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Do socioeconomic disparities between ethnic groups influence whether a country democratizes and remains democratic? I propose that, on average, high levels of ethnic inequality do not affect the prospects of democratization due to competing mechanisms. Although such inequalities give rise to grievances that fuel the demand for democracy, they also make the ruling elites from dominant groups less willing to concede political rights. However, ethnic inequality is generally associated with an increased risk of democratic breakdowns because high-inequality countries are more likely to experience politicized ethnic divides, distributional conflicts, and polarization. Investigating these arguments with time-series, cross-national data, I find that while there is a relatively strong and robust association between ethnic inequality and the risk of democratic breakdown, ethnic inequality is not associated with transitions to democracy. Examinations of potential mechanisms based on national and group-level data lend further support to the argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The life of George Wellington Bryant, a potentially corrupt minor officeholder and gifted orator whose public life began in Reconstruction and ended in the nadir of Black rights at the turn of the century, provides an exceptional window into Black men's involvement in patronage politics during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. This article argues that patronage politics offered a real path for advancement for ambitious Black men like Bryant in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, as such positions became increasingly rare in the 1890s, Black appointees were subjected to intense levels of scrutiny that some could not withstand. Even minor stumbles became potent rhetorical weapons in the white supremacist campaign against Black political rights. Bryant's colorful life and warped rhetorical afterlife demonstrate the continued importance of Black officeholding to American politics as a totem of racial equality even as that promise grew increasingly hollow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linda Smart Chubb made history in 1950 when she served as acting mayor of Colón City, Panama. Not only did she become the first woman to hold this position in Colón, but her tenure also marked the first time that a woman of Afro-Caribbean descent had been elected to any political office in Panama. Smart Chubb's position in the mayoral office also came only four years after women had secured the right to vote. Looking particularly at Smart Chubb's work with feminist organizations, advocacy groups for Afro-Caribbean migrants, the Black international press, and British consular offices in Panama, this article posits that Smart Chubb's election rested on her ability, beginning in the 1920s, to hone a Black feminist internationalist praxis. Such a praxis sought to secure the political rights of all women but also acknowledged the specific challenges faced by Black people in a world mired by xenophobia, anti-Blackness, and competing imperial mandates. Through a focused engagement with the life of Linda Smart Chubb, this article adds to recent scholarship on Black women internationalists while centering a vision of Black feminist internationalism rooted in grassroots local activism with attention to imperial and nationalist struggles emanating from Central America and the Caribbean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ifirst read Wendy Brown's I States of Injury i ( I SOI i ) as a very early graduate student, and it opened up for me, as it did for so many others, a number of the most exciting and dynamic strands of contemporary political theory at the time: the clash between modern and postmodern approaches; Nietzschean and Foucauldian challenges to Marxism, and vice versa; theories of power, freedom, and radical democracy; feminist debates over liberalism, rights, and the state; and the potentialities and pitfalls of identity politics. In light of Brown's trenchant diagnoses and critiques, and the myriad ways in which they seem to have been validated, it is easy to overlook the fact that Brown's intervention in I SOI i was not intended as a wholesale dismissal of identity politics. To be sure, many theoretical and practical manifestations of identity politics have confirmed Brown's diagnoses in the quarter century since the publication of I SOI i . [Extracted from the article]

Wendy Brown's I States of Injury i broke new ground by interrogating the strategies of emancipatory political struggles at the end of the twentieth century, in a moment marked by the loss of comforting promises of historical progress, fixed referents of truth, and familiar visions of the good and the just that anchored past political projects. Yet I want to suggest that the turn to the state by politicized identities reflects more than a desire to hold on to pain and reproach power, and this can be seen by placing it in dialogue with right-wing critiques of state domination occurring at the same time Brown was writing. From this angle, the turn to the state could reflect more than a desire to punish or to be recognized, more than a credulous embrace of state protection, and instead press for something we could even call freedom. [Extracted from the article]

