Post-Political Transitions in Arab Spring Countries: The Challenges

This paper aims at examining the impact of political transitions on democracy, corruption and growth in countries which knew democratic changes. The results of our study indicate that these changes positively affect implementation of democratic principles, the struggle against corruption and economic growth. We examined also the case of the Arab spring countries focusing on the main political and socio-economic challenges and most importantly the religious challenge which is a characteristic of these countries. Indeed, religion may be considered as a relevant variable in these transitions and consequently it is very difficult to claim short-term or long-term triumph of these transitions as Arabs are now in a political boiling phase where religion may gather unexpected results.     

Democratizing Rural Economy: Institutional Friction,Sustainable Struggle and the Cooperative Movement*

Abstract Sustainable development demands institutions manage the conflicts and struggles that inevitably arise over material and ideal interests. While current cooperative theory privileges the economic element, a political economy of cooperation emphasizes cooperatives' tentative bridging of economic and political spheres with a democratic ethos. The cooperatives' democratic political structure exists in tension with a capitalist economic structure and other sites of friction. These contradictions are: in the realm of social relations, between production and consumption; in the realm of spatial relations, between the local and the global; and in the realm of collective action, between cooperatives as both traditional as well as new social movements. Where neo‐classical economic models seek to eliminate or reduce these tensions, political economy views these tensions as functional to sustainability by creating an “institutional friction” that facilitates innovation, flexibility and long‐term adaptability. This political economy of cooperation is intended as a step toward the development of a multidimensional sociology of cooperation.     

Civil society,social movements and Democracy in Southern Africa

The article reviews the theory of civil society and social movements in a general perspective and relates the theoretical argument to recent economic and political changes in Southern African states. Salient aspects of civil society and its role in the democratic process is considered and the role of different key institutions and organizations in the democratic process are analyzed. The role of economic elites is equivocal, both because of the racial dimension in their composition and in the way they avoid addressing problems of living standards of the working class. The most important institutions of civil society seem to be the universities and the church, whereas the role of media is less important than one might have expected, because of widespread state control and state ownership. The article analyzes the particular role of different social movements and offers an interesting comparison of their strengths and weaknesses in democratization processes in various Southern African countries.     

Contemporary Research on Social Movements and Protest in Latin America: Promoting Democracy, Resisting Neoliberalism, and Many Themes in between

This essay outlines how research on Latin American social movements has evolved since the late 1980s. Emphasis is given to two topics. First, the essay examines how Latin American social movement research has historically been oriented toward social movement theories that emerged out of the study of European movements and, to a lesser extent, movements in the United States. At the same time, it discusses how the unique historical and contextual factors of Latin American societies have repeatedly been found to defy adequate explanation by these theories. Second, the essay outlines five major themes that characterize the Latin American social movement literature: the dynamics of movements in relation to transitions to democracy, and to neo-liberal economic reforms, as well as transnational movement dynamics, indigenous movements, and women's movements.     

Globalization and the policing of protest: the case of APEC 1997

The policing of protest at international events conflicts with the political and policing culture of the host nation. Previous research shows a trend toward softer, more tolerant styles of policing protest within various Western democracies. We present a case study of an exception: the repression of protest at an international event in which one Western democracy hosted rulers of less democratic regimes in a ritual celebration of economic globalization. We explore reasons why, in the face of protests about undemocratic regimes elsewhere, the Canadian government and police were willing to use blatantly undemocratic tactics popularly believed to be more characteristic of those other regimes. Implications are discussed concerning protest policing, economic globalization, the nation-state and social movements.     

Immigration,Ethnicity, and Conflict: The California Chinese, 1849–1882*

Drawing on Bonacich's split market theory, the work of Hechter and Blalock on ethnic conflict, and the literature on social movements, the authors develop a model of factors producing conflict between native and immigrant workers. The model identifies the relative size of the immigrant group, the growth of the immigrant population, the desirability of jobs held by immigrant workers, economic conditions, the development of racist ideology among native workers, and the organization of native workers as factors possibly explaining the frequency of incidents of overt ethnic conflict and efforts to institutionalize discrimination through government action. The model is assessed by examining the situation of Chinese immigrants in California between 1849 and 1882. The data suggest that poor economic conditions, a well-developed racist ideology, and well-organized native workers best explain incidents of ethnic conflict and successful efforts to obtain discriminatory government action.     

