Theda Skocpol Research Articles

Legacies of States and Social Revolutions

Forty years after its publication, Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions confronts us with a series of questions: Are social revolutions different today compared with 50 years ago, and if yes in what ways and why? What is the state of the study of Revolutions in political science and sociology? More generally, how do we understand and relate to social revolutions in the post-Cold War world? Why do we pay more attention to civil wars now compared with then – and vice versa? If the 40th anniversary of Theda Skocpol’s path-breaking book forces these questions on us, answering them opens up fundamental concerns about how we approach the study of social phenomena and the way we are embedded, as social scientists, into the politics of our world.

Bringing the state back in: Ruling parties and regime collapse during the Arab Uprisings

Scholars have mostly investigated the fall of dictatorships during the Arab Uprisings through the lens of contentious politics, uncovering new information about the protest dynamics and how they spread both within countries and throughout the wider region. However, the longer structural vulnerabilities within regimes have received little attention; yet such factors internal to states and their regimes proved paramount to the social revolutions investigated by Theda Skocpol. Focusing on the case of Tunisia, the author shows how the economic downturn and a succession crisis contributed to the decay of the Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali regime starting in the 2000s. Importantly, they heightened internecine conflicts within the regime and, in particular, within the longtime ruling party, the Constitutional Democratic Rally. It is through this backdrop that the events of the 2010–2011 Tunisian revolution must be understood: far from supporting the regime in times of crisis, members of Ben Ali’s ruling party engaged in contentious activities against him, thus crucially weakening the regime from within.

The methodological legacies of Theda Skocpol’s State and Social Revolutions: Locating the three pillars of comparative historical analysis

Stein Rokkan and Barrington Moore revived comparative historical analysis (CHA) in Europe and the United States, respectively, during the 1960s without, however, elaborating its methodological underpinnings. Theda Skocpol’s State and Social Revolutions as well as her Visions and Methods Historical Sociology filled this gap. In her important essay with Margaret Somers, she identified three distinct strands of CHA that tackled macro-historical question in distinct but ultimately also complimentary ways. In doing so, she established the foundation for subsequent work on CHA methodology. The article elaborates the subsequent elaborations of Skopol and Somer’s CHA typology and the factors contributing to this evolution. It also underscores how many of those innovations were already implicit in Skocpol’s State and Social Revolutions even though she herself did not highlight it in her own methodological writings. Skocpol the empirical scholar thus turns out to have been methodologically more advanced than Skocpol the methodologist.

Left or centre? Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions from the French Revolution to today

Forty years on, Theda Skocpol’s account of the French Revolution remains remarkably robust. But how are we to think about political change today? Since Louis XVI walked up to the guillotine, we have been used to thinking of a left/right opposition driving political change, but this was not the only division at the time, nor indeed since: during the Terror, Robespierre was supported by the Montagnards, the deputies who sat on the highest benches of the Assembly, while the opposition was located at the bottom, in the Marais or the Plain. Like during la Terreur, today’s politics, from France to the United States, appears more to oppose a centre to an extreme, and this prism allows us to track Skocpol’s own evolution since 1979, from periphery to centre.

Book Review: Theda Skocpol “States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China

In “States and Social Revolutions: A comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (1979), Theda Skocpol presents a comparative-historical analysis of social revolutions by looking beyond the existing social-scientific theories that explain the causes and outcomes of successful revolutions. Skocpol presents a contrast to the prevalent theories of social revolutions from a comparative historical analysis by presenting valid associations of potential causes within a given phenomenon. The author focuses on the structuralists’- perspectives to the causes of social revolutions in agrarian society with intense focus on the influence of transnational relations in the emergence of social-revolutionary crises that lead to basic social-structural transformations and the collapse of state organizations of old regimes.

Analyzing Madhesh Movement from a Social Structural Approach

Collective human activities are the motors of social change. Change depends less on mutual understanding and more on the contradiction between different micro-to-macro-level functioning units. Thus, sociological theories bring together the network of relationship between manifold social layers while analyzing the status of continuity or flux of change in society. Insofar as Nepali society has undergone tremendous changes, attempts of inserting more recent sociological theories becomes customary. Contrary to this, the application of classical theories in analyzing the socio-political transformations has been a usual trend. The 2007-Madhesh Movement was one of the major turning points in Nepal’s socio-political history, which had brought significant macro-level changes in Nepal. Several scholarly attempts are made to discuss and analyze the Movement, but emphasis is given more to the internal structure bypassing the international structure. This paper aims to analyze the Madhesh Movement with reference to an acclaimed book ‘Madhesh Bidrohako Nalibeli’, and examines whether the book has applied the most updated sociological theories of social movement such as Theda Skocpol’s social structural approach. The book is found too slim in defining and theorizing the movement sociologically since it has given credit only to national-level phenomena than the global capitalist process. This paper confirms that the proper positioning of macro-level structural contexts and the development at home and abroad can help anyone better understand the movement.

