Author Archives: Jennifer Dudley

The New Handbook of Political Sociology

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Janoski, Thomas, De Leon, Cedric, Misra, Joya, & Martin, Isaac William. (Eds.). 2020. The New Handbook of Political Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
New Handbook of Political Sociology
How will political sociology help us discern and analyze such changes now and in the next few decades? The future of politics is as uncertain as ever, but a brief overview of the history of political sociology may offer some clues to the theoretical challenges and opportunities ahead. For convenience, we divide the recent history of political sociology into three periods, suggesting that the field is now entering a fourth period with an expanding focus.

Social Movements: The Structure of Collective Mobilization

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Almeida, Paul. 2019. Social Movements: The Structure of Collective Mobilization. University of California Press.
Social Movements the Structure of Collective Mobilization
Social Movements cleverly translates the art of collective action and mobilization by excluded groups to facilitate understanding social change from below. Students learn the core components of social movements, the theory and methods used to study them, and the conditions under which they can lead to political and social transformation. This fully class-tested book is the first to be organized along the lines of the major subfields of social movement scholarship—framing, movement emergence, recruitment, and outcomes—to provide comprehensive coverage in a single core text.

Protest Waves and Social Movement Fields: The Micro Foundations of Campaigning for Subaltern Political Parties

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Almeida, Paul, Eugenion Sosa, Allen Cordero Ulate, and Ricardo Argueta. 2021. “Protest Waves and Social Movement Fields: The Micro Foundations of Campaigning for Subaltern Political Parties.” Social Problems. https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spab012. The paper examines the individual-level building blocks of getting out the vote (GOTV) for electoral parties that represent subaltern sectors in resource scarce environments. Drawing on theories of protest waves, social movement fields, and threat-induced collective action, we examine the likelihood of campaigning in left party electoral mobilization and party identification. The study implements a modified version of the Caught in the Act of Protest: Contextualizing Contestation (CCC) survey protocol and respondent selection design. We use a sympathy pool sample of over 1,200 May Day participants in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Honduras to explain the micro-foundations of electoral proselytizing of political parties advocating for disadvantaged populations. We found that involvement in left party electoral campaigning was largely driven by resources deposited during anti-neoliberal protest waves, including prior movement-type protest, civic organizational activity, and economic threat perceptions. Campaigning for the anti-neoliberal party was also associated with a higher level of post-election party identification. The findings suggest that left parties may at times partially overcome economic and political resource deficits by mobilizing individuals deeply embedded in the social movement field.

Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies

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Reed, Isaac Ariail. 2020. Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Power in Modernity
In Power in Modernity, Isaac Ariail Reed proposes a bold new theory of power that describes overlapping networks of delegation and domination.  Chains of power and their representation, linking together groups and individuals across time and space, create a vast network of intersecting alliances, subordinations, redistributions, and violent exclusions. Reed traces the common action of “sending someone else to do something for you” as it expands outward into the hierarchies that control territories, persons, artifacts, minds, and money. He mobilizes this theory to investigate the onset of modernity in the Atlantic world, with a focus on rebellion, revolution, and state formation in colonial North America, the early American Republic, the English Civil War, and French Revolution. Modernity, Reed argues, dismantled the “King’s Two Bodies”—the monarch’s physical body and his ethereal, sacred second body that encompassed the body politic—as a schema of representation for forging power relations. Reed’s account then offers a new understanding of the democratic possibilities and violent exclusions forged in the name of “the people,” as revolutionaries sought new ways to secure delegation, build hierarchy, and attack alterity. Reconsidering the role of myth in modern politics, Reed proposes to see the creative destruction and eternal recurrence of the King’s Two Bodies as constitutive of the modern attitude, and thus as a new starting point for critical theory. Modernity poses in a new way an eternal human question: what does it mean to be the author of one’s own actions?

“The Paradox of Inequality: Income Inequality and Belief in Meritocracy go Hand in Hand” by Jonathan J.B. Mijs

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Mijs, Jonathan J. B was quoted in a January 24 The Guardian article, a February 26 Washington Post article, and a March 3 Financial Times article about his recent article “The Paradox of Inequality: Income Inequality and Belief in Meritocracy go Hand in Hand” published in Socio-Economic Review (doi: 10.1093/ser/mwy051).