Maternal Health Policies in Countries in Transition: Poland and Kyrgyzstan, 1990–2006

ABSTRACT

Starting with the initiation of democratic and market economic transitions, unsupportive policies concerning women's reproductive health were implemented in Kyrgyzstan and Poland in the period 1990–2006. These policies were expressed by (1) political decisions limiting available funding to support medical practices protecting women's reproductive health, (2) diminishing or restricted dissemination of knowledge about family planning, and (3) the implementation of new contraception and abortion policies. Could these changes be perceived as combat between democratic liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and tolerance versus traditionalism, insularism, and fundamentalism? We use analyses of policies concerning women's reproductive and maternal health to manifest rivalry between economic crisis and the push toward modernity and between traditionalism and liberalism. We demonstrate that the return to traditional gender roles and gender policies, and their practical application expressed in maternal health policies, illustrates cultural backlash toward diffusing Western liberalism in countries in political and economic transition.     

States,elites, and inequality in Latin America

In this article, I review the literature on elites and inequality in Latin America with a focus on the emergence of uneven state structures and how they came to foster the needs of elites for protection. States in Latin America are traditionally thought of as facilitating processes of top‐down modernization that transformed traditional agrarian economies into complex urban polities, while maintaining extreme inequality. The state is thus central in the genealogy of inequality and elite privilege in Latin America. The synergy between states and elites continues to mark Latin American societies, and it helps us to understand how major economic and political changes occur without significant changes in inequality. For the most part, Latin America's current uneven states emerged as the result of exclusionary projects of citizenship during the first half of the 20th century and were advanced by the advent of repressive regimes during the 1960s and 1970s. After democratic transitions during the 1980s and 1990s, Latin American states came to be characterized, on the one hand, by procedural democratic institutions and on the other, by high levels of state violence, exclusion, and segmented citizenship. The present situation is one of a problematic equilibrium between states, elites, and inequality.     

Factionalism in Transition: A Comparison of Ruptures in the Spanish Anarchist Movement

The three most important ruptures in Spanish anarchism in the 20^th century (1931, 1945 and 1979) occurred during political transitions towards more open and democratic systems. How did the political context influence these processes of factionalism and rupture? This article attempts to answer this question by means of a qualitative comparison of the three episodes. The results highlight the role played by two environmental factors: the isolation imposed by the previous repression, which encouraged the growth of divergent groups; and the growth in resources associated with the start of the political transition, which encouraged the transformation of symbolic conflict into political competition for control of the movement. Moreover, the results show how certain organizational procedures and features of the movement accelerated the internal conflict. They show in particular how the calling of congresses in the new context of visibility served to catalyze political competition; and how the symbolic capital of the movement became reduced to two antagonistic and mutually destructive strategic positions. At the theoretical level this case study examines the scope of two different models. On the one hand, it extends the viability of the alternating phases of latency and visibility model by applying it outside the context of new social movements. On the other, it questions two biases of the protest cycle model by dissociating innovation and internal competition in social movements from the initial and final phases of the cycle, respectively.     

Thailand's Work and Health Transition

Thailand has experienced a rapid economic transition from agriculture to industry and services, and from informal to formal employment. It has much less state regulation and worker representation relative to developed nations, who underwent these transitions more slowly and sequentially, decades earlier. We examine the strengthening of Thai government policy and legislation affecting worker's health, responding to international norms, a new democratic constitution, fear of foreign importer embargos and several fatal workplace disasters. We identify key challenges remaining for Thai policy makers, including legislation enforcement and the measurement of impacts on worker's mental and physical health.     

Kulturelle Variablen, organisatorische Netzwerke und demokratische Staatsstrukturen als Determinanten der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung im internationalen Vergleich

The article focuses on the determinants of economic growth in modern democratic industrial societies. The investigation is led by the idea that the traditional theory of growth must be extended in two directions: towards the micro-level, i.e. towards the field of microeconomic attitudes and values, and towards the macro-level, i.e. towards the field of institutional and political conditions. The study makes an attempt to develop such an integrative perspective and to explain the growth rate in the 1980s and 1990s with cultural, political-institutional and economic factors. Empirical analyses show that economic expansion is limited by three factors: the distribution of post-materialist values, the size of economic interest organizations and consensus forms of democracy. Furthermore, the results confirm the assumption of conditional convergence of economic growth.     

In (a) democracy we trust: social and economic determinants of support for democratic procedures in central and eastern Europe

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Empire, most of the nations of Central and Eastern Europe have begun adopting democratic procedures and institutions. In this paper, we argue that the presence or absence of social capital may very well be an important part of any equation that attempts to predict the extent to which the citizens of these nations will support the new democratic regimes. We apply Logit analysis to survey data collected in the Third Annual New Democracies Barometer (NDB III) to test this hypothesis. We also test the importance of economic variables on citizen support for democratic procedures in these nations. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the presence of social capital is a factor in explaining citizen support for democratic procedures. Moreover, we find indicators of social capital to be more important than economic variables in explaining citizen support for democratic procedures in our sample countries.     

