Comparative Political Sociology Research Articles

Local Politics and Fluctuating Engagement with China: Analysing the Belt and Road Initiative in Maritime Southeast Asia

Abstract The past few years have witnessed that the success (or failure) of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) depends to a large extent upon engagement with and responses from recipient countries. The article explores the impact of Southeast Asian countries’ domestic socio-political factors on their foreign policymaking and BRI projects in Southeast Asia. Based on comparative political sociology, the article develops a conceptual typology of foreign policymaking and an explanatory typology of socio-political risks, both of which are further applied to studying the socio-political risks that BRI projects entail in the four maritime Southeast Asian countries of Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Singapore. The empirical study suggests that the Philippines’ ‘populist’ type of foreign policymaking creates the highest level of risks—both political and societal—for BRI projects and that Singapore’s ‘procedural’ type produces the lowest. Malaysia’s ‘arbitrary’ type and Indonesia’s ‘democratic’ type, meanwhile, generate medium-level political or societal risks. These findings have important policy implications for Chinese-funded overseas projects.

What Makes Firms Competitive? States, Markets, and Organisational Embeddedness in Competitive Firm Restructuring in Postsocialist Economies

ABSTRACTThe prevailing transitions literature suggests that dynamic firms in postsocialist economies are the result of macroinstitutional reforms leading to the making of markets. This article builds on work in comparative political economy and economic sociology to show that the degree of competitive behaviour of postsocialist firms is determined not by the existence of general market institutions alone but by the kinds of organisational allies firms possess and the kinds of markets they compete in. Using firm survey data across 28 postsocialist economies, the article examines the determinants of competitive restructuring by firms, including product innovation, standards upgrade, financial transparency, and investments in research and development. The article confirms insights from comparative political economy which suggest that dynamic enterprise sectors emerge when governance is effective. However, at the firm level, the article finds that transnational ties and supportive policy environments are most significant in the making of dynamic postsocialist enterprises. The article also highlights important regional variation in firm behaviour and discusses the relationship between institutional frameworks, organisational embeddedness, and firm restructuring in postsocialist economies.

Political space and the space of polities: Doing politics across nations

What makes political life in the United States so different from political life in France, Hungary or Argentina? This paper considers why societies “do politics” differently. We draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s criticism of substantialist thinking in sociology and on his conceptualization of the social space to propose a new way of relating methodological to theoretical claims in comparative political sociology. We do this by exploring and constructing a “space of polities” based on data from the 2004 World Values Survey, using relational statistical techniques (e.g., geometric data analysis). The main insight is that any single form of political action (e.g., joining a voluntary association, or a demonstration, or a boycott) only takes its meaning in the context of its objective relationship to other forms of political action and non-action that have currency in each particular society. We explore the diversity of polity types that actually exist and discuss how they emerge from similar configurations in countries’ spaces of political practices. We suggest that the reason for such clustering lies in similar political–historical trajectories. We conclude by arguing for a comparative approach that is sensitive to differences in overall systems of relationships.

Abstracts, volume 46, n° 3, 2015 Reconsidering the post-Communist period: Between area studies and comparative political sociology

Abstracts, volume 46, n° 3, 2015 Reconsidering the post-Communist period: Between area studies and comparative political sociology

Circulations and Qualities of Political Elites

Abstract Circulations and qualities of political elites are subjects of abiding interest in comparative political sociology. Pairs of articles in this issue examine (1) long-term circulations of parliamentary elites in Norway, Denmark, and other Nordic countries; (2) changing compositions of ministerial and parliamentary elites in Spain and Russia since both countries transited from authoritarian rule; (3) personality traits of German parliamentary elites, compared with those of the German adult population, and proclivities of American and British elites since World War II. This introduction compares and contrasts the three pairs of articles with previous comparative studies of political elites.

The SAGE handbook of comparative politics

Introduction - Todd Landman and Neil Robinson PART ONE: METHODS AND FIELDS OF COMPARATIVE POLITICS The Distinctiveness of Comparative Research - Charles C Ragin and Claude Rubinson Global Comparative Methods - Paul Pennings, Hans Keman and Jan Kleinnijenhuis Case Studies - Darren Hawkins Is there a Quantitative-Qualitative Divide in Comparative Politics? The Case of Process Tracing - James A Caporaso Establishing Equivalence - Jan W van Deth Comparative Political Sociology - Willfried Spohn Comparative Institutional Analysis - Vivien A Schmidt Comparative Political Economy - Thomas Pl mper The Contribution of Area Studies - Stephen E Hanson Comparative Politics and International Relations - John M Hobson PART TWO: CLASSIC ISSUES IN COMPARATIVE POLITICS Postindustrial Democracies: Political economy and democratic partisan competition - Herbert Kitschelt Government Formation - Wolfgang C M ller Institutional Design - Josep M Colomer Comparative Political Behaviour: What is being compared? - Shaun Bowler Changes in the Causes of Democratization through Time - Barbara Geddes Political Culture - Christian Welzel Revolution - Jack A Goldstone Social Movements - Vincent Boudreau and David S Meyer Corruption - Paul Heywood PART THREE: NEW AND EMERGING ISSUES IN COMPARATIVE POLITICS Electoral Authoritarianism - Andreas Schedler Electoral Corruption - Sarah Birch Comparative Federalism - David McKay Human Rights - Todd Landman Governance - Philip Keefer Terrorism - Jennifer S Holmes Comparative Regional Integration and Regionalism - Fredrik Soderbaum Transitional Justice - Paola Cesarini The globalization of comparative public opinion research - Pippa Norris