The Current Population Survey (CPS) is a key source of information on who votes. Turnout estimates derived from the CPS are often cited in academic research on participation, widely used in the calibration of surveys, and central to ongoing legal and policy debates over the protection of voting rights in the United States. We compare CPS estimates to official voter turnout records from 2008–18 and document consistent, significant discrepancies that call into question the reliability of CPS turnout statistics. Specifically, the CPS overestimates black and Hispanic turnout relative to non-Hispanic whites, whether relying on turnout rates as a share of eligible citizens or the racial/ethnic composition of the voting population. Sampling error and commonly used adjustments to CPS estimates do not account for or correct this bias, and thus academics and policy makers should use discretion when judging recent shifts in voter turnout with survey data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graph: Jonas Staal and Jan Fermon, Collectivize Facebook: A Pre-Trial, 2021. Other projects of Staal's, such as I Collectivize Facebook i (2020-ongoing, with the lawyer Jan Fermon) and I Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes i (2021-22, with the writer and lawyer Radha D'Souza) relate more explicitly to the tradition of people's tribunals that is perhaps best encapsulated by the 1966-67 Russell Tribunals on war crimes in Vietnam, its 1974-76 successor on Latin America, or the 1976 International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women. The announcement of Staal's I New World Summit i (2012-ongoing) gatherings is worth parsing: The I New World Summit i is an artistic and political organization that develops parliaments with and for stateless states, autonomist groups, and blacklisted political organizations. [Extracted from the article]

