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ID:
132973
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| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article presents a new explanation of the widespread occurrence of cycles of protest in electoral autocracies - the most common type of authoritarian regime in the world today. Because multiparty elections in autocracies are partially free but unfair, opposition parties are compelled to compete for office while contesting the rules of competition. To fulfill this dual goal, opposition parties actively seek to recruit a wide variety of independent social movements who can provide votes and lead major mobilizations during election campaigns and in post-election rallies to denounce fraud. Because electoral participation can cause divisions within social movements, social activists join socio-electoral coalitions when opposition parties offer them financial and logistic resources and institutional protection to mobilize for their causes during non-election times. This quid pro quo explains how isolated protest events become aggregated into powerful cycles of mobilization and why protest is more intense during elections but persists beyond election cycles. When political liberalization leads to increasingly free and fair elections, the prospect of victory motivates opposition parties to discourage radical mobilization, bringing cycles of protest to an end. Drawing on an original database of indigenous protest in Mexico and on case studies, I provide quantitative and qualitative evidence of the causal impact of electoral incentives on the rise, development and decline of a powerful cycle of indigenous protest as Mexico transitioned from one-party to multi-party autocracy and into democracy. Beyond Mexico, I show that the introduction of multiparty elections in a wide variety of autocracies around the world gave rise to major cycles of protest and discuss why the relationship between the ballot and the street is a crucial factor for understanding the dynamics of stability and change of authoritarian regimes.
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| 2 |
ID:
162458
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article claims that cross-national variation in criminal violence in new democracies is highly dependent on whether elites adopt transitional justice processes to address a repressive past. State specialists in violence who repress political dissidents under authoritarian rule often play a crucial role in the operation of criminal markets and in the production of criminal violence in democracy. Some of them defect from the state to become the armed branch of criminal organizations in their deadly fights against the state and rival groups; others remain but protect criminal organizations from positions of state power; and still others use state power to fight criminals through iron-fist policies. When post-authoritarian elites adopt transitional justice processes to expose, prosecute, and punish state specialists in violence for gross human rights violations committed during the authoritarian era, they redefine the rules of state coercion and deter members of the armed forces and the police from becoming leading actors in the production of criminal violence. Using a dataset of 76 countries that transitioned from authoritarian rule to democracy between 1974 and 2005, we show that the adoption of strong truth commissions is strongly associated with lower murder rates; we also find that the implementation of trials that result in guilty verdicts is associated with lower homicide rates only when the trials are jointly implemented with a strong truth commission. In contrast, amnesty laws appear to stimulate criminal violence. Our findings are particularly robust for Latin America and remain unchanged even after addressing selection effects via matching techniques.
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| 3 |
ID:
090816
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2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article suggests that a society's religious market structure can explain whether religion is "the opium of the people" or a major source of dissident secular mobilization. I present a simple model explaining why under monopolistic conditions, Catholic clergy in Latin America ignored the religious and social needs of poor rural indigenous parishioners but, when confronted by the expansion of U.S. mainline Protestantism, became major institutional promoters of rural indigenous causes. Catholic indigenous parishioners empowered by competition demanded the same benefits their Protestant neighbors were receiving: social services, ecclesiastic decentralization, and the practice of religion in their own language. Unable to decentralize ecclesiastic hierarchies, and facing a reputation deficit for having sided with rich and powerful elites for centuries, Catholic clergy stepped into the secular realm and became active promoters of indigenous movements and ethnic identities; they embraced the cause of the Indians as a member retention strategy and not in response to new doctrinal ideas emanating from Vatican II. Drawing on an original data set of indigenous mobilization in Mexico and on life histories and case studies, I provide quantitative and qualitative evidence of the causal effect of religious competition on the creation of the social bases for indigenous ethnic mobilization.
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