Scales of subversion

Scales of subversion

Osvrt na uzroke oktobarske revolucije kroz dopunu analize Tede Skočpol

Starting from the global importance of the October Revolution as a historical event, as well as the complexity of social relations in such circumstances, the objective of this paper is to look as thoroughly as possible into the correlations between the Revolution itself and social circumstances that preceded it. The paper interprets historical data and examines the main arguments within theories of revolutions. The focus is on structural factors and the analysis presented by Theda Skocpol, with an additional emphasis on the role of the proletariat. The basic thesis is that one of the key conditions is the existence of branched networking of the peasant communes and workers' associations, with sufficiently strong connections within the classes. That is, discontent with the economic situation and the weakening of the central government would not in themselves lead to revolutionary events, just as joint activities of the proletariat and the leaders of opposition parties should not be neglected.

The Saints and the State: The Mormon Troubles in Illinois

The Saints and the State: The Mormon Troubles in Illinois

Indigenous Revolution in Ecuador and Bolivia, 1990–2005

Sociologist Jeffery M. Paige is the author of two important comparative works on revolution in the latter part of the twentieth century. The first examined cases of agrarian revolution in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, while the second focused on Central America. More than two decades later, he has produced a new comparative study that takes a surprising tack. Whereas in the past Paige deployed a structural economic and political framework for analyzing revolution, he now adopts a primarily cultural one. The cases that he takes up are “indigenous revolutions” at the turn of the twenty-first century in the Ecuadorian and Bolivian Andes, a region rarely considered in the global geography of revolution.Paige's concept of revolution in the new book emphasizes subjective consciousness, as seen in the political actors' utopian imagination. The aspiration to “turn the world upside down” is indeed a classic feature of revolutions, but less often a feature of classic social science definitions of them. Paige here moves away from Theda Skocpol and toward Pierre Bourdieu, who stressed the symbolic transformations that underlie political revolution. In the Andean case, Paige argues, Indigenous discourse provided a new way to think and talk about overturning the existing order, a pachakuti in native parlance. The communalist social organization and ethos in Andean and Amazonian society also provided a foundation for an ideology of “indigenous socialism” that inspired mass mobilizations. Paige goes on to highlight one other unusual factor in Ecuador and Bolivia. While symbolic transformation and mass uprising are common elements of revolutions, what stands out in the Andean cases is that social movements ultimately achieved a share of state power through electoral democracy rather than armed struggle.Here the two cases diverge, however. Whereas the Indigenous movement in Ecuador was unable to retain power in the center-left government of Rafael Correa (2007–17), it had more success in Bolivia under the Movement Toward Socialism government of Evo Morales (2006–19). Paige argues that the difference lay in the more heterogeneous and inclusive notion of Indigenous identity in Bolivia. He observes that the coca growers' movement, which combined peasant trade unionism, ancestral ethnic affiliation, and an anti-imperialist stance against the United States, played a key part in constituting a durable symbolic and political unity.To discern the symbolic and utopian dimension of the movements, Paige conducted 45 interviews, primarily with Indigenous intellectuals and political leaders in 2008, 2009, and 2011. They represent a gamut of influential organizations and constituencies in the two countries. In Ecuador, the interviewees come from the lowland and highland regional associations that are part of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador as well as from the Pachakutik political party. In Bolivia, we hear from intellectuals and activists from the radical indianista-katarista, coca-growing, and peasant trade union movements as well as from non-Indigenous Left intellectuals. The extensive testimonial accounts are an unusual feature of the book and are framed by coherent and accessible interpretations by the author.A panoply of key themes emerge from the interviews and form the basis for what Paige conceives of as the revolutionary vision in the Andes. A number of interviewees address the philosophy of “living well” (suma qamaña in Aymara, or sumak kawsay in Quechua), an approach to natural resources, territory, and development that would overcome historical patterns of extractivism and capitalist development. They consider the meaning of decolonization, whether in spheres of Indigenous autonomy, intercultural relations, or plurinational state formation. They also reflect on the relationships between social movements and state power, direct and representative democracy, mass mobilization and armed struggle, and Indigenous ideology and Marxism.One difficulty is that the book ostensibly focuses on the phase of powerful Indigenous and popular insurrections in the two countries between 1990 and 2005, while the interviews were conducted subsequently. Therefore we get the perspectives of the actors only in the aftermath of the events, when a series of new issues presented themselves. Chief among these were the tensions between some of the Indigenous intellectuals and activists and the Pink Tide governments of Correa and Morales. Nonetheless, these later conflicts are of significance in themselves, and the interviews do indeed provide ample evidence of the radical critiques of society and the utopian aspirations that animated the mass mobilizations at the turn of the century.Whether or not one accepts Paige's concept of revolution, his compelling cultural approach and the rich testimony that he supplies will be of great value to general students and specialists interested in revolution, Indigenous social movements, and the Andean region.