French sentencing is characterized by broad judicial discretion and an ethos of individualized justice focused on rehabilitation. The aims are to prevent recidivism, and so protect the interests of society, while reintegrating the offender. By contrast, the political Right, characterized by the recent Sarkozy regime, favors deterrence through harsher penalties, minimum prison sentences, increased incarceration, and preventive detention of offenders considered dangerous. The sentencing process can be understood only within the broader context of inquisitorially rooted criminal procedure. The central part played by the prosecutor (including in case disposition through alternative sanctions) and her role in recommending sentences that the court almost invariably endorses, together with the unitary nature of the judicial profession, means that there is remarkable consistency in penalties imposed. The contrainte pénale, based on a reconsideration of the range of available penalties put forward by the Consensus Commission and legislated in 2014, is unlikely to have great impact without investment in the probation service and a change in the judicial culture that still favors simple sentencing options, including imprisonment, compared with alternatives now in place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States was a suffrage pioneer for eliminating restrictions based on class and race, but not for prohibiting the use of sex classifications as a voting qualification. This contribution focuses on the relationship between the family and the state to explain this discrepancy. In the context of America's liberal heritage, the family and the state are separated by virtue of being ruled by opposite principles: parental rule versus political rule. I argue that women's suffrage was delayed in the United States because women's identification with the family as an institution separated them from formal inclusion in the state. Reformers had to solve, therefore, the relationship between the family and the state in order to achieve women's political citizenship. Using a new data set that tracks family-state frames used by women's suffrage and women rights leaders from the founding of the American state to the addition of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, I show how configurations of the family and the state developed over time. It was when the family and the state were eventually conceptualized to be analogous, rather than opposite, institutions that women finally achieved the right to vote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide a general framework for the analysis of institutional dynamics in an environment in which payoffs and political powers change stochastically. Assuming that economic and political institutions as well as individual types can be ordered, and preferences and the distribution of political power satisfy natural "single-crossing" (increasing differences) conditions, we prove existence of a pure-strategy Markov voting equilibrium, provide conditions for its uniqueness, and present a number of comparative static results. We then use this framework to study the dynamics of political rights and repression in the presence of threats from extremist groups and the dynamics of collective experimentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era concerned with dysfunction in American politics, polarization, and the relevance of academia for ameliorating these problems, the fiftieth anniversary of a debate about American political science permits rediscovery of the philosophical balance and breadth of Herbert Storing. His constitutionalist political science embodied a broad conception of American principles that emphasized founding debates and their continuing echoes in policies and thought, as well as a post-Progressive appreciation for assessing ends and enduring truths of free government. Storing's science anticipates, but contrasts favorably with, the narrower methodological pluralism of the recent Perestroika movement; it developed a philosophical moderation that analyzed alternatives and extremes in both ideas and politics but appreciated intellectual and political blending that sought higher middle grounds; and it focused on leadership or statesmanship in a way that addresses worries over dysfunction, a leadership crisis, and academic relevance more constructively than alternative models of American political science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades, donors increasingly link foreign aid to democracy objectives in Africa. This study investigates whether and how foreign aid influences specific outcomes associated with democratic transition and consolidation. Using an instrumental variables approach for the period from 1989 to 2008, we show that economic aid increases the likelihood of transition to multiparty politics, while democracy aid furthers democratic consolidation by reducing the incidence of multiparty failure and electoral misconduct. However, we find little evidence that either economic or democracy aid influences opposition support in multiparty elections. These findings have implications for understanding how donors allocate aid and the political consequences of foreign assistance in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do authoritarian elections affect voters' attitudes toward the regime and their support for democracy? This article draws upon the case of village elections in China to argue that elections may have two simultaneous effects. First, free and fair elections increase citizens' confidence in the government. Second, elections also allow voters to exercise political rights and accumulate democratic experience through participation, and this in turn may trigger greater demand for further empowerment. Empirical analysis of data from a two-round nationwide survey conducted in 114 villages confirms both effects. One implication of these findings is that competitive elections may simultaneously boost regime popularity and increase public demand for further democratic reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article builds upon the observation that political rulers have to rely upon administrators to implement their policy decisions to uncover two mechanisms by which legal limits, understood in terms of fundamental human rights, can be self-enforcing. We show how the effectiveness of such legal limits depends on administrators’ expectation that rights violations might be costly in the future, when the current ruler’s grip on power ends. We also show how the effectiveness of legal limits depends on administrators’ expectation about each others’ actions when asked to execute an illegal policy, which allows for the possibility that human rights laws might induce compliance by making a particular behavior salient. The analysis contributes to a general understanding of the mechanisms by which law can effectively limit the arbitrary power of the government. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The ''mere parchment barriers'' created by constitutional provisions may lead to decreases in the extent to which nations abuse the human right not to be imprisoned, tortured, killed, or made to disappear arbitrarily or because of your political views. A global pooled cross-national time-series analysis for a 21-year period shows that adopting selected constitutional provisions protecting individual rights and freedoms, promoting judicial independence, and guarding against states of emergency¿and keeping the provisions in place for 10 years¿has the potential to reduce a nation's level of state terror substantially, from one in which political imprisonment affects large numbers of the politically active population and political murders are common, to one where the rule of law is secure, for example. We report significant caveats about and limitations of the research. Nevertheless, we conclude that, since it may be easier to change constitutions than to build effective democracy, to create massive amounts of new wealth, or to avoid or defuse deeply ingrained conflicts, these findings have possible policy and scientific importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although finding considerable value in Joshua Mitchell's recent JOP article about political science commentary on religion, we take issue with his contentions about empirical work on religious influence in politics. We argue that Mitchell has propounded an individualized conceptualization of religion that overlooks the communal nature of religious interaction, a dimension central to translating religious perspectives into political action. Moreover, we argue that conceptualizing religion in terms of preference, values, identity, and choice (which Mitchell regards as antithetical to the true nature of the religious experience) is in fact consistent with the lived religion of most people. Approaches to religious influence in politics rooted in such concepts have yielded considerable predictive power, the appropriate standard by which measurement decisions should be assessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the view of political liberalization in Africa. Accordingly, there has been a longer history of democratization struggles on the continent that stretched back to resistance to indigenous forms of authoritarian rule as well as to opposition to various forms of foreign rule, wherein these struggles encompassed demands for radical social and economic changes, and not only for political liberalization. The author has stated that any desirable form of democracy must encompass the civil and political rights advocated by liberalism, the socio-economic freedoms at the heart of socialism, and the cultural freedoms envisaged by feminism.

