Ballots and Barricades

Ballots and Barricades PDF Author: Ronald Aminzade
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691228108
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

Book Description
Using class analysis to understand the dynamics of political conflict in mid-nineteenth-century France, Ronald Aminzade explores political activity among workers in three industrialized French cities--Toulouse, Saint-étienne, and Rouen. A comparative case-study design enables the author to analyze how the complex interaction between industrialization, class relations, and party development fostered revolutionary communes in some cities but not others. Challenging traditional theories of industrialization and revolution, Aminzade innovatively uses narratives to provide a historically grounded analysis of the failed municipal revolutions of 1871 and the triumph of liberal-democratic institutions in France. In each of these cities, distinctive patterns of capitalist industrialization and class restructuring intersected with shifting political opportunities at the national level to produce local republican parties with different ideologies, strategies, and alliances. Focusing on changing relations between republican parties and male workers, whose identities and economic standing were in transition, Aminzade examines struggles within local parties among liberal, radical, and socialist republicans. The outcome of these struggles, he argues, shaped the willingness of workers to embrace the ballot box or take to the barricades.

Contentious Elections

Contentious Elections PDF Author: Pippa Norris
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317526848
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Book Description
From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe the world has witnessed a rising tide of contentious elections ending in heated partisan debates, court challenges, street protests, and legitimacy challenges. In some cases, disputes have been settled peacefully through legal appeals and electoral reforms. In the worst cases, however, disputes have triggered bloodshed or government downfalls and military coups. Contentious elections are characterized by major challenges, with different degrees of severity, to the legitimacy of electoral actors, procedures, or outcomes. Despite growing concern, until recently little research has studied this phenomenon. The theory unfolded in this volume suggests that problems of electoral malpractice erode confidence in electoral authorities, spur peaceful protests demonstrating against the outcome, and, in the most severe cases, lead to outbreaks of conflict and violence. Understanding this process is of vital concern for domestic reformers and the international community, as well as attracting a growing new research agenda. The editors, from the Electoral Integrity Project, bring together scholars considering a range of fresh evidence– analyzing public opinion surveys of confidence in elections and voter turnout within specific countries, as well as expert perceptions of the existence of peaceful electoral demonstrations, and survey and aggregate data monitoring outbreaks of electoral violence. The book provides insights invaluable for studies in democracy and democratization, comparative politics, comparative elections, peace and conflict studies, comparative sociology, international development, comparative public opinion, political behavior, political institutions, and public policy.

Why Elections Fail

Why Elections Fail PDF Author: Pippa Norris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316368440
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Book Description
Too often, elections around the globe are, unfortunately, deeply flawed or even fail. What triggers these problems? In this second volume of her trilogy on electoral integrity, Pippa Norris compares structural, international, and institutional accounts as alternative perspectives to explain why elections fail to meet international standards. The book argues that rules preventing political actors from manipulating electoral governance are needed to secure integrity, although at the same time officials also need sufficient resources and capacities to manage elections effectively. Drawing on new evidence, the study determines the most effective types of strategies for strengthening the quality of electoral governance around the world. With a global perspective, this book provides fresh insights into these major issues at the heart of the study of elections and voting behavior, comparative politics, democracy and democratization, political culture, democratic governance, public policymaking, development, international relations and conflict studies, and processes of regime change.

Is Voting for Young People?

Is Voting for Young People? PDF Author: Martin P. Wattenberg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317347021
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187

Book Description
This book focuses on the root causes of the generation gap in voter turnout—changes in media consumption habits over time. It lays out an argument as to why young people have been tuning out politics in recent years, both in the United States and in other established democracies.

The Diffusion of Social Movements

The Diffusion of Social Movements PDF Author: Rebecca Kolins Givan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139490192
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
It is widely recognized that social movements may spread - or 'diffuse' - from one site to another. Such diffusion, however, is a complex and multidimensional process that involves different actors, networks, and mechanisms. This complexity has spawned a large body of literature on different aspects of the diffusion process, yet a comprehensive framework remains an elusive target. This book is a response to that need, and its framework focuses on three basic analytical questions. First, what is being diffused? Second, how does diffusion occur? Finally, what is the impact of diffusion on organizational development and shifts in the scale of contentious politics? This volume suggests that diffusion is not a simple matter of political contagion or imitation; rather, it is a creative and strategic process marked by political learning, adaptation, and innovation.

The Street and the Ballot Box

The Street and the Ballot Box PDF Author: Lynette H. Ong
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009193058
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 128

Book Description
How do discontented masses and opposition elites work together to engineer a change in electoral authoritarian regimes? Social movements and elections are often seen as operating in different terrains – outside and inside institutions, respectively. In this Element, I develop a theory to describe how a broad-based social movement that champions a grievance shared by a wide segment of the population can build alliances across society and opposition elites that, despite the rules of the game rigged against them, vote the incumbents out of power. The broad-based nature of the movement also contributes to the cohesion of the opposition alliance, and elite defection, which are often crucial for regime change. This Element examines the 2018 Malaysian election and a range of cases from other authoritarian regimes across Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa to illustrate these arguments.

