Political Structures and Political Mores: Varieties of Politics in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Political Structures and Political Mores: Varieties of Politics in Comparative Perspective Marion Fourcade, a Evan Schofer b a) University of California, Berkeley; b) University of California, Irvine Abstract: We offer an integrated study of political participation, bridging the gap between the literatures on civic engagement and social movements. Historically evolved institutions and culture generate different configurations of the political domain, shaping the meaning and forms of political activity in different societies. The structuration of the polity along the dimensions of “stateness” and “corporateness” accounts for cross-national differences in the way individuals make sense of and engage in the political sphere. Forms of political participation that are usually treated as distinct are actually interlinked and co-vary across national configurations. In societies where interests are represented in a formalized manner through corporatist arrangements, political participation revolves primarily around membership in pre-established groups and concerted negotiation, rather than extra-institutional types of action. By contrast, in “statist” societies the centralization and concentration of sovereignty in the state makes it the focal point of claim-making, driving social actors to engage in “public” activities and marginalizing private and, especially, market-based political forms. We test these and other hypotheses using cross-national data on political participation from the World Values Survey. Keywords: political sociology; social movements; political participation; civil society; protest; comparative/historical sociology is a well-established fact that democratic countries differ in the extent and manner in which their citizens “do” politics (Fourcade, Lande, and Schofer 2016). How they differ depends on what aspect is being examined. For instance, different indicators will give a more or less lively picture of American democracy. On the one hand, the US remains an associational nation: according to the World Values Surveys, roughly 60 percent of the people there have joined at least one voluntary group. On the other hand, voting rates in national parliamentary elections are low in comparative perspective (IDEA 2009). Americans also appear less prone to the more episodic forms of social mobilization that routinely stir many of the societies in Continental Europe and Latin America. More than one-third of Italian and French participants in the World Values Surveys from 1981 to 2008 had joined a demonstration, as opposed to only 17 percent of their American and 13 percent of their British counterparts; roughly 8 percent of the French and Italian interviewees, but 2 percent of the American and British ones, had ever taken part in a building occupation. The scholarly literature on political participation tends to treat these different forms as relatively exclusive from each other. Academic disciplines and fields have cut up “politics” into a series of discrete objects (e.g., voting, civic engagement, social movements, lobbying, and more), each of which is presumed to obey its own institutional logics. Thus we have an extremely dynamic scholarship broadly I Citation: Fourcade, Marion and Evan Schofer. 2016. “Political Structures and Political Mores: Varieties of Politics in Compar- ative Perspective” Sociological Science 3: 413-443. Received: May 8, 2015 Accepted: December 23, 2015 Published: June 16, 2016 Editor(s): Jesper Sorensen, Sarah Soule DOI: 10.15195/v3.a19 c 2016 The Au- Copyright: thor(s). This open-access article has been published under a Cre- ative Commons Attribution Li- cense, which allows unrestricted use, distribution and reproduc- tion, in any form, as long as the original author and source have been credited. c b T