Theoretical Interpretation of Revolutions, Evolution of Concepts and Diversity of Questions: Discussion on the perspectives of Marx, Tocqueville, Weber, Theda Skocpol and Ellen Kay Trimberger

Is the era of revolution is over? Thus only a long historical and theoretical concepts optic can shed light on the discussion of revolutions. This paper seeks to simplify some of the theoretical concepts of revolutions, the major approaches are the classical phase, Karl Marx, Tocqueville, and Max Weber, while challenges of modernization theorists are Huntington and Tilly. This paper formulize the evolution in these concepts from one era to another. In addition, it explained the reasons for the revolutions, as well as explaining the role of the actors, and trying to clarify the reasons that led to the diversity of theories such as structural Analysis by Theda Skocpol and Ellen Kay Trimberger. Furthermore, it is notable that the development of concepts of theoretical analysis depends on the key aspects, and on the focus in analyzing the role of different actors, as well as on linking the different roles of these actors and the reasons for the revolution. Of course, there are still many theories that attempt to explain the revolution and make it a social phenomenon linked to scientific and objective reasons.

On Data, Media, and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State

On Data, Media, and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State

Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance. Edited by Theda Skocpol and Caroline Tervo. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 378p. $99.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance. Edited by Theda Skocpol and Caroline Tervo. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 378p. 27.95 paper. - Volume 19 Issue 1

Understanding Governance in Contemporary Japan: Transformation and the Regulatory State by Masahiro Mogaki

Reviewed by: Understanding Governance in Contemporary Japan: Transformation and the Regulatory State by Masahiro Mogaki Steven K. Vogel (bio) Understanding Governance in Contemporary Japan: Transformation and the Regulatory State. By Masahiro Mogaki. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2019. xiii, 184 pages. £80.00, cloth. Masahiro Mogaki wants to bring the state back in to the study of Japanese politics. His book refreshingly runs counter to the dominant trends in the subfield that favor the study of electoral politics and civil society. Mogaki turns the debate back to governing elites, state structures, and the rich minutiae of the policymaking process. In 1985, Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol published a volume entitled Bringing the State Back In to coax their fellow social scientists back from the behavioral revolution toward a sustained reexamination of the state. They argued that scholars should study states as both "actors" and "structures." By this they meant that state officials and agencies are autonomous actors in the political system in their own right, with preferences that cannot be reduced to those of the citizens and interest groups in the society around them. And state institutions define arenas that powerfully shape the ways in which societal interests are aggregated and policies are formulated and implemented, and thereby influence the quality and the substance of policy outputs. Mogaki derives his primary inspiration not from Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol but rather from scholarship on the "core executive" in Britain, where he completed his doctoral studies. The core executive refers to the major organs of the central government, including the prime minister, the cabinet, government departments, and the civil service. The British core executive extends beyond what we would call the executive branch in the United States because most cabinet ministers in parliamentary systems are also members of the legislature, hence the executive and legislative branches are partially fused. But Mogaki expands the definition of the core executive further to include Diet members not serving in the cabinet, because they play such a central role in governance in Japan (pp. 15, 23–24). Mogaki's primary thesis is that the core executive exercises "asymmetric dominance" in the Japanese political system. It did so in the heyday of the postwar era, and it continues to do so today. But if the core executive includes all of the main actors in the political system, then what does this really mean? At points the thesis almost seems to border on tautology, simply affirming that those who are in charge in Japan are in charge. Yet Mogaki has something different in mind. He contends that state actors are structurally advantaged relative to societal actors. They have the ability to control [End Page 150] other actors' access to the policy process and to manage policy implementation. They have unique resources such as legitimacy, administrative capacity, and enforcement powers (pp. 13–14, 132, 145). They are the ones in the room at the moments of decision and enactment. Mogaki makes an important point in the Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol sense. The state does not simply execute the will of society; it plays a leading role in the political arena both as actor and as structure. Yet Mogaki asserts the dominance of the core executive almost by fiat. That is, government officials certainly make the key decisions and implement those decisions in the literal sense. But are they doing so as obedient servants of societal interests, or are they acting on their own interests and beliefs? To get at this, Mogaki would have to identify state interests and societal interests, examine policy processes, and evaluate policy outcomes to discern whose preferences actually prevailed. Mogaki focuses so much on the core executive that he does not really grapple with societal interests and their political influence, so he cannot possibly show that the core executive dominates over society. To be fair, Mogaki's primary goal is not to explain policy outcomes so much as to describe the transformation of the Japanese state, and here he provides a valuable service to the field. The book's greatest strength is not the thesis about the dominance of the core executive but rather the nuanced portrait of bargaining and power shifts within that...