One hundred and fifteen law students were given a mock brief with identical legal arguments on both sides of a standing dispute in litigation involving restrictions on political expression of public employees. The content of the expression at issue (pro-choice versus pro-life) and the jurisdiction where the case was pending (with versus without controlling authority on the standing issue) were experimentally manipulated. Participants’ policy views on (1) abortion, (2) free speech, and (3) Hatch Act restrictions were measured to assess their influence on the standing decision. In line with traditional notions of legal reasoning, participants were able to separate their views on Hatch Act restrictions from the standing decision. Opinions on free speech, however, influenced judgments consistent with attitudinal hypotheses. Also, participants’ opinions on abortion interacted with speech content to influence judgments—but in a manner not wholly consistent with legal or attitudinal accounts of decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to understand what difference it makes if voters systematically consider a representative range of salient criteria before choosing a candidate, and whether the effects of such systematic processing are conditioned by political knowledge. To this end, we executed experiments during the 2000 electoral season that randomly exposed some subjects to an Analytic Hierarchy Processing (AHP) tool, which encourages systematic processing of various orthogonal decision criteria in complex choice environments. We predicted, and found, that the choices of knowledgeable voters exposed to AHP were weaker and less consistent than control group responses, suggesting that systematic processing induces integrative complexity and perhaps“analysis paralysis” among knowledgeable voters. However, we found that among less knowledgeable voters, the opposite pattern generally emerged—AHP exposure was associated with even greater reliance on party ID and ideology cues, perhaps even bolstering predispositions via projection and rationalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

) develop a theory in which relative, rather than absolute education determines political participation. Empirical tests of this theory have been unable to isolate the effect of education from other factors that impact participation. We propose an alternative definition in which education is measured relative to those born in the same year. This is used to estimate a model of voter turnout that controls for both absolute and relative education. The results show that this new measure of relative education has far more explanatory power than does absolute education. This finding has significant implications regarding how education affects both aggregate voter turnout levels and inequality in voter participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents the margins, centers and democracy on the paradigmatic history of women's suffrage. Geography and democratic innovations; Ambiguities in dating the achievement of women's suffrage; Rationale in the era of revolution.

Presents the political commitments and institutional accomplishments of feminist knowledge between the agent and object of feminist practice. Implications on the absence of exceptional women; Inclusion on the presumptions of male superiority; Social standing and cultural capital for intellectual and artistic labor.

The book "Postsocialist Pathways, is written as a critique of neoliberal orthodoxy just at the height of its ascendancy in academic and policy circles. It is argued that neoliberalism was a poor guide to policy because its rejection of diverse types of capitalism threatened to shut the door to social exploration almost immediately after it had been opened. The task was to develop middle-range concepts capable of translating this social experimentation, of understanding its problems and prospects, and of charting diversity in the patterns of interacting political and economic institutions across the countries of East Central Europe. The authors carry out the comparative analysis of capitalism after the fall of socialism. What sets the postsocialist transformations apart is that they created a class of property holders at the same time that they extended political rights to the propertyless. These are the problems of transforming economies-no less for sectors of market volatility and rapid technological change in the developed West than in the inchoate social orders of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

