Search

Global convergence of public polices has been regarded as a defining feature of the late twentieth century. This study tests the generalizability of this claim for three road safety policies: i) the creation of road safety agencies; ii) child restraint laws; and iii) mandatory use of day-time running lights. I analyze crossnational longitudinal data using survival analysis for the years 1957-2013 in 147 countries. My first main finding is that only child restraint laws have been fully globally diffused and the other two face both international and national forces, depicting a fractured global convergence process. This finding may reflect the lack of necessary conditions at the regional level that accelerate the global spreading of policies, and thus contests the global convergence thesis. A second main finding is that the adoption of a road safety agency diffused in Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean, and the mandatory use of daytime running-lights spread throughout Europe. This may mirror the existence of specific elective affinities when policies only disseminate at the regional level. By recognizing fractured convergence processes our results call for rethinking the concept of global convergence and reintegrating more consistently regional analyses in the sociology of policy diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I use recent survey data to construct a methodology to measure participation in social movements and to test Resource Mobilization (RMB) and New Social Movement (NSM) theories, using the case of Chile. I note various challenges to how participation has been both conceptually and methodologically advanced, and stress in particular the importance of capturing social movements' fluidity. I suggest a method to identify how patterns of social movement participation can be distributed-as previous literature has suggested-into three sub-groups: successful, fizzler and tractable. I specifically concentrate on two social movements, environmental and student, and apply latent class models to assess the composition of each movement. I then examine, through a multinomial logistic regression analysis that includes a range of RM and NSM theories, and control variables, the social character of these sub-groups. After having introduced this method, results provide limited support for the NSM theory and strong RM theory. While NSM theory partially detects a few participation patterns of the student movement, RM theory, on the other hand, captures thoroughly the fluidity of both movements. To conclude, I suggest expanding the notion of participation commonly used to identify more accurately the fluidity of social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]