Threat Of Revolution Research Articles

Appeasing Workers without Great Loss: Autocracy and Progressive Labor Legislation

Under what conditions do dictators enact pro-worker legislation? Conventional wisdom suggests that heightened mass discontent motivates dictators to make policy concessions to defuse revolutionary threats. However, a more protective labor law may decrease elites' economic benefits-and thus loyalty to the regime. I argue that limited judicial independence helps dictators control the distributional outcomes of the law and therefore better respond to the twin challenges magnified by labor reforms. To test this argument, I conduct a cross-national analysis of sixty-eight autocracies from 1970 to 2008. I then examine an illustrative case-China's 2008 Labor Contract Law-to illuminate how a non-independent judiciary gives autocrats more leeway to balance the interests of elites and the masses. This article contributes to our understanding of authoritarian survival strategies amid distributive tensions.

Ear Training for History: Listening to Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield's Double-Voiced Aesthetics

Bend your ear to Saturday, 23 July 1853. On that morning, America's first Black concert vocalist and operatic singer, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, performed at Stafford House, home of prominent English Abolitionist the Duchess of Sutherland, during her UK tour. Born into captivity on a plantation in Mississippi and raised free in Philadelphia, Taylor Greenfield's voice sounded out the fever pitch of America's conflict over slavery. A multioctave singer, she smashed boundaries for race and gender as a Black woman who sang “white” vocal repertoire across registers heard as both female and male. Writing on an early public performance in 1851, one newspaper reviewer summed up the revolutionary threat of Taylor Greenfield's voice by stating “we can assure the public that the Union is in no degree periled by it,” meaning of course, that the Union was. Whether received by pro- or antislavery audiences, Taylor Greenfield's voice was understood to peal out Black emancipation. In his 1855 review of Taylor Greenfield's New York Tabernacle performance, James McCune Smith went as far to compare Taylor Greenfield's voice to the firearms employed by escaped slaves defending their freedom against the Fugitive Slave Act.

A Revolutionary's “Stravaganza”: Police and Morality in the Habsburg Empire (1780–1830)

AbstractDuring the era following the Enlightenment, the police became the main institution to oversee the maintenance of public order in many European cities. Their activities also shaped the idea of public order and public morality. The police were important in the context of political change and perceived “threat of revolution” but also in other areas, including the control of movement and residence. From the end of the eighteenth century, criminal codes were changing, and in the Habsburg monarchy, these changes included the definition of a new category of less grave “police delicts.” This study compares police norms and practice in the period of 1790–1830. Using several concrete examples, the author investigates whether the approach of the police and the authorities to moral offenses changed in connection with social and political developments (reaction to revolutions, restoration, changes in the influence of the Church). The aim of the study is to analyze whether the Habsburg police, in an era of more liberal legislation, played a similar restrictive role in the area of moral offenses as they did in controlling political activities.

The Right Conservative Views of the Holy Righteous John of Kronstadt

The article analyzes the political beliefs of the Holy Righteous John of Kronstadt. It is noted that to the end of his days he remained a convinced monarchist, a supporter of autocracy and an opponent of revolutionary ideas, defending the purity of the Orthodox faith and opposing the penetration of Catholic, Protestant, liberal and Masonic ideas into the church. John of Kronstadt supported by word and deed various rightist monarchical (blackhundredist) organizations, both official (parties, unions, societies) and unofficial (circles, salons, including the salons of General Evgeny Bogdanovich and Countess Sophia Ignatieva). He also allocated money for the development of the largest Black Hundred organization, the Union of the Russian People, and other right-wing associations, joined the Union himself and expressed support for various Black Hundred initiatives by telegrams and letters.The article studies some of his public speeches, sermons, articles and diary entries. In his public speeches, Saint John of Kronstadt repeatedly pointed out that the death of the Russian monarchy would inevitably lead to the most negative consequences for Russia, up to its collapse. Special attention is paid to the attitude of the clergyman to the imperial power and the royal ministry, as he supported the idea of the divine origin of the royal power. Like many other conservatives, Saint John of Kronstadt considered the Holy Blessed Grand Duke Alexander Nevsky a kind of ideal monarch, pointing out the virtues of his rule. In his sermons, he rebuked the revolutionaries and spoke about the danger of the revolutionary threat, pointing out that Russia would perish if the revolutionary forces won. Saint John of Kronstadt explained the Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 by the decrease of faith in the Russian society and the decline of patriotism.The article notes that the numerous sermons of the priest repeatedly showed his concern about the fate of Russia, prone to secession due to the activity of the liberal intelligentsia.