Theda Skocpol’s Theory of Revolution

The article analyzes several ideas suggested by American political scientist Theda Skocpol in regards to the theory of revolution. From the author’s point of view, Skocpol’s attitudes are noteworthy both in terms of studying the history of political science and understanding the current state of “the theory of revolution” as a scientific direction. The author critically examines the classification of “generations of the theory of the revolution contributors” offered by J. Goldstone, according to which T. Skocpol belongs to “the third generation”. At the same time, the key provisions of Skocpol’s concept continue the ideas of the first and second generations, as is suggested by Goldstone. The author highlights the importance of the conceptual provisions related to the questions of social system failures and the reasons and consequences of revolutions in the context of revolutionary modernization.

Turkish Parliamentary Experience Review of the Parliamentary Experience of Turkey from Ottoman to Republic Periods

Turkish parliamentary tradition with a history of 140 years, no doubt is a result of challenging periods which roots extending to the history of the Ottoman Empire. Tanzimat reforms as well as Constitutional Monarchy periods (known as I. and II. Meşrutiyet) crowned with the National Liberation Movement initiated the new political regime in Turkey and formed a parliamentary institution that call now the Turkish parliament or the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. The analysis of the historical evolution of the Turkish parliamentary experience along with its parliamentary functions and activities will provide us valuable information on politics and socio-historical development of the Turkish state. Certainly, the unique characteristics of Turkish society and Turkish history, as well as parliamentary transformations at the global level along with political developments affecting the parliamentary tradition makes a Turkish parliamentary experience noteworthy to be analyzed. Social structure, bureaucracy and traditions of every society or political entity define the role of a parliament in the certain political system. The social and political structure gives important information on the organization and behaviour of the parliament as well as parliamentary functions provide first-hand data on features and characteristics of the society reciprocally. This study is a brief historical account of the Turkish parliament as a representative institution. The main goal of this research is to provide an analytic review of the Turkish parliamentary experience and parliamentary evolution without debates on pro and contras of parliamentary or presidential systems. There are two matching features in our research approach in this study. First, we will focus on and outline the historical evolution process of the Turkish parliamentary experience. Second, we will look for descriptive information to enrich our general understanding of the parliamentary workings. The historical analysis method will be applied to conduct this research. The method was described by sociologist and political scientist Theda Skocpol. The historical analysis method aims to develop and improve descriptive and reasonable hypothesizes on institutions as nation-states.

Happy anniversary? States and social revolutions revisited

Abstract Forty years after its publication, Theda Skocpol's States and social revolutions remains the pre-eminent book in the study of revolutions. But how should the book be assessed from the vantage point of contemporary world politics? This essay reviews Skocpol's contribution to three main issue-areas: theory, structural approaches and the international. It argues that, rich as it has been, the research agenda initiated by States and social revolutions has run its course. It cannot respond effectively to the different contexts within which revolutions emerge and the diverse forms they take. Its bifurcation between structure and agency cannot capture the relational character of revolutionary action. And, despite its concern for the international components of revolutions, States and social revolutions cannot accommodate the ways in which revolutions are ‘intersocial’ all the way down. A new Skocpol is needed for a new age of revolutions.

A Conversation with Theda Skocpol

An interview with Theda Skocpol took place at Harvard University in December 2017. Professor Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. Skocpol is the author of numerous books and articles well known in political science and beyond, including States and Social Revolutions, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life, and The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (the latter coauthored with Vanessa Williamson). Skocpol has served as President of the American Political Science Association and the Social Science History Association. Among her honors, she is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences, and she was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science. She was interviewed by Eric Schickler, the Jeffrey & Ashley McDermott Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. The following is an edited transcript; a video of the entire interview can be viewed at https://www.annualreviews.org/r/theda-skocpol .

Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy by Enrico Dal Lago

Reviewed by: Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy by Enrico Dal Lago J. William Harris Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy. By Enrico Dal Lago. Cambridge Studies on the American South. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv, 465. $59.99, ISBN 978-1-107-03842-4.) Enrico Dal Lago is the author of a number of comparative studies focused on Italy and the United States, including Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders and Southern Italian Landowners, 1815–1861 (Baton Rouge, 2005). Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy is in some ways a sequel to that earlier study, but with a focus on peasants, small farmers, and enslaved people rather than on ruling elites. It is an original and significant contribution to the ongoing globalization of American historical scholarship. In the mid-nineteenth century, southern Italy (the Mezzogiorno) was ruled from Naples by the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, a Bourbon dynasty. In 1861, that kingdom was conquered and incorporated into the newly consolidated Kingdom of Italy; Francis II, the Bourbon ruler in Naples, went into exile in Rome. More than four years of conflict known as the Great Brigandage ensued in the Mezzogiorno. For two years, resistance to the new regime focused on the restoration of Francis II as the legitimate ruler; afterward, guerrilla bands of poor peasants invaded and destroyed the properties of big landowners, many of whom had prospered by seizing common lands. Only a concerted effort by the Italian army and National Guard, which operated under draconian emergency laws, was able to suppress this “‘inner civil war’” at the cost of more than five thousand lives (p. 4). Dal Lago offers an analytical comparison of the Great Brigandage with simultaneous conflicts in the Confederate States of America. His “central question,” he writes, is “[h]ow did nineteenth-century newly formed nations cope with internal dissent, and how crucial was the role played by the latter in threatening the survival of those new nations?” (p. 7). In Part 1, he compares the pro-Bourbon legitimist movement of 1860–1863 in northern Terra di Lavoro with resistance to the Confederate government by southern whites in East Tennessee. In Part 2, he moves to a comparison of “The Revolts of the Lower Strata” from 1862 to 1865: slaves’ resistance to the Confederacy (and, later, to Union army attempts to keep them working on plantations), with a focus on the Lower Mississippi Valley, and peasant guerrilla war against Italian landowners, especially in Upper Basilicata (p. 227). [End Page 916] In broad terms, Dal Lago argues that this comparison of “parallel processes” in a “contrast of contexts” (the latter phrase he takes from an essay by Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers) shows that both “‘inner civil wars’” should be understood as products of two overarching developments: on the one hand, the formation of new nation-states, some by consolidation and others by separation from larger states; and on the other hand, conflicts between agrarian masses—slaves, serfs, and free peasants—and the agricultural elites who profited from their labor during the nineteenth-century expansion of international commodity markets (p. 9). Dal Lago’s study is based on a mastery of two different national historiographies as well as a deep familiarity with the methodologies of comparative history. It is also informed by his research in primary sources, both published and archival, in both countries. In a short review, it is impossible to do more than suggest some of the implications of his interpretations. His theme of “agrarian unrest” offers, from an innovative angle, support for scholars such as Steven Hahn, David Williams, and Stephanie McCurry, who have emphasized internal social conflict as an explanation for the end of slavery and the fall of the Confederacy (p. 19). At the same time, this approach largely ignores the questions that arise when we focus on the relationship, not of agrarian masses to agrarian elites, but of individuals to the state. For example, in the Confederacy, unlike in the Mezzogiorno, there was remarkably little overt violence by slaves against slaveholders and their families. Instead, former slaves killed white Confederates while serving...

PROTECTING SOLDIERS AND MOTHERSTWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER: THEDA SKOCPOL'S LEGACY AND AMERICAN WELFARE STATE HISTORIOGRAPHY, 1992–2017

This essay examines Theda Skocpol's landmark 1992 book,Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, and discusses its influence historians of the U.S. welfare state. The first section summarizes the book's “state-centered” approach and its central arguments and discusses its reception. It pays particular attention to critiques from women's and gender historians, who challenged Skocpol's characterization of Progressive Era “maternalist reform” particularly for its failure to account for racial politics or the limitations of rooting women's claims to social citizenship in mothering. The second section explores Skocpol's influence on historians of the U.S. welfare state in the past twenty-five years. Scholars of women and gender followed Skocpol's call to “bring the state back in,” bringing the insights of two decades of social and cultural history to the arena of state-building. In the process, they illuminated the centrality of race and racial politics to American social policy and citizenship in ways that Skocpol largely elided. Skocpol's discovery of the peculiar forms of American social provision also profoundly influenced welfare state scholars, who uncovered the vast reach of the “hidden” or “submerged state” in shaping unequal citizenship and political identities around race, gender, sexuality, and other axes of difference. Finally, the essay discusses historians’ attention to an aspect largely absent fromProtecting Soldiers and Mothers—the voices, perspectives, and actions of participants in welfare state programs and policies—which has deepened and expanded understanding of the processes and effects of welfare state-building in the past twenty-five years.