Monthly Archives: January 2026

Aging in Nationhood: Everyday Nationalism and Belonging Among Seniors in Old-Age Homes in Québec

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Stallone, Jessica. 2025. “ Aging in Nationhood: Everyday Nationalism and Belonging Among Seniors in Old-Age Homes in Québec,” The British Journal of Sociology: 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.70042.

Scholars of aging and nationalism rarely engage with each another. To remedy this gap, I examine how ethnonationalism becomes a resource for navigating the precarity of aging. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two private senior residences in a region of Québec, I show how financially privileged Québécois seniors enact nationhood through everyday cultural practices. I introduce the concept of “aging in nationhood” to describe how seniors draw on ethnonationalist identities to foster comfort, community, and meaning at an age of decline—often with exclusionary effects. Seniors who do not—or cannot—assimilate into majority culture experience social isolation. By linking nationalism and aging, I show how seniors reproduce the nation, shaping their well-being and the boundaries of belonging. While grounded in Québec, this concept offers new insight for thinking about how dominant-group seniors mobilize ethnonationalism as a source of membership and exclusion in white aging societies across the Atlantic.

Toward a Predistributive Democracy: Polanyi and Piketty on Capitalism, Moral Economy, and Democracy in Crisis

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Somers, Margaret, Toward a Predistributive Democracy: Polanyi and Piketty on Capitalism, Moral Economy, and Democracy in Crisis (October 30, 2024). Journal of Law and Political Economy, Volume 5, Issue 3. Pp. 508-607., Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5160643 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5160643

As accelerating inequality careens into plutocracy, and America tilts toward autocracy, Karl Polanyi and Thomas Piketty have become key resources for understanding the link between the social exclusions of capitalism and democracy in crisis. This and its companion article (Somers 2022a) explore each of these thinkers and put them into dialogue to generate the outlines of a democratic political economy that I dub a predistributive democracy. Deconstructing capitalism’s moral economy of market justice, building on legal and economic institutionalism, and advocating a movement of countervailing power against escalating commodification and dedemocratization are central components of the project. The first article focused on Polanyi’s contribution to a predistributive democracy. This one engages Piketty’s work as it evolves from a bent toward economic naturalism to a robust institutionalism and an agenda for a participatory democratic socialism. Neither Polanyi nor Piketty is a legal theorist, yet both thinkers are indispensable to the new Law and Political Economy (LPE) project and the movement for a predistributive democracy. 

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“Until Indian Title Shall Be … Fairly Extinguished”: The Public Lands, Indigenous Erasure, and the Origins of Government Promotion of Infrastructure in the United States

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Shi, M. (2025). “Until Indian Title Shall Be … Fairly Extinguished”: The Public Lands, Indigenous Erasure, and the Origins of Government Promotion of Infrastructure in the United States. Politics & Society, 53(4), 570-602. https://doi.org/10.1177/00323292251338129 (Original work published 2025)

Prior to the authorization of the Erie Canal in 1817, it was not taken for granted that governments should directly promote infrastructure projects such as roads, canals, and railways as a means of stimulating what is now called economic development. This article investigates infrastructure promotion in this early period to examine the origins of the American developmental state. It finds that legislators repeatedly called on the nation’s public lands as a costless and freely available resource—even in the face of legally recognized Native title—for infrastructure finance. Doing so allowed legislators to rely on assumptions of Indigenous erasure to mobilize the public lands as a politically light fiscal resource that reduced the perceived costs of government action. In making this argument, this article develops political lightness as a concept for diagnosing how public budgets can institutionalize power-laden cultural contexts in public policy, makes visible the processes of Indigenous dispossession and erasure constitutive of the fiscal calculus of the modern developmental state, and contributes to the theorization of the United States as a case of settler colonial state formation.

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Adopting Gender-Based-Violence Legislation, 1980–2015: The Role of Norm Cascades, Women’s Movements, and Level of Development

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Kimberly Seida, Candice Shaw, Jessica Kim, Sam Shirazi, Kathleen M. Fallon; Adopting Gender-Based-Violence Legislation, 1980–2015: The Role of Norm Cascades, Women’s Movements, and Level of Development. Sociology of Development 1 December 2025; 11 (4): 309–340. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/sod.2025.2607832

Research suggests that the global passage of gender-based-violence legislation (GBVL) is linked to transnational women’s movements, alongside CEDAW ratification and regional diffusion. Unfortunately, most studies are qualitative, limiting the number of case comparisons. The few existing quantitative studies incorporate both developed and developing countries and do not focus on broad factors further contributing to faster passage of specific kinds of GBVL. Also, both qualitative and quantitative studies tend to focus on the primary decade of women’s transnational activism, the 1990s. Using event history models, we build on the world society literature by exploring the effects of norm cascades and women’s movements on the passage of two types of GBVL (protections and criminalization) in two time periods (1980–2003 and 1980–2015) and across three tiers of developing countries (upper-middle income, lower-middle income, and low income). We find strong support that CEDAW and regional diffusion of GBVL facilitate policy adoption and limited support that women’s movements do so. While the effects of regional diffusion are robust across laws, time periods, and income levels, the effects of CEDAW vary by position in the global economy, and the effects of women’s movement are significant only in CEDAW-ratifying countries for protections legislation during the full time period.

Democracia y movimientos sociales

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Rossi, Federico M. (2023), Movimientos sociales y democracia (Temas de la Democracia, 45; Mexico: Conferencias Magistrales – Instituto Nacional Electoral). ISBN 9786078870660. URL: https://www.ine.mx/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/democracia-y-movimientos-sociales.pdf

«El libro», afirma Matías Rossi, «sintetiza 20 años de investigación en un breve texto que responde a una serie de interrogantes troncales para comprender el rol de la acción colectiva en la constitución de los regímenes sociopolíticos». Estos interrogantes, en torno a los que Rossi articula su investigación, van desde las preguntas «¿Qué son los movimientos sociales?« y «¿Qué es la democracia?« hasta otras como «¿Cuál es la relación entre movimientos sociales y democracia?«, «¿Cómo contribuyen los movimientos sociales a la democratización como cambio de régimen político?«, «¿Cómo contribuyen los movimientos sociales a expandir la democracia más allá de sus límites representativos?« y «¿Cómo contribuyen los movimientos sociales a evitar que la democracia transite hacia una plutocracia?« Para el investigador de la UNED, «es un honor y una oportunidad» poder presentar este libro en una feria como la FIL. «Más allá de sentirme honrado por este reconocimiento a mis esfuerzos por comprender el curso de la historia, lo siento como una oportunidad de hacer reflexionar a la ciudadanía. El formato que propone el INE favorece un lenguaje coloquial que acerca los debates académicos a la población. Esto representa una oportunidad, que es la de hacer uso de la responsabilidad social del académico de involucrarse en la constitución de pueblos que vivan en libertad con dignidad social».