology of genocidal violence and the legacies of these episodes as areas for future inquiry.

Volume 53, Number 1, October 2020Corby, Jennifer2021-01-19T01:28:05+00:00

Volume 52, Number 4, July 2020

Maiah Jaskoski, Participatory Institutions as a Focal Point for Mobilizing: Prior Consultation and Indigenous Conflict in Colombia’s Extractive Industries

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.

Marie-Eve Desrosiers, “Making Do” with Soft Authoritarianism in Pre-Genocide Rwanda

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.

Mariel J. Barnes, Divining Disposition: The Role of Elite Beliefs and Gender Narratives in Women’s Suffrage

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.

Onur Bakiner, Endogenous Sources of Judicial Power: Parapolitics and the Supreme Court of Colombia

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.

David K. Ma, Explaining Judicial Authority in Dominant-Party Democracies: The Case of the Constitutional Court of South Africa

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.

Paul Schuler and Mai Truong, Connected Countryside: The Inhibiting Effects of Social Media on Rural Social Movements

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.

Jie Lu and Bruce Dickson, Revisiting the Eastonian Framework on Political Support: Assessing Different Measures of Regime Support in Mainland China

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.

Şener Aktürk, Review Article, Comparative Politics of Exclusion in Europe and the Americas: Religious, Sectarian, and Racial Boundary Making since the Reformation

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.

Volume 52, Number 4, July 2020Corby, Jennifer2020-10-29T21:53:19+00:00

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