Pehlman on Zuckerman & Lichbach 10, 12 and 14

Chapters 10, 12, and 14

Chapter 10 is an explanation of the perimeters of what is studied within contentious politics and a brief history of the evolution of the discipline. The authors attribute the origin of the study of contentious politics to be of a ‘dominant structuralist tradition’ yet they explain how the discipline has evolved to include more paradigms and explanations of contentious politics.

Another crucial adaptation in the development of examining contentious politics has been the broadness of issues that is has grown to study and compare. While the discipline was first interested in reformist social movements (such as the counter culture and anti-war movements of the 1960’s) it now includes phenomena as seemingly diverse as terrorism, insurgencies, ethnic conflict and union strike activity.

Before we can compare different forms of contentious politics we must first define the term. The authors define contentious politics as; “[consisting of] public collective making of consequential claims by connected clusters of persons on other clusters of persons or on major political actors when at least one government is a claimant, and object of claims, or a third party to the claims.” I would summarize this definition as the following; the manner in which non state actors promote their means, either through violence or non-violence, in an attempt to either exercise power over the government’s own action, induce or coerce the government from acting or not acting on themselves or another party, and exercising influence over another party with an organized demand. Another crucial point of the article for me was the notion that vehicles of contentious politics from concerned coalitions all the way through rural guerilla insurgencies are dynamic, relational, and living. The article examines not only how movements are created but how they define themselves, revise their strategy, adjust their claims, and ultimately demobilize. I agree with the article when it says that a solely structural paradigm cannot fully describe the constant changes in what is really a living breathing movements of individuals. An example that came to mind for me, albeit a horrible one, was that of the Ku Klux Klan. The first KKK was envisioned as a tactical insurgency response to the union army during southern reconstruction in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. A second reformation in the early 20^th century was based almost entirely on anti immigrant (at that time Southern and Eastern Europeans), and anti black agenda. Today it is a mostly social (albeit horrid) forum and a publicity stunt based membership organization. Throughout the nearly century in a half of its existence the claims, membership, and tactics of their contention have changed dramatically, and at any one point would be unrecognizable to another era’s Klan.

By far the most important section of the chapter to me was chapter on “Mechanisms and Processes of Contention,” in which the authors do a good job of exploring the different factors and dynamics of why someone would chose to act instead of not, which to me is at the fundamental root of contentious politics. They define five factors that convince or enable the average citizen to become political actors as: ‘brokerage’, ‘identity-shift’, ‘cooptation’, ‘diffusion’, and ‘repression.’ I will not re-define and summarize each of these terms as I think the authors have made them relatively plain and understandable. According to the authors using this model of the five factors given by the authors in context of the historical particularities, the model of government, and the social and structural factors will inevitably produce different types of contention has been the most informative part of the chapter. It has always perplexed me why two populations in two very similar and near countries afflicted with similar problems have acted differently in a given situation. In my opinion, at least for IR, the study of contentious politics may be the most scientific and reliable discipline in comparative government.

CHAPTER 12

Anderson describes political sociology as, ‘the birthplace of comparative mass politics’, in the early 20^th century. While sociology still plays a major factor today in the study of comparative mass politics, psychology has come to play an equal role in understanding group political actions. Anderson attributes this diminishment of predominance by the sociological paradigm as coinciding with suburbanization (my term not his) and the great cultural shift since the 1960’s and 1970’s US. He says that while people began to identify less as members of a particular class, region, religion or identity their voting patterns became harder to approach through a strictly sociological approach. I attribute this cultural shift primarily to the de-urbanization of American cities but I leave this open in the comments for others to challenge. New forms of understanding the American voter were needed and the Michigan approach emerged as the messiah of individual cognitive factors as opposed to collective structural ones. Anderson is careful to note that the Michigan approach’s roots were very much in the sociological approach and even went so far as to call them ‘first cousins.’ More importantly what the new approach brought to the table was the tool for understanding an individual in themselves as opposed to simply an atom in a structural group; that key was the personal survey.

Mass political study was largely overlooked by comparative politics in the beginning as it was geographically not ambitious in its surveys, preferring to stay in a given region or country, and furthermore not standardized in a way that could be applied in different nations. That began to change according to Anderson, as the 1980’s and 1990’s saw an increase in the level of democratic countries available to research and by student interest in cognitive political research. Macro level assessments have opened new tools f or explaining individual behavior and simultaneously created even more confusion in understanding seemingly contradictory activity political behavior. By exploring structural aspects as well as the unique representational configuration of a given state mass political study has tried to answer new questions such as why are voters in one country more likely to punish a party or coalition for poor economic results. The rational approach states that while all voters in an economy will pursue different causes either moral, religious, social or otherwise; the fundamental unifying interest of all segments of a population should be economic performance. Often, the rational orthodoxy is disproved as voters consistently elect governments that fail to deliver economic results and make poor decisions regarding the economy term after term that negatively affect citizens. A behavioral approach to voting must encompass not only the structural aspects of a given society but also the governmental structure, as well as the culture of a society. Anderson closes by saying that the study of mass politics is becoming the study of nested citizens. By this he means that no two societies are the same, and furthermore what a researcher may suppose is a standard single society, to the individual actors within that society they may see themselves as many more than one group, each with its own distinct customs, structures, and institutions. Behavioral research promises now more than ever fruitful analysis of the complex actions of actors and voters through a synthesis of structuralist, rationalist, and cultural factors.