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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some communities protest to demand change, while other seemingly similar communities do not? A large body of literature has found that elites play an important role in this regard, and documented the wide variety of mobilization tactics they use. While such arguments go some way toward explaining protest patterns, however, the literature has so far struggled to explain why some elites are able to employ these mobilization tactics so much more effectively than others. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in South Africa, I argue that closer attention to the technology of mobilization helps to explain these patterns. Specifically, I identify the critical role played by protest brokers —intermediaries who connect elites desiring mobilization with potential protesters. Without these brokers, I argue, many elites lack the local knowledge, connections, and trust necessary to mobilize collective action, significantly decreasing the likelihood of protest occurrence, and helping to explain where protests happen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leveraging comparisons within and across cases, this article investigates legal mobilization for social rights in Colombia and South Africa. This kind of rights contestation represents a new phenomenon, in which both ordinary citizens and judicial actors have come to view problems related to access to health care, housing, education, and social security through the lens of the law. Research on legal mobilization has tended toward one-sided examinations of this complex phenomenon, focusing primarily on either legal claims-making or judicial decision-making, and neglecting to fully theorize the relationship between the two. Drawing on an analysis of rights claims and 178 interviews, this article aims to correct these imbalances. In doing so, it offers a generalizable model that accounts for the social construction of legal grievances and the development of judicial receptivity to particular kinds of claims, and explains both the emergence and continuation of legal mobilization for social rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]