Revolution, Elite Fear, and Electoral Institutions

We present a systemic threat theory to explain the introduction of Proportional Representation (PR). If facing a revolutionary threat, incumbents agree to enact electoral reforms such as PR to secure the stability of the parliamentary system, even if this could imply their own personal electoral loss. We argue that the theory can help explain the largest wave of PR adoptions in history, namely in the years immediately after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Incumbents came to over-estimate the true revolutionary threat in Europe. Simultaneously, reformist parliamentarian socialists came to push for PR to weaken the radicals within their party. Incumbents and reformist socialists could therefore support the same system. We test this using qualitative and quantitative data from Norway's adoption of PR in 1919.

Как министр читает социалиста? Политический протест 1870-х гг. глазами участников межведомственных совещаний

The article is devoted to the governmental policy in relation to political protest during the reign of Alexander II of Russia. Based on the materials of interdepartmental meetings of the first half of the 1870s, it shows that the decisions that played a key role in the escalation of revolutionary violence and the emergence of political terrorism did not result from “fear” of revolutionary threat. On the contrary, they arose as a result of misunderstanding the nature of the new phase of youth protest, partly associated with the inertia of the perception of the incipient “going to the people” (khozhdenie v narod) by analogy with the European revolutionary movement, on the one hand, and earlier organizations, primarily the People’s Retribution (Narodnaya rasprava), on the other. At the same time, participants in interdepartmental meetings had to make decisions in conditions of knowingly incomplete information about the ideology of political protest and its specific manifestations. Under those circumstances they had to trust experts from the Third Section and the Ministry of Justice who prepared analytical notes on illegal communities, focusing on the interests of their own departments. Analysis of the materials provided for discussion, primarily texts attributed by the police as the writings of Kropotkin brothers, allows us to conclude that the Russian bureaucratic elite, who perceived socialism as “wild theories,” refused to consider youth protest as a serious threat and gave complete control over the solution to the problem to the relevant departments. This attitude was determined by contradictions within the government, where the struggle to form a further political course prevented the development of a coordinated policy regarding revolutionary movement.

The fatherland and religion in Spanish Catholicism: from turn-of-the-century decline to the Rif War (c.1898–1923)

ABSTRACT The present article analyses both the discourse as well as actions and policies through which non-Carlist Catholic movement promoted and socialised the Catholic image of Spain, from the end of the nineteenth century until the beginning of the 1920s. The anticlerical fervour of the first decade of the twentieth century served to mobilise Catholics who called for the re-Catholicisation of Spanish society for the benefit of religion and the fatherland. Recourse to the fatherland and its identity as exclusively Catholic were significantly reinforced during the insecurity unleashed by the crisis of 1917 and the threat of revolution. Finally, the present paper also analyses the repercussions of the Catalan nationalist movement in 1918–1919 and the Rif War, two events that only augmented the centrality of the fatherland for the Catholic discourse of the period.

