Ballots and Barricades

Ballots and Barricades
Author: Ronald Aminzade
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2021-04-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691228108

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
Author: Pippa Norris
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2015-04-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317526848

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
Author: Pippa Norris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2015-07-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1316368440

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?
Author: Martin P. Wattenberg
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2015-10-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317347021

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
Author: Rebecca Kolins Givan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2010-07-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1139490192

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
Author: Lynette H. Ong
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2022-02-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1009193058

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.

Armies of the Poor

Armies of the Poor
Author: Mark Traugott
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2017-09-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351531123

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 Satiric Decade

The Satiric Decade
Author: Amy Wiese Forbes
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2010
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780739129456

"Where do democratic political practices originate? This issue has long concerned republics, but few historians have studied the process by which people learn the skills of rights-based government. In this illuminating history, Amy Wiese Forbes addresses these origins by analyzing how republicanism took shape through the political satire that flooded French newspapers, theaters, courtrooms, and even academic life in 1830. Forbes shows that satire was the chief source of the critical spirit of republicanism that erupted in the 1840s and sustained the Republic in the 1870s and argues against the notion that satire had no lasting political impact. This book will speak to historians of French politics, republicanism, popular culture, the July Monarchy, satire and political humor, class and gender formation, and legal history." --Book Jacket.

Marianne in the Market

Marianne in the Market
Author: Lisa Tiersten
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2001-09-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0520225295

This text traces the transformation of comsumerism in 19th-century France and the effects it had on the image of women.

Winning Hearts and Votes

Winning Hearts and Votes
Author: Steven Brooke
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2019-01-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1501730630

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.