Religion and Comparative Political Sociology

In the last decade, religious politics seemed to sweep the world. Calls have been issued for religion to regain its rightful place in the study of politics. We contend that the influence of religion on politics is hardly novel and that religious beliefs and organizations have had a profound effect on polities both in the developed democracies and in developing societies. Drawing widely on the comparative sociology of politics, we trace the role of religion in the generation of political attitudes and preferences, in the process of democratization, in the formation of interest organizations and confessional parties, and consider the contemporary debate concerning religious violence. We will demonstrate the importance of religion in inspiring political behavior, including both electoral and non-electoral politics, and in the shaping of political institutions and the regulatory framework surrounding the religious sphere. Our survey indicates that neither arguments concerning the secularization of polity and society nor for the recent return of religious fervor to politics is persuasive. Religion is, and has been, fundamental to modern politics.

Using Europe: Strategic action in multi-level politics

This article examines the importance of action-theoretical considerations in European studies. By outlining the notion of ‘usage’ of the European Union, we argue for a more systematically sociological consideration of strategic action in the study of European transformations. The recent turns towards constructivism and comparative political sociology allow analyzing the rationality of political actors without falling in the trap of overly reductionist rational choice assumptions. Concentrating on intentional action helps to reveal the importance of three aspects of the multi-level polity: (1) informal and non-constraining procedures; (2) the effects of ways in which actors move in between the different levels of the European political system; and (3) the ambiguous and often surprising coalitions that come together despite often considerable disagreement over their final goals.

The Antipodean social laboratory, labour and the transformation of the welfare state

The Australian and New Zealand welfare states have undergone dramatic transformations since the early 1980s. This has led some commentators to redeploy the ‘social laboratory’ metaphor widely used to describe Australasia at the turn of the 19th century. This article analyses the disjunctures in Australia’s and New Zealand’s experience of transforming the welfare state, and seeks to account for them. Drawing inspiration from comparative political sociology, it suggests that the differences can be explained with reference to variations in the political-economic starting point of transformation, variations in the institutional context of political decision-making, and variations in the balance of social and political power in the two countries

Political Institutions, Minorities, and Punishment: A Pooled Cross-National Analysis of Imprisonment Rates

Despite their plausibility, political explanations for incarceration rates have not been intensely investigated. Centralized democracies that reduce public influence by using corporatist methods to resolve disputes should have lower incarceration rates, but the opposite should be true in decentralized polities with federalist political arrangements where mass publics have greater control over punishment. Threat hypotheses are assessed by examining the effects of minority presence and economic inequality. This study uses a panel design to examine these effects on imprisonment rates in 13 of the most progressive democracies from 1970 to 1995. With the murder or overall crime rates, social disorganization, and additional indicators held constant, the presence of corporatist and federalist political arrangements explain cross-national differences in incarceration rates. The evidence suggests that internal racial or ethnic threat produces larger imprisonment rates as well. The findings indicate that a well-developed comparative political sociology of punishment should help us understand contrasts in the proportion of the population that is incarcerated in advanced democracies.

Rebellious Civil Society: Popular Protest and Democratic Consolidation in Poland, 1989–1993. By Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. 296p. $22.95. Framing Democracy: Civil Society and Civic Movements in Eastern Europe. By John K. Glenn, III. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. 289p. $45.00. Creating a Democratic Civil Society in Eastern Germany: The Case of

A decade after the epochal events of the late 1980s and early 1990s, we have come to see them not as quasi miracles the way we did then but almost as prosaic way stations in the ever-present process of societal change. To be sure, there has been a stream of often pathbreaking scholarship in the fields of comparative politics and political sociology, with a special emphasis on social movements, civil society, the transition from authoritarian to democratic societies, and the complex consolidation of the latter that has rightly contributed to the demystification of these events. Yet, as citizens as well as scholars, we still remain so riveted by what happened in those few years in East Central Europe that the point of diminishing returns potentially afflicting additional research and writing on the subject remains distant.

The political economy of tariffs in late nineteenth-century Europe: Reconsidering Republican France

This article examines an important period in work on comparative political economy and economic sociology the late nineteenth century in Europe. It takes up a classic problem in these fields domestic political responses to changes in exposure to international trade. Narrowly constructed models of pressure group politics have dominated approaches to this problem. I argue here that these approaches pay insufficient attention to the fiscal sociology of states and regimes. I develop these arguments, first of all, by examining central features of trade and domestic politics in France, secondly, by putting this examination in a broader comparative context, and finally, by drawing out some of the theoretical implications.