France 1939–1945: From strange defeat to pseudo‐liberation

This essay provides a class-analysis interpretation of France's role in World War II. Determined to eliminate the perceived revolutionary threat emanating from its restless working class, France's elite arranged in 1940 for the country to be defeated by its “external enemy,” Nazi Germany. The fruit of that betrayal was a victory over its “internal enemy,” the working class. It permitted installing a fascist regime under Pétain, and this “Vichy-France”—like Nazi Germany—was a paradise for the industrialists and all other members of the upper class, but a hell for workers and other plebeians. Unsurprisingly, the Resistance was mostly working-class, and its plans for postwar France included severe punishment for the collaborators and very radical reforms. After Stalingrad, the elite, desperate to avoid that fate, switched its loyalty to the country's future American masters, who were determined to make France and the rest of Europe free for capitalism. It proved necessary, however, to allow the recalcitrant leader of the conservative Resistance, Charles de Gaulle, to come to power. In any event, the “Gaullist” compromise made it possible for the French upper class to escape punishment for its pro-Nazi sins and to maintain its power and privileges after the liberation.

Цензура как предмет полицейско-правовой теории

The article examines the institution of «press police» in the police law of the Russian Empire, as well as measures taken to tighten censorship in the late XIX – early XX century, as one of the ways to neutralize the socio-political situation in the country. The author analyzes the views of the most prominent Russian police officers: I. E. Andrievsky, N. N. Belyavsky, V. F. Deryuzhinsky, V. V. Ivanovsky, and I. T. Tarasov on the problem of restricting the rights and freedoms of the population, including freedom of speech and the press, under the conditions of the emergency legal regime of an exceptional situation. The author describes the significance of the exceptional position as a way to eliminate the extreme socio-political situation in the state, as well as a means of political prevention of the revolutionary threat to the state system. It is concluded that Russian state experts, in General, who advocated the development of the system of rights and freedoms of the population, in an extreme situation recognized the need to take measures to tighten censorship and restrict freedom of speech, however, in practice, this measure, even in conjunction with other protective measures, could not solve the problem of preserving the existing state system.

What Motivates an Oligarchic Elite to Democratize? Evidence from the Roll Call Vote on the Great Reform Act of 1832

AbstractThe Great Reform Act of 1832 was a watershed for democracy in Great Britain. We study the vote on 22 March 1831 in the House of Commons to test three competing theories of democratization: public opinion, political expedience, and threat of revolution. Peaceful agitation and mass-support for reform played an important role. Political expedience also motivated some members of Parliament to support the reform, especially if they were elected in constituencies located in counties that would gain seats. Violent unrest in urban but not in rural areas had some influence on the members of Parliament. Counterfactual scenarios suggest that the reform bill would not have obtained a majority in the House of Commons in the absence of these factors.

Komix Kountermedia (1969)

