Tag Archives: Article

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».

The State and the Emergence of the First American Party System: Roll Call Voting in the New York State Assembly during the Early Republic

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Rohr, B., & Martin, J. L. (2025). The State and the Emergence of the First American Party System: Roll Call Voting in the New York State Assembly during the Early Republic. American Sociological Review, 90(4), 726-754. https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224251344574

Prevailing theories about the nature and development of the democratic party system fail to account for the important case of the United States. Using a novel dataset on legislators and roll call votes in the New York State Assembly after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, we show that, contrary to existing accounts, legislative parties had already formed at this early stage. Yet these parties did not arise from the translation of social cleavages such as economic or social class into political oppositions, as sociologists might expect, nor were they merely networks of powerful elites disconnected from the polity, as political scientists and historians have suggested. Instead, these parties coalesced around formal issues—structural questions like the procedures for election and appointment, questions whose answer would determine the rules of the game for future contests. Parties emerged, we argue, not because of an inherent need to adjudicate conflicts between sectors of the polity, but because of the organizational affordances of the modern democratic state. Our findings suggest the formation of party systems is an integral part of the formation of the modern state.