This essay examines the meaning and practice of fieldwork in a situation in which the primary goal is not to create an ethnographic understanding of the ‘Other’ hut to gather information in order to he an informed citizen capable of acting in a morally conscientious manner toward a particular category of persons with whom the participant observer shares the identity ‘fellow citizen.’ It asks how citizens gather information on the spot to make decisions as to which actions, among a range of possible and culturally feasible ones, are morally accceptable given their understanding of the ideological precepts they deem relevant to constructions of self and others and the interactions in which they are involved that require an immediate decision and action. It calls this information gathering and the decision points that motivate it doing one's homework—trying to understand what must he done, why it must he done, and what the consequences are of doing it one way and not another. It contrasts the implications of fieldwork for ethnographic representation with those of fieldwork as an aspect of homework, arguing that the latter is a self-consciously moral and political act and cannot he presumed consistent with shared identity based on locality, race, gender, or other categoric distinctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the contemporary debate concerning European integration and the ‘problem’ of Third World immigration no less than in developments in anthropology in the past decade, the boundedness of cultures and cultural difference have gained new prominence. Anthropology needs not only to explore how globalization affects the discipline's classical subjects but also to pay more attention to the new ways in which cultural differences and cleavages are conceptualized at its source. In effect, the political right in Europe has in the past decade developed a political rhetoric of exclusion in which Third World immigrants, who proceed in part from its ex-colonies, are construed as posing a threat to the national unity of the ‘host’ countries because they are culturally different. This rhetoric of exclusion has generally been identified as a new form of racism, I argue, instead, that, rather than asserting different endowments of human races, it postulates a propensity in human nature to reject strangers. This assumption underlies a radical opposition between nationals and immigrants as foreigners informed by a reified notion of bounded and distinct, localized national-cultural identity and heritage that is employed to rationalize the call for restrictive immigration policies. Following a systematic comparison of the contrasting conceptual structures of the two doctrines, I conclude that the contemporary cultural fundamentalism of the political right is, with respect to traditional racism, both old and new. It is old in that it draws for its argumentative force on the unresolved contradiction in the modem conception of the nation-state between an organicist and a voluntarist idea of belonging. It is new in that, because racism has become discredited politically, it attributes the alleged incompatibility between different cultures to an incapacity of different cultures to communicate that is inherent in human nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looks at the civil and political rights of citizens in the Deep South of the United States and Northern Ireland. Discussion of the inalienable rights integral to citizenship; Influence of voters who find themselves in a minority during elections; Information on the social feature of the Deep South and of Northern Ireland.

For a brief period after the Civil War, blacks gained a measure of political influence in Southern states. They used this nascent power first in a grass roots movement to build, fund, and staff schools. Then they joined with Radical Republicans in the Congress and with allies in Southern constitutional conventions during Congressional Reconstruction to establish free and universal public education. This article examines these political campaigns and the new constitutional frameworks that established schooling as a basic right for both races and that created new structures for the governance and finance of public education. These campaigns broadened traditional tenets of republican ideology to include the ex-slaves, but when white supremacists overthrew Reconstruction governments in the 1870s, the crusade stalled. Diminishing educational opportunity for blacks accompanied the loss of political rights and influence. Despite grave inequities that emerged between black and white schools, the principle of universal education remained in these constitutions. Although Reconstruction failed to transform the political economy of the South, it did leave an educational legacy vital to the survival and regeneration of black people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a substantial increase in nonwhite voter turnout since World War II. Part of the increase in nonwhite voter turnout is attributable to growing economic parity. The effects of policies on turnout has been examined. The 1965 Voting Rights Act caused a general narrowing of the racial turnout gap by between .104 and .280. Literacy tests had a small general effect on turnout. Poll taxes reduced turnout greatly. Policy changes have increased nonwhite turnout rates by .23-.33 more than white turnout rates. By 1980, virtually all remaining racial differences in turnout could be explained adequately by such variables as income, educational achievement and the quality of education received by the potential voter.

The article presents information on the importance of school clubs in natural and progressive growth in civic efficiency of the students of the U.S. The chief ideal of the public elementary schools is the development of intelligent, efficient and upright citizens. In realizing this ideal teachers have to depend upon the curriculum for material from which to develop a knowledge and appreciation of the rights and duties of citizens in a democracy and upon the classroom discipline for opportunities to make vital this knowledge through expression. Formal instruction does not provide the opportunity to express the knowledge. School clubs offer the opportunity to use this knowledge in a practical situation and furnishes opportunities for a vital development of a practical knowledge of the rules of order in such a way as to assist the school in its endeavors to make the school life an expression of the child's life as well as a better preparation for intelligent, efficient and upright participation in the privileges and duties of American citizenship.