Komix Kountermedia (1969) Paul Buhle (bio) The left's mixed reception of komix is an interesting indication of the schism in attitudes toward "cultural" subjects. On the one hand, people (including myself) who believe that the New Left is only part of a much larger but more amorphous New Culture movement are excited to see an intrusion of radical attitudes into "classic" areas of modern cultural mediations, comic strips and comic books. For us it seems to promise another step toward an organic New Left, striking root in society deeper than the level of "politics" (elections, parties, organizers, etc.). On the other hand, plenty of fine, even good-humored radicals are plainly distressed to see the excitement over komix. One extreme tendency is indicated by a dealer in an old, CP1-oriented bookshop who wrote me that all "underground culture" was a new attempt by the ruling class to pervert the revolutionary threat. Another attitude, common among people sympathetic to New Left culturalists, is that komix are interesting but not to be taken seriously in political terms. A considerable amount of the confusion about komix and the Left is their newness, with their power to irritate or excite. Not that comic strips have been unknown to the Left: […] strips have often been offered in radical newspapers. But komix, as drawn by such creative figures as Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, and S. Clay Wilson, are more than simply instruments of the political New Left; they are subversive thrusts at capitalism coming right out of a popular cultural tradition. More fundamentally the confusion about komix is symptomatic of important misunderstandings about the meanings of culture and art. Bourgeois aesthetics has taught us that these are leisure customs associated with the elites, rather than organic aspects of popular life. But if we accept the anthropological definition of culture as the style and organization of day-to-day life and of art as a more self-conscious aspect of "culture," then content, how popular "culture" and "art" relate to the values of society's rulers, becomes an important political question. As yet, the New Left does not possess the theoretical tools for a full analysis of modern (hence popular) culture and its art forms (certainly less for comic strips than for America's other two distinctive contributions to twentieth[-]century culture, cinema and jazz) under capitalism in the mass market epoch. Certain critics, like Marshall McLuhan, attempt to deal with the meaning of various communications media in contemporary society; but for me the most heuristic insights were offered by Walter Benjamin over thirty years ago, in his brilliant essay, "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." [End Page 199] Art, as Benjamin understood, could not remain unchanged in the new era of mass production and consumption: its traditional "aura," its quality of craft refinement, of rarity, could not survive immersion in the "commonness" of the masses and their daily life. Indeed, to have any élan or vitality of its own art had to associate with and give expression to the existence of the people it now reached. Even poor Mona Lisa, reproduced on a half million postcards, simply wasn't enough. But Benjamin also perceived that the possibilities for new, popular arts were emerging at the very time when bourgeois cultural vitality had long passed even though their nascent forms were subject to the influences of the decay of bourgeois culture. On the other hand, he believed that the threads of art's resurrection nevertheless lay within popular culture, in the essence of their content that commercial forms so thoroughly violated. In one sense, the forms of the future were stretching their fingers into a repression-ridden present; in another, mass art, like politically revolutionary forces, was maturing, as it had to, within the womb of the culture of the old social system. Drawing on Benjamin's notion of a cultural dialectic, I have noted three rough stages for the emerging modern art form which also describe the growth of twentieth[-]century comic strips: (1) an early, highly experimental period, where the very newness of the form permits the "eccentric" visionaries to practice before internal and external discipline are fully introduced; (2...

Политическая полиция конца XIX – начала ХХ вв. и «революция»: игра понятием или реальная угроза?

This article is concerned with the interpretation of the concept of revolution by various structures of the political police of the Russian Empire of the late 19th – early 20th centuries (Department of police, security departments, provincial gendarmerie management) — the union of state institutions which had to fight the revolution. In the frames of the history of concepts developed by R. Kozellek, attention is drawn to the fact that the revolution alike the concepts of troubles, revolt, uprising, and civil war is aiming at changing of the state system, on fundamental transformations in the political system of the country. The theoretical framework for the explication of this approach to the records of political investigation is the concept of evidence paradigm proposed by K. Ginzburg to describe the process of the formation of state control over society in the European countries of the period of becoming Modern. According to the officials of the political police of the Russian Empire, revolutionaries were those who aimed to overthrow the existing system; those who belonged to the underground resistance. But they were not those who did the most for the benefit of the revolution on an all-Russian scale — not compared to the socio-political groups that existed in the legal space and had access to the publicity. At the same time, gendarmes regarded everyone, who did not consider himself an ohranitel (Russian for conservator) as a representative of revolutionary legal socio-political forces. The Police Department of Russia regarded not only underground revolutionaries themselves to be a revolutionary threat, but also the radicals, the opposition members, and the radical liberals; liberals in general, though, were not considered to be the agents of the revolution. Two images of revolution, which were formed within the system of the political police, in general correspond with the two concepts of revolution, described by R. Kozellek. In the first, which is chronologically younger, revolution is considered to be an exclusively political phenomenon concerned with the change of the bases of a state system (which actually occurred in 1905). The second image of the revolution, which originated in Europe in the middle of the 19th century, suggested the distinction of political revolution (i.e. one that is concerned with the state-civil, constitutional and legal side) and social revolution (concerned with the society). Analysis of the correspondence of the political investigation forces of the Russian Empire at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries shows that this image of the revolution resonated with the leadership of the political police (i.e. the officials of the Department of police) by the beginning of the 20th century. In this sense, the events of the revolutionary 1905 year had primary importance for them not so much in terms of changes in the state system (as it was for the gendarmes), but as an inevitable reflection of the transformational processes that took place in the Russian society.

