This chapter explores the adoption of mobilization strategies in the case of the MAS in Bolivia. Drawing on extensive interviews with representatives of the party and societal organizations, as well as archival materials and ethnographic work in local organizations, it shows how the shared experience of moments of solidarity between the party proto-leaders and organizational allies during the party’s founding moments determined whether party–organization ties would later become institutionalized by adopting routinized rules and mechanisms that governed how candidates would be selected and factional disagreements would be settled. As it documents across different organizational allies of the party, where the party’s tie with an organization became institutionalized, these rules and mechanisms ensured that the party could rely on organizationally mediated strategies.

This chapter explains the methodological approach behind the measurement of analytical information in witness testimonies. Focusing on House hearings from the 105th through 114th Congresses, the methodological approach quantifies technical information relevant to policymaking – analytical information – and shows how witness affiliations can capture meaningful differences in the amount of analytical information that witnesses provide Congress in committee hearings. Bureaucrats and research-affiliated witnesses excel in delivering analytical testimony, while citizens and religious institution representatives provide the least. The patterns in this chapter demonstrate that not all testimony provides the same type of information and that committees may receive different amounts of analytical information depending on the types of witnesses they invite. Taken together, the findings and patterns illustrated in this chapter motivate our argument that the composition of witnesses has important implications for committees, as witness invitations not only indicate from whom committees choose to hear but also signify the different types of information committees may ultimately receive.

This chapter further tests the argument about how the experiences during a party’s founding moments shape which mobilization strategies the party adopts through a paired comparison with a new party that did not experience moments of solidarity with its organizational allies. Alianza PAIS was founded in Ecuador during a period of mass mobilization similar to the one in Bolivia and initially could rely on a broad coalition of powerful societal organizations – representing sectors similar to those in the founding coalition of the MAS. However, as this chapter shows, drawing on extensive interviews with early party leaders and organizational representatives, Alianza PAIS leaders had little trust in their organizational allies due to a lack of experience during the party’s founding moments. This made them hesitant to adopt internal rules and mechanisms that would institutionalize their tie with their organizational allies. Instead, ties remained instrumental and largely broke down when policy disagreements between the party leadership and its organizational allies arose. As a result, Alianza PAIS could not rely on organizationally mediated appeals and had to primarily use direct appeals.

In 1956 (and even now), two distinct types of agriculture existed in the state: cultivation of seasonal field crops and cultivation of tree crops. The latter held steady in the long run. But traditional agriculture, especially paddy cultivation, for which the lowlands and the river basins were especially suitable, has seen a relentless decline since 1970. Twenty years into the new millennium, traditional agriculture was an insignificant employer and earner, and for most people still engaged in it, the land provided no more than a subsidiary income. A relative retreat from traditional agriculture is not news. It happened everywhere. In the state the fall was spectacular.

What was this a change from? Although agriculture employed a smaller proportion of the workforce than in India at the start of this journey, it was not a marginal livelihood. Land control secured the political power of the elites in the princely states. A variety of crops were cultivated throughout the state, from monsoon rice to tapioca, ginger, groundnut, sugarcane and pulses. Most were rarely traded outside the region but were vital to sustaining local consumption. Good croplands occurred in clusters. Because of the topography, land available for the cultivation of traditional field crops was less than half the total land area of the state. Alluvial soil occurs in a narrow strip along the coast or in river valleys. Land elsewhere is not as fertile, though frequently suitable for tree crops. Unlike in most regions of India, access to water was not a serious problem. Soil quality and drainage of excess water were bigger problems.

Good land, however, was extremely scarce relative to the population. The exceptionally high population density in the areas of cultivation ensured a level of available land per head that was a fraction of the Indian figure (0.6 acres against an Indian average of 3.1 acres around 1970) and low by any benchmark. Partly, the density reflected high labour demand in lowlands to deal with drainage and seasonal flooding. Paddy yield was very high in these areas, but paddy cultivation needed a lot of people. From the 1940s, this zone in the middle was emerging as a political battleground.

This chapter expands on the micro-level evidence from Chapter 6 on how effective one-off organizational endorsements are at swaying vote preferences by exploring how repeated organizational expressions of support over multiple years (due to a mechanism that institutionalized a new party’s ties with its organizational allies) can help new parties secure support in subsequent elections. Analyzing a natural experiment from Mexico, in which MORENA uses lotteries to select candidates for national public office, it shows how the party took root and mobilized voters more successfully in localities where it was able to tap into organizational networks through candidates who are embedded in local organizations.

This chapter analyses the decline of the concern about liberty as non-domination and the idea of a competition–democracy nexus following the ascent of the Chicago School and the rise of a More Economic Approach towards antitrust law on both sides of the Atlantic. It shows how the Chicago School not only challenged the economic foundations of the republican antitrust tradition but also put forward the consumer welfare standard as a versatile, principled framework to supersede the conception of republican liberty with a narrow negative notion of economic liberty as non-interference. The Chicago School thus shaped a laissez-faire approach to antitrust that seeks, in the first place, to preserve entrepreneurial liberty against state interference.

This chapter introduces a novel dataset encompassing 731,810 witnesses across 74,077 House, Senate, and Joint standing committee hearings held between 1961 and 2018. The dataset includes comprehensive details such as witness names, organizational affiliations, hearing summaries, committee titles, dates, and bill numbers discussed. The chapter describes the meticulous construction process, emphasizing the extraction of key variables focusing on witness affiliations, affiliation type, and gender. With eighteen categorized affiliation types and nine broader parent categories, this classification captures the diverse spectrum of external groups represented in congressional hearings. The chapter also provides rich descriptive statistics on hearings and witness over time and across committees.

This chapter analyses how the ideal of republican liberty and the concept of a competition–democracy nexus have been implemented through concrete competition policy. To this end, the chapter looks at the interpretation and application of the three substantive pillars (i.e., the prohibition of anticompetitive agreements, the regulation of monopoly power, and the control of mergers) of competition law in the US until the 1970s and in the EU until the early 2000s. It describes how all three branches of competition law were interpreted in accordance with a republican conception of economic liberty as non-domination that perceived the very existence of concentrated economic power as an obstacle to economic freedom and democracy. This republican concern about liberty as non-domination as the central element of the competition–democracy nexus primarily manifested itself in the overarching policy goal of preserving a polycentric market structure as an institution of antipower. The republican antitrust tradition in the United States and in Europe built upon the structuralist approaches envisaged by various republican antitrust paradigms to operationalise the idea of a competition–democracy nexus that we discussed in the previous chapter.

Chapter 5 examines the intent for a legislative hearing and how it affects a committee’s selection of witnesses. Committees, guided by the partisan goals of the committee chair, seek different types of information depending on whether they are considering specific bills in hearings. When the chair has not yet advanced a bill through the committee process, it gives the committee more political flexibility to hear from those who can provide expertise in policy development. Consistent with this argument, we show that committees turned to think tanks, universities, and bureaucrats – witnesses who can provide more analytical information – at higher rates for hearings without a bill (nonreferral hearings), when committees hearings to learn about an issue area. Committees tended to invite witnesses from mass-based groups, such as labor unions, trade associations, and membership associations, at higher rates for hearings on a specific bill (referral hearings). Different witness compositions between referral and nonreferral hearings suggest strategic choices of the identities of witnesses and thus the types of information that the committee hearing generates.