Tag Archives: Comparative historical

Bringing War Back In: Victory, Defeat, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

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Schenoni, L. 2024. Bringing War Back In: Victory, Defeat, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: Cambridge University Press.

Bringing War Back In provides a fresh theory connecting war and state formation that incorporates the contingency of warfare and the effects of war outcomes in the long run. The book demonstrates that international wars in nineteenth-century Latin America triggered state-building, that the outcomes of those wars affected the legitimacy and continuity of such efforts, and that the relative capacity of states in this region today continues to reflect those distant processes. Combining comparative historical analysis with cutting edge social science methods, the book provides a comprehensive picture of state formation in nineteenth-century Latin America that is compelling for readers across disciplines, breathes new life into bellicist approaches to state formation, and offers a novel framework to explain variation in state capacity across Latin America and the world.

“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.

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.

Working-class structural power, associational power, and income inequality

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Movahed, M. (2025). Working-class structural power, associational power, and income inequality. Journal of Industrial Relations, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/00221856251326670

Under capitalism, workers have two sources of power: associational and structural. A vast body of social science research shows that workers’ power—often measured by union density—is associated with lower levels of income inequality. Drawing on a country-level, panel dataset for much of the post-World War II era (1960–2013), the author introduces a model of distributive outcomes that centers on the dual sources of workers’ associational and structural power. By differentiating the sources of workers’ power, the author examines the extent to which they bear on distributive outcomes across countries in the Global North. Using two-way fixed effects regression models, the author presents strong evidence that while workers’ associational and structural power are both statistically associated with lower levels of income inequality, it is workers’ structural—and not associational—power that drives egalitarian outcomes. Notably, counterfactual simulations demonstrate that, on average, structural power of the working class explains a gap up to approximately 4% in levels of income inequality over the past five decades across postindustrial countries.