The Threat of Returning Foreign Fighters: Finnish State Responses to the Volunteers in the Spanish and Syria-Iraq Civil Wars

ABSTRACTThe conflict in Syria and Iraq from 2011 onwards, and the Spanish Civil War in 1936–39 both witnessed a very relevant foreign fighter phenomenon. Even if the ideological drivers were different, both phenomena had a huge impact internationally on how foreign fighters were perceived as a threat in their home countries. In this article the official state responses to the two waves of foreign fighters have been compared with respect to the Finnish context. The volunteers in the Spanish conflict were regarded a security threat upon their return, since it was estimated that they might provide added expertise to the revolutionary left-wing movements in Finland. The returning volunteers from Syria-Iraq have not been perceived as a revolutionary threat to the Finnish political system, but as potential terrorists attacking the civilian population. After comparing different political contexts, it can be argued that the domestic political situation has in both cases had an impact on how the threats were answered in practice. Since the foreign fighters in Spain had significant political support among the growing left-wing parties, the Finnish state response towards them remained vague. In the Syria-Iraq case there has been no political support for the foreign fighters, and the issue has been effectively securitized.

Political transition in resource economies

This paper explains the lack of democratization in resource‐ exporting countries using a two‐period resource extraction model. There are two classes of agents: the elite who own capital and natural resources, and citizens who own labor. Government policies are designed to ensure that the elite remain in power and that citizens do not have the incentive to revolt. On the other hand, policies in the democracy case are not constrained by the threat of revolution. Compared to the democratic case, the resource is over‐extracted and the investment is lower. Non‐democratic institutions are the rational choice of the elite.

La justicia constitucional contra los bolcheviques: la Corte Suprema de Justicia Conservadora y la represión al movimiento obrero, 1926-1930

The nascent industrialization of Colombia with the strengthening of the workers' movement led to rise in conflict during the last Government of Conservative Hegemony (1926-1930). While strikes were breaking out in different parts of the country, at the same time, the influence of the Russian and Mexican revolutions caused the Government to believe that it was necessary to stop the communist and protest. The Conservative Administration faced the social issue with repression: the response to the workers' movement, which demanded the recognition of their labor rights, was the use of security forces.This article examines the role played by the Supreme Court, composed mostly of Conservative judges, who legally supported this repression and the containment of the revolutionary threat.The article first provides an overview of the institutional and political context in the first two decades of the twentieth century in Colombia. Then, it reviews the role of the Conservative Supreme Court in the judicial review of two legal tools that the Executive approved to repress protest: (i) decree 707 of 1927 or of High Police, which was mostly declared constitutional, and (ii) the measures of state of siege dictated to repress the “Massacre of the Banana Region” of 1928, that the Court evaluated almost three years later, when the decree had been derogated. In this way, this article highlights how the Court aligned itself with the other two branches of public power, also conservative, to legally support repression and stop the revolutionary threat .Enviado el (Submission Date): 19/10/2017Aceptado el (Acceptance Date): 23/12/2017

Rent extraction, revolutionary threat, and coups in non-democracies

This paper studies the political turnover process in autocracies due to coup d’états. We present a model in which autocratic rulers are politically constrained both by the elite and by the street. These political constraints are inter-related such that when leaders extract rent from the economy on behalf of the elite they increase the probability of facing a revolt in the street. We suppose that rulers differ in the efficiency with which they extract rents and citizens make inferences about the ruler’s type when idiosyncratic shocks occur. Equilibria are characterized in which elite-led coups serve to reset citizens’ beliefs about the leader’s type and pre-empt revolutions during periods of popular unrest. We then investigate the empirical implications using panel data on popular unrest and coups in sub-Saharan Africa. OLS and IV estimates support the causal mechanism highlighted in our theory. The magnitude of the effect is substantial – a one standard deviation increase in protest intensity increases the probability a coup occurs by a factor of almost three in our baseline IV specification.