Economic Transition,Class Formation,and the Superintendent State in the Midwest: 1850‐1900

This article outlines and clarifies the complex relationship between economic development, the formation of classes, political movement responses to these changes, and state institutional capacity building in response to these movements in the Midwestern US. It seeks to remedy views of the transition to capitalism in America that focus too narrowly on a moment of transition, positing instead a long, politically contested process of class formation by elucidating the specific interactions between agrarian and union movements and state‐building processes. Our research reveals the substantial role of the state in forcing through acceptance of economic changes and shifting class locations through a co‐developmental process of political resistance movements and state‐building.     

Urban poverty and labor market dynamics in five Latin American countries: 2003–2008

Latin America experienced a long period of sustained growth since 2003 that positively impacted social and labor market indicators, including poverty. This paper contributes to the understanding of this process as it carries out a comparative study of poverty dynamics in five Latin American countries during 2003–2008. It analyzes the extent to which countries with different levels of poverty incidence diverge in terms of poverty exit and entry rates, identifies the relative importance of the frequency and impact of events associated to poverty transitions and examines how these events affect households with different characteristics. For this, a dynamic analysis of panel data is carried out using regular household surveys. Sizeable rates of poverty movements were observed in all five countries and it was found that a large proportion of household experienced positive events, mainly related to the labor market; however, only a small fraction of them actually exited poverty. Demographic events and public cash transfers proved to be of little relevance; in particular, the latter did not contribute much either to intensify poverty exits or to prevent poverty entries. Households with children experienced more (less) negative (positive) events than those without children. It appeared therefore that even when the economy behaved reasonably well at the aggregate level, high levels of labor turnover and income mobility (even of a negative nature) still prevail, mainly associated to the high level of precariousness and the undeveloped system of social protection that characterize the studied countries.     

Gender and the Public Sphere: Alternative Forms of Integration in Nineteenth-Century America

This paper intends to evaluate two competing models of multicultural integration in stratified societies: the "multiple publics" model of Nancy Fraser and the "fragmented public sphere" model of Jeffrey Alexander. Fraser and Alexander disagree on whether or not claims to a general "common good" or "common humanity" are democratically legitimate in light of systemic inequality. Fraser rejects the idea that cultural integration can be democratic in conditions of social inequality, while Alexander accepts it and tries to explain how it may be realized. In order to address this debate, I analyze the cultural foundations of the female-led, maternally themed social movements of nineteenth-century America. The language of these movements supports Alexander's position over Fraser's, though it also suggests that Alexander is mistaken in the specifics of his cultural theory of a general and democratic "common good." While Alexander's model of integration is structured uniquely by what he and Philip Smith have called "the discourse of civil society," the evidence suggests a distinctly alternative, equally democratic code at play in this case, which I have labeled a discourse of affection and compassion.     

Nationalism, Charisma, and Plebiscitary Leadership: The Problem of Democratization in Max Weber's Political Sociology

Max Weber has typically been regarded as a central thinker in the liberal tradition of social analysis. At the same time, critics have long noted how his democratic commitments were compromised by his nationalism. Drawing on existing criticism, I discuss the importance of charismatic leadership in Weber's thought and its implications for his understanding of the process of democratization. Reconstructing core concepts in Weber's political thought, I analyze how Weber's concept of plebiscitarian leadership unites charismatic domination with nationalism and skepticism concerning effective democratic politics. I show how Weber's concept of plebiscitarian rule grew from deeply held political values and his engagement with German politics. I then generate propositions regarding the problem of democratization in regime transitions and apply them to contemporary charismatic leaders and ethno-nationalist mobilization in post-Communist transitions. I argue that as much as it anticipates the central dilemma of charismatic solutions to political crisis, Weber's thought favors nationalist and plebiscitarian responses to democratization that have been largely discredited by historical experience.     

Group formation,styles, and grammars of commonality in local activism

This article argues that in order to analyse democracy as a pattern constantly processed in a given society, it is useful to look at activist groups’ agenda setting and recruitment principles, group bonds and boundaries, and how these actions direct and influence ways of creating the common. Based on an ethnographic study on bicycle activism in Helsinki, Finland, it describes a local critical mass movement that was successful in promoting a bicycle friendly and sustainable city, yet dissolved due to lack of people involved, and the bicycle demonstrations stopped at a moment of high public interest. This empirical puzzle is addressed by combining three theoretical perspectives: Kathleen Blee’s work on path dependencies in nascent activist groups; Nina Eliasoph and Paul Lichterman’s work on group styles, and Laurent Thévenot’s work on the grammars of commonality. These theoretical tools help understand the sense of what is deemed possible, desirable and feasible in activist groups, and the consequences thereof to social movement ‘success’ and ‘failure’. The article claims that everyday practices and interaction are crucial in understanding the ‘democratic effects’ of social movements. It concludes that following specific processes of politicization and their conditionings in activist groups provides keys to understanding contextual differences in democracies without resorting to methodological nationalism or to exaggerated global isomorphism, and thus may contribute to figuring out how to succeed global action plans over wicked, pressing problems like global warming.     