Where and When Was Democracy Invented?

Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy made explicit an influential but usually unstated principle for comparative political sociology. In his search for the social sources of different sorts of political systems, Moore devoted chapters to revolutionary or quasi-revolutionary upheavals in England, France, the United States, Japan, China, and India. He did not feel it equally important to consider the history of democracy in Scandinavia, the Low Countries, or Switzerland (not to mention Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). The lesser players on the world stage, buffeted by the prestigious ideologies of the greater players, tied to the latter's economies and sometimes assaulted by their armies, are less rewarding as research sites for comparativists looking for distinct national “cases” to test their ideas. Small, weaker powers are not, in this reasoning, independent cases of anything. One presumes the same logic led Moore to include only third world giants like China and India and not the many other countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Characteristically, it is Germany and Russia that Moore regards as the most significant cases of democratic failure omitted from his study: not Spain or Italy, let alone Bolivia or Burma.Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), pp. xi–xiii. Moore went on to tackle the missing German case in Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1978) and, more briefly, the Russian in Authority and Inequality Under Capitalism and Socialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). In many a theory of “modernization,” England—or England and France—have been taken as prototypes or paradigmatic cases, and the broad outlines of their histories are therefore far more likely to have entered the education of American sociologists than the histories of other places in Europe or beyond. Sometimes the presumed centrality of one or more of these cases is made explicit, sometimes not.

Values Count but Institutions Decide: The Stein Rokkan Approach in Comparative Political Sociology

This article presents the major characteristics of the tradition of comparative political sociology which Stein Rokkan incarnated. Special emphasis is put on Rokkan's scientific reasoning based on the organic relationship between the creation of infrastructures for research and research efforts. Rokkan'soeuvreis marked by an acute awareness of the historical sources of institutional variation and by a concern for constructing region‐specific models reflecting culturally meaningful contexts. Rokkan's use of comparisons is treated at length before the conclusion states what the authors claim is worth preserving from the Rokkan tradition: thehistorical, institutionalandcomparativeaspects of Rokkan's approach.

Comparative Political Sociology

Comparative Political Sociology

Comparative Political Sociology

Comparative Political Sociology

Conventional Religion and Political Participation in Postwar Rural Japan

This exploratory study examined the relation between conventional everyday shrine/temple/ church religion and politics among a random sample of rural Japanese. In contrast to the conventional wisdom previously assumed by many Western and Japanese social scientists, presence/absence of religious identification was found to be positively associated with presence/absence of political party preference, religiosity was positively correlated with several modes of political participation, and significant differences in rates of political participation were discovered between two types of Buddhism analogous to the Western Protestant-Catholic division. Social structural factors in the community, rather than theological or doctrinal elements, are suggested as accounting for the latter findings. Comparative political sociology has confirmed religious identification and religiosity as important correlates of political participation and partisan choice in many Western nations. (See, for example, Finland-Allardt and Pesonen; Italy-Dogan; Hazelrigg; France-Dogan; Norway-Rokken; West Germany-Linz, and for Anglo-American countries, the United States, Australia, Canada, and Great Britain in studies by Alford; Converse; Knoke, a, b; Lenski; Lipset; Olsen; Verba and Nie.) Indeed, speaking specifically of the United States, Knoke has maintained, Excepting perhaps only race and social stratification. . . . no other variable accounts for as much variation in party identification and voting behavior as religious membership (b, 51). In light of such evidence from Western nations, it seems warranted to inquire into the existence of similar relationships in a non-Western society of comparable technological development. The relation of the religious identities and related activities of postwar Japanese to their political participation has been little examined. This paper poses four questions directed at conventional, everyday religion and politics in postwar rural Japan: (1) Is there a basic association between partisan and religious identifications? (2) What is the relationship of religiosity to involvement in the political system? (3) Is there within Buddhism a division of orientations analogous to Christianity's Protestant-Catholic one that discriminates between levels of political involvement? and (4) What explanations can be offered for the presence or absence of any relationships? Several studies (Dator; Ikado; McFarland; Moos; White) have considered the political orientations of more sensational denominations and sects of Buddhism *The author wishes to thank Edward Norbeck, Lawrence E. Hazelrigg, and David Knoke for comments on an earlier draft of this paper and is indebted to the faculty and staff of the Agricultural Policy Laboratory, Shimane University, Japan, for their valuable advice and assistance during the field research for this project.

Politics and Society: Studies in Comparative Political Sociology.

Politics and Society: Studies in Comparative Political Sociology.

Authority Relations and Governmental Performance

Abstract : This paper presents authority patterns as one aspect of the framework of a research project in comparative political sociology now being carried out by a group of faculty members and graduate students. After summarizing the concerns, reflections, and previous work out of which the project developed, it states and explains the principal hypotheses that the research is intended to investigate. Subsequent reports on the framework of the project will cover the concepts used in it and the manner in which the concepts have been 'operationalized' to make possible the systematic gathering of pertinent data and the measurements required to evaluate the hypotheses.

State and Society: A Reader in Comparative Political Sociology.

State and Society: A Reader in Comparative Political Sociology.