Politics, Social Movements and Social Change

Democracy was inspired by the lofty ideals of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, and fraternity. These ideals led many countries to challenge the absolutist monarchies of the past. In Europe, democratic ideals and values grew in response to the oppressive rule of absolutist monarchs. In India, the idea of democracy came with colonial rule but conferred subjecthood without citizenship on the Indian people. Colonial rule kindled the aspiration of Indians to become a nation of free and equal citizens and led to the formation of a political party, the Indian National Congress. This book explores the political institutions of democracy in India, focusing on those that began to emerge from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. It looks at Parliament and the state legislatures, the Supreme Court and high courts, and political parties, highlighting the maladies that beset these basic institutions of democracy today. After discussing the institutions of democracy, the book looks at the role of government and opposition in a democracy, civil society and the state, constitutional morality, how institutions work and why they fail, the representation of India as a society of castes and communities as well as a nation of citizens, pluralism and liberalism in India, the distinction between law and custom, and the relationship between sociology and ideology.

Democracy in the Making looks at how activist groups form. By closely observing the dynamics of 60 emerging activist efforts on the left and right over a three year period in Pittsburgh, it assesses the possibilities and limits of grassroots activism as a democratizing force in modern U.S. society. The book presents two broad findings. First, very early times matter. What an activist group initially does, even what it talks about, has long-lasting consequences. Early actions set up assumptions about how activist groups should operate that are difficult to dismantle or even perceive. Second, activist groups make decisions within a changing sense of what is possible. Over time, their sense of possibilities tends to narrow and options for action become more restricted. When action is too constrained, groups either collapse or dramatically reshape their sense of possibilities. By taking a close look at how ordinary people come together to change society, this book pinpoints both the potentials and the boundaries of democratization in grassroots activism. It shows how activism can broaden people’s sense of political engagement but also how activist groups can become mired in dysfunctional and undemocratic patterns that their members may dislike but don’t know how to change.

In the 1960s, on the heels of the Brown decision and in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, Ku Klux Klan activity boomed, reaching an intensity not seen since the 1920s, when KKK membership extended into the millions. Surprisingly, the state with the largest Klan membership—more than the rest of the South combined—was North Carolina, a supposed bastion of southern-style progressivism. Klansville, U.S.A. documents and explains the civil rights-era KKK's astounding rise and fall, by focusing on the under-explored case of the United Klans of America (UKA) in North Carolina. Like its contemporaries in the Deep South, the massive Carolina Klan engaged in secretive campaigns of terror and intimidation, but also developed a strong public presence, spreading its message and supporting its members at massive nightly rallies, afternoon street walks, weekend church services and turkey shoots, and through local radio shows and roadside billboards. The UKA's successes in the Tar Heel State provide a window into the complex appeal of the KKK as a whole, demonstrating how the Klan organized most successfully where whites perceived civil rights reforms to be a significant threat to their status, where mainstream outlets for segregationist resistance were lacking, and where the policing of the Klan's activities was lax. By connecting the KKK to the more mainstream segregationist and anti-communist groups across the South, this book offers new insight into southern conservatism, resistance to civil rights, and the region's subsequent dramatic shift to the Republican Party—shedding new light on organized racism and on how political extremism can intersect with mainstream institutions and ideals.

In 1989, citizens in China and East Germany rose up, demanding political change. Both movements used the tactics of strategic nonviolence but their outcomes differed: the Tiananmen Square revolt was crushed but East German resisters were victorious. Nonviolent Revolutions examines these two movements, along with citizen revolts against authoritarian regimes in Panama, Chile, Kenya, and the Philippines in the late twentieth century. Through a comparison of successful and failed uprisings, Sharon Erickson Nepstad analyzes the effects of movement strategies and regime counter-strategies. She concludes that security force defections were critical for movement success since regimes that maintained troop loyalty were the least likely to collapse. She also examines the impact of international sanctions, arguing that they sometimes harm movements by generating new allies for authoritarian leaders or by shifting the locus of power from local civil resisters to international actors. In conclusion, this book argues that theories of armed revolution do not sufficiently account for the factors shaping unarmed revolutions. Nonviolent Revolutions offers insight into the distinctive dynamics of civil resistance and explores the reasons why nonviolent insurrections succeed or fail.

Remembering Revolution explores the gendered politics of leftwing cultures and practices of violence. It is a study of women’s role and involvement in the late 1960s radical left Naxalbari movement of West Bengal, the origin of India’s Maoist revolution. At a time when the face of international terrorism is increasingly female, this book raises new and pressing questions about women’s participation in cultures of violence through the memories of urban, middle-class women activists. One of the first major studies of the gender and sexual politics of Naxalbari, the book draws on a unique body of historiographic, popular and personal memoirs, and a wide range of interdisciplinary theoretical devices. In making central the issue of violence, the book offers fresh reflections on how women are implicated by and negotiate different types of violence. It forwards the first major examination of the ordinary, everyday interpersonal violence of revolutionary movements. Such forms of violence are not merely silenced in the collective memory of Naxalbari but also in women’s own search for heroic identity through militant action. Moving beyond current considerations of radical politics as a site of women’s agency or victimhood, the book points to the more ambivalent, psychosocial implications and costs of women’s political identifications and subjectivities.

Voting distills a complex decision into a deceptively simple action. The electorate faces a messy tangle of parties, leaders, and issues. How is it possible for voters to unravel it all? How do they perceive the political landscape? How, in short, do voters choose? Not only is voting a complex choice, but voters themselves also vary widely in their degree of interest, and involvement in politics. This book provides a new understanding of how voting works by focusing on how choices are made given the cognitive limitations of the human mind and the environment in which decision making takes place. Drawing on recent advances in the study of cognitive psychology, decision making, and political cognition, this book provides a careful empirical examination of the strategies voters actually use to manage the complexity of political choice. Expressly rejecting the prevailing one-size-fits-all, “what a rational voter should do” approach, it distinguishes voters based on the cognitive shortcuts, or heuristics, they use to simplify the decision-making process. Drawing on survey data from the 1990s Italian national general elections, the book identifies four types of voters, classified by how they perceive and organize the political debate—from those who capably rely on nuanced ideological categories to those who, skeptical about all-things-political, prove easy prey for television broadcasters. The typology allows us to grasp the actual differences in political sophistication among citizens and to understand which factors are most important to different types of voters. The book helps us make sense of the various ways in which citizens themselves make sense of—and make “simple”—the complex world of politics.

This book tells the story of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers' ground-breaking victory, drawing important lessons from this dramatic tale. Since the 1900s, large-scale agricultural enterprises relied on migrant labor—a cheap, unorganized, and powerless workforce. In 1965, when some 800 Filipino grape workers began to strike under the aegis of the AFL-CIO, the UFW soon joined the action with 2,000 Mexican workers and turned the strike into a civil rights struggle. They engaged in civil disobedience, mobilized support from churches and students, boycotted growers, and transformed their struggle into La Causa, a farm workers' movement that eventually triumphed over the grape industry's Goliath. Why did they succeed? How can the powerless challenge the powerful successfully? Offering insight from a long-time movement organizer and scholar, the book illustrates how they had the ability and resourcefulness to devise good strategy and turn short-term advantages into long-term gains. The book covers the movement's struggles, set-backs, and successes.