Movement Parties of the Far Right

Movement Parties of the Far Right PDF Author: Pietro Castelli Gattinara
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198892101
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
In an era of traditional political party decline, this book explores a new phase of nativist mobilization, in which street politics plays an increasingly important role. Pietro Castelli Gattinara and Andrea L. P. Pirro delve into the hybrid and transitional nature of far-right movement parties, i.e. collective actors that contest elections like political parties and mobilize in the protest arena like social movements. Movement parties offer an exceptional object of study since they challenge the conventional distinction between institutional and non-institutional politics. Examining the 'production structure' of ten movement parties across nine European countries, the authors identify key factors that affect their engagement in protest activity. They address the internal organization, decision-making processes, and external mobilization of these collective actors using unique empirical material, including quantitative data on far-right protest mobilization spanning over a decade, protest network visualizations, and qualitative interviews with high-ranking officials. The book provides fresh insights into how the far right spreads its influence and relates to non-institutional politics, making it essential reading for anyone concerned about the way in which nativist collective actors transform society from the ground up. A compelling study looking at the relationship between electoral politics and grassroots activism, Movement Parties of the Far Right illuminates the complex organizational and strategic choices underlying far-right mobilization.

Winning Hearts and Votes

Winning Hearts and Votes PDF Author: Steven Brooke
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501730630
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Book Description
In non-democratic regimes around the world, non-state organizations provide millions of citizens with medical care, schooling, childrearing, and other critical social services. Why would any authoritarian countenance this type of activism? Under what conditions does the private provision of social services generate political mobilization? And in those cases, what linkage does the provision of social services forge between the provider and recipient? In Winning Hearts and Votes, Steven Brooke argues that authoritarians often seek to manage moments of economic crisis by offloading social welfare responsibilities to non-state providers. But providers who serve poorer citizens, motivated by either charity of clientelism, will be constrained in their ability to mobilize voters because the poor depend on the state for many different goods. Organizations that serve paying customers, in contrast, may produce high quality, consistent, and effective services. This type of provision generates powerful, reputation-based linkages with a middle-class constituency more likely to support the provider on election day. Brooke backs up his novel argument with an in-depth examination of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the archetypal organization that combines social service provision with electoral success. With a fascinating array of historical, qualitative, spatial, and experimental data he traces the Brotherhood's provision of medical services from its origins in the 1970s, through its maturation under the authoritarian regime of Hosni Mubarak, to its apogee during the country's brief democratic interlude, 2011–2013. In addition to generating new insights into authoritarian regimes, party-voter linkages and clientelism, and the relationship between political parties and social movements, Winning Hearts and Votes details the history, operations, and political effects of the Muslim Brotherhood's much discussed but little understood social service network.

Armies of the Poor

Armies of the Poor PDF Author: Mark Traugott
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351531123
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Book Description
In June 1848, two irregular armies of the urban poor fought a four-day battle in the streets of Paris that decided the fate of the French Second Republic. The Parisian National Workshops and the Parisian Mobile Guard-organizations newly created at the time of the February Revolution-provided the bulk of the June combatants associated with the insurrection and repression, respectively. According to Marx's simple and compelling hypothesis, a nascent French proletariat unsuccessfully attempted to assert its political and social rights against a coalition of the bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat, represented by the Parisian Mobile Guard. Through a detailed study of archival sources, Mark Traugott challenges this interpretation of these events and proposes an organizational explanation.Research has consistently shown that skilled artisans and not unskilled proletarians stood at the forefront of the revolutionary struggles of the nineteenth century. Traugott compares the social identities of the main participants on opposite sides of the conflict and sorts out the reasons for the political alignments observed. Drawing on work by Charles Tilly and Lynn Lees, Traugott demonstrates that the insurgents were not highly proletarianized workers, but rather members of the highly skilled trades predominant in the Parisian economy. Meanwhile, those who spearheaded the repression were little different in occupational status, though they tended to be significantly younger. Traugott's ""organizational hypothesis"" makes sense of the observed configuration of forces. He accounts for the age differential as a by-product of the recruitment criteria that Mobile Guard volunteers were required to meet. Finally, he explains why class position creates no more than a diffuse political predisposition that remains subject to the influence of situation-specific factors such as organizational affiliations. Armies of the Poor helps clarify our understanding of the dynamic at work in the insurrectiona

The Dictator's Dilemma at the Ballot Box

The Dictator's Dilemma at the Ballot Box PDF Author: Masaaki Higashijima
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 047290275X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 498

Book Description
Contrary to our stereotypical views, dictators often introduce elections in which they refrain from employing blatant electoral fraud. Why do electoral reforms happen in autocracies? Do these elections destabilize autocratic rule? The Dictator’s Dilemma at the Ballot Box argues that strong autocrats who can garner popular support become less dependent on coercive electioneering strategies. When autocrats fail to design elections properly, elections backfire in the form of coups, protests, and the opposition’s stunning election victories. The book’s theoretical implications are tested on a battery of cross-national analyses with newly collected data on autocratic elections and in-depth comparative case studies of the two Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.