Protests as critical junctures: some reflections towards a momentous approach to social movements

ABSTRACT

Recent times have been defined as momentous: great transformation, great recession as well as great regression have been frequently used short-cut terms to characterize the period following the financial breakdown of 2008. As for contentious politics in these times, we frequently hear references to crisis as well as eventful protests, as calls for what was expected to be routine protest triggered portentous waves of contentious politics. Reference to moments of change can be found in different approaches addressing social movements from the macro, meso, and micro levels. While neoinstitutional approaches have looked at extraordinary times from a macro perspective, the Chicago School adopted a micro perspective, looking at the sudden breaking of established paths, the reproduction of ruptures, and their stabilization. An emerging concern in social movement studies with ‘great transformations’ that triggered big mobilizations can also be seen at the meso level Drawing on these perspectives, I argue that some eventful protests trigger critical junctures, producing abrupt changes which develop contingently and become path dependent. While routinized protests proliferate in normal times, under some political opportunities, some protests – or moments of protest – act as exogenous shocks, catalyzing intense and massive waves of contention. Referring to the debate on critical junctures, and bridging it with social movement studies, I thematize a sequence of processes of cracking, as the production of sudden ruptures; vibrating, as contingently reproducing those ruptures; and sedimenting, as the stabilization of the legacy of the rupture. With the aim of mapping some relevant questions, rather than providing answers, I refer for illustration to research I carried out on movements in democratic transitions during economic, political, and social crises, as well as their legacy and memory.     

Migration transition in small Northern and Eastern Caribbean states

1 area of intra-Caribbean migration that has been overlooked is the "migration transition"--the transformation of rapidly modernizing societies from net labor exporters to net labor importers. This article assembles 8 case studies to 1) briefly present a spectrum of migration experiences in the Caribbean, 2) uncover some transitions under way, 3) pinpoint the forces that underlie the migration transition, and 4) point out some of the more important policy implications of labor migration reversals. The 8 island societies sampled for illustration purposes include 1) the Bahamas and the US Virgin Islands as post-migration transition societies (Zelinsky's advanced society), 2) the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands as undergoing transition (Zelinsky's late transitional society), and 3) Anguilla, St. Kitts-Nevis, Turks and Caicos, and Montserrat as premigration transition societies (Zelinsky's early transitional society). Population data for the islands were derived primarily from the West Indian censuses and government statistics. These 8 historical sketches reveal certain commonalities. All are at various stages in a long-term economic restructuring to displace traditional staple crops with more income elastic, high value export services. In such societies, population growth and progress along the migration transition is an increasing function of this kind of successful export substitution. In addition, along the migration and economic transitions, such insular economies exhibit a relatively large public sector (20-30% of all activity), declining unemployment, increasing fiscal autonomy, and are committed to a development strategy remarkably similar to the "successful" model of the Bahamas and the US Virgin Islands. Cursory evidence suggests that, because of intersectoral competition for land and labor, there is an inverse relationship between farm effort/manufacturing employment and tourism intensity. This review suggests that small islands undergoing rapid growth imperatives also experience a similar set of self-reinforcing socioeconomic and environmental imbalances. Particularly for post-transition and transition societies, these spillovers include increasing real estate speculation and inflation because of tourism and the allied development of retirement colonies of affluent North Americans, wage pressures and skilled manpower shortages, and increasing vulnerability to international business cycles.     

A Neo-Durkheimian analysis of a new religious movement: The case of Soka Gakkai in Italy

Soka Gakkai is one of the world’s fastest-growing religious movements and Italy figures among the western nations where this religious group has been most successful. This article aims at explaining this success-story: why has Soka Gakkai, and particularly its Italian affiliation, grown so rapidly in recent years? This research question gives the opportunity to assess the applicability of the economic theory of religion to the growth of new religious movements. Hence, in order to explain the expansion of Soka Gakkai, this work begins with an examination of the adaptive strategies developed by a Japanese organization in the Italian religious market. It is claimed, however, that a rational choice explanation cannot stand on its own and that we must take into account the dynamics of pre-contractual solidarity that promote trust, especially when the expected benefits promised by this organization to its adherents do not materialize. Moreover, these solidarity dynamics generate intense emotional gratification that works as a highly motivating incentive to sustain members’ commitment and to prevent them from dropping out. This pre-contractual solidarity is actively produced and continuously reproduced by means of ritual interaction along the lines suggested by Collins’s theory.