Grievances, Mobilization, and Mass Opposition to Authoritarian Regimes: A Subnational Analysis of East Germany’s 1953 Abbreviated Revolution

Mass opposition to authoritarian governments is caused by economic grievances and factors which facilitate mobilization. In this article, I explore these competing explanations of revolution with a county-level analysis of the June 17, 1953, uprising against the socialist dictatorship in East Germany. I argue that grievances can drive unrest, but only when they are disproportionately large and clearly attributable to a regime. Mobilization capacity is the primary driver of unrest outcomes, but depends on group structure and communications networks which are difficult to capture using cross-national indicators. Independent farmers with intense grievances attributable to the East German regime’s agricultural collectivization policies were associated with unrest despite significant obstacles to mobilization. Construction workers with strong mobilization structures and dense communications networks were significant instigators of unrest despite small numbers and moderate grievances. These findings raise important questions for both theoretical and empirical treatments of revolutionary threats to autocratic regimes.

Pampered Bureaucracy, Political Stability, and Trade Integration

This paper shows how, under threat of revolution, a nation's elite are able to maintain political stability and hence ownership of their wealth by creating or expanding a `pampered bureaucracy.' The elite thus divert part of an otherwise entrepreneurial middle class from more productive manufacturing activities, reducing economic efficiency. If the country has a comparative advantage in primary products, trade integration is potentially destabilizing since it raises the payoff to the lower classes of mounting a revolution and challenging the elite for their wealth. In that case trade integration mandates expansion of the pampered bureaucracy. Therefore, trade integration may actually reduce economic efficiency. The econometric results provide supportive evidence for our model.

Elites, Institutional Change, Institutional Persistence and Economic Development: Lessons for Africa

In the essay, we show how the preference of political elites for special status and power translates to an institutional structure that not only maximizes their relative share of social wealth through predation but ensure they keep as wide as possible the gap between actual development and potential development. In exchange for de facto power, their choice of institution is one which yields them less rather than more wealth. Though developmental institutions will yield them more wealth, political elites still avoid choosing the socially optimal institution because the resulting political configuration will turn them into elites with merely de jure political power. We draw on a number of historical and contemporary examples to which our model applies. Drawing on the experiences of nations which have successfully transited from growth-inhibiting to developmental institutions, we isolated factors critical to the attainment of this transition. Factors considered included revolution or the threat of revolution, religion through it impact on human capital, international trade and entrepreneurship, external wars and political competition between countries. In examining barriers in the way of countries yet to transit, we identified ethnic diversity and natural resource endowment. Both have prevented to a large extent the emergence of common constitutional pact across elites belonging to groups with different complexities. The challenge remains overcoming these barriers. New pro-development elites are required to make the initial investments in efforts and organization required to upset the status quo. Only when they start would the larger society follow in their steps to sustain and implement the desired institutional change.

Fiscal redistribution around elections when democracy is not “the only game in town”

This paper seeks to examine the implications of policy intervention around elections on income inequality and fiscal redistribution. We first develop a simplified theoretical framework that allows us to examine election-cycle fiscal redistribution programs in the presence of a revolutionary threat from some groups of agents, i.e., when democracy is not “the only game in town”. According to our theoretical analysis, when democracy is not “the only game in town”, incumbents implement redistributive policies not only as a means of improving their reelection prospects, but also in order to signal that “democracy works”, thereby preventing a reversion to an autocratic status quo ante at a time of the current regime’s extreme vulnerability. Subsequently, focusing on 65 developed and developing countries over the 1975–2010 period, we report robust empirical evidence of pre-electoral budgetary manipulation in new democracies. Consistent with our theory, this finding is driven by political instability that induces incumbents to redistribute income—through tax and spending policies—in a relatively broader coalition of voters with the aim of consolidating the vulnerable newly established democratic regime.