Variations in the loss of seats in the House of Representatives by the president's party in midterm elections between 1854 and 1998 are analyzed from a historical perspective. Whereas in the latter three-fourths of the nineteenth century the president's party lost, on average, 22% of its share of House seats, in the twentieth century the average loss was 13%. Using district-level data, the author attributes the problematization of “midterm decline” to the growing power of incumbency (a consequence of the development of the Australian ballot), the decline in the number of partisanly competitive districts in open-seat elections, and the limitation, since 1912, of the size of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Social scientists studying revolutions have increasingly argued that explanations of revolutions that do not include subjective factors, such as culture, are inadequate. The failure to explain the anti-Communist revolutions of 1989 is forceful testimony to this inadequacy. But the way in which cultural aspects are being added to existing approaches tends to undermine past advances in studying revolutions. Recent historiography of the French Revolution provides an example of a more thorough-going approach to political culture. A productive synthesis that both preserves past advances and better explains the revolutions of 1989 is achieved by analyzing the effects of cultural change on state elites.

In June 1975 and January 1978, seminary students in the shrine city of Qum, Iran, staged public protests against the regime of Shah Muhammad Riza Pahlavi. In both instances security forces forcibly suppressed the protests. Yet the first incident generated almost no public outcry, while the second incident echoed throughout Iran and quickly became a rallying point for revolutionary mobilization. What was different about Iran in mid-1975 and early 1978 that might account for these different reactions? This article examines three widely credited explanations: economic downturn, widening political opportunity, and organizational mobilization of the opposition. The examination of economic and political explanations uncovered little evidence of significant differences between the two time periods; organizational explanations, by contrast, accounted for significant shifts in 1977 among the moderate and Islamist opposition, with the Islamist opposition in particular exhibiting a sense of optimism and efficacy in the weeks before January 1978. This changed self-perception appears to be the most likely explanation for the wave of protest that followed the suppression of the Qum protest of January 1978.

Rising per capita incomes generated by rural development helped make the industrialization of Europe possible. The current dominant approaches to rural development in European history stress the role of either local class relations or state institutions. Both approaches ignore the role of local institutions. Although class relations and state institutions were important in rural development in European history, the regional analysis presented here shows that these factors alone were not enough. Also important was a suitable institutional structure at the local level. Local institutions and associated class relations also shaped when enclosure occurred and what its effects were and thus need to be taken into account by those assessing the efficiency value of enclosure.

Between 1956 and 1971, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) operated five counterintelligence programs (COINTELPROs) designed to repress a range of threats to the status quo. This article examines more than twelve thousand pages of memos related to FBI programs against white hate groups (mostly the Ku Klux Klan) and the New Left in an effort to gain insight into the Bureau's repression of left- and right- wing targets. The article's goals are both general and historically specific: First, to introduce a two-dimensional typology to organize and categorize repressive acts generally and then to use this typology to examine the patterning of repressive acts across the COINTELPROs. This approach allows for the uncovering of distinct overarching strategies applied to left- versus right-wing targets. These strategies are emergent in the sense that they are not apparent from a textual analysis of Bureau memos or through a comparison of the outcomes of each COINTELPRO. Recognition of these emergent strategies provides insight into the complex, ambiguous relationship that the FBI had with both the civil rights movement and the Klan.

The author provides a critical response to the social scientific literature that cast political interest and cleavages as the projection of sociocultural dynamics onto the political scene. Sociopolitical cleavages in general, and nationalism in particular, are thus viewed as having taken form outside the partisan arena, and only subsequent to their societal formation do they take on political importance. Through a comparison of the development of political nationalism in interwar Scotland and Flanders, the author argues for the importance of political forces in defining and shaping the political and social meaning and significance of nationalism. In Scotland, despite the potential popular appeal of nationalism, it does not emerge as a significant and autonomous political cleavage, principally due to configurations of partisan programs and alliances, and a politically unfavorable “demographic geometry.” In Flanders, on the other hand, markedly different political conditions fostered the development and societal significance of nationalism. Hence, political nationalism did not emerge as a necessary concomitant to societal and cultural change; it was in part the result of political conditions and institutions that could foster or constrain the sociopolitical significance and meaning of nationalism.

Globalization is transforming the spatial organization of the world economy. In particular, it is leading to the “shrinking globe” phenomenon and the speeding up of social interaction between places across the planet. Given that international labor solidarity is a process of coming together across space, I argue that the spatial reorganization of global capitalism has important consequences for practices of solidarity. Specifically, I suggest that the spatial context within which they find themselves is likely to impact the types of political praxis in which workers engage. Thus, whereas globalization may encourage some workers to engage in traditional international solidarity campaigns it might also, paradoxically, lead others to focus on highly local campaigns, the consequences of which can quickly be spread far and wide as a result of the growing spatial interconnectivity of the planet that globalization has augured. Likewise, the spatial context within which they find themselves may lead some workers to defend their class interests while others defend their spatial interests. Equally, while some unions are focusing upon organizing what I call the spaces of production, others are organizing around the spaces of consumption. Given that workers’ spatial context impacts their spatial goals and political praxis, I argue that it is important to conceptualize international labor solidarity in explicitly spatial terms if we are to understand why different groups of workers may pursue radically different types of political praxis in different places and at different times.

This article describes and explains the movement of female relative wages in Sweden from 1920 to 1995. During this period the aggregate gender wage gap shrunk from 41 to 15%. The bulk of the change took place in two periods: 1920 to 1940 and 1960 to 1980. With regard to determining factors, the analysis distinguishes between the period before 1960, when the rise in the female relative wage was the result of employment shifts, and after 1960, when wage structure change was the prime determinant. In the interwar period, women moved from low-paid to better-paid jobs, notably in trade and commerce and public services, as legal and administrative reforms opened up the public sector to women and educational reforms raised the educational level of the female labor force. The most rapid change in the gender wage gap occurred at a time when the solidaristic wage policy doctrine was embraced by the blue-collar trade unions and formed the basis of claims in wage negotiations. This study suggests, however, that excess demand for female labor rather than egalitarian ambitions of strong trade unions was the decisive factor behind the rapid reduction of the gender gap. Likewise, supply and demand shifts may well explain why the female relative wage stagnated from the late 1970s. These observations add up to the somewhat unorthodox conclusion that institutions were of primary importance for female relative wage development in the interwar period, while market forces played the leading role after 1960.

This article examines the interests expressed by white Populists and black Republicans regarding political coalition in Virginia. Virginia is interesting because it is generally considered a failed site for the Populist movement and for interracial organizing under it. Such a coalition was untenable statewide, but economic, social, and historical conditions opened a space for it in a cluster of majority-black counties. The failure of the coalition was not due to incompatible interests but to changing calculations of the outcomes. The interests expressed by white Populists and black Republicans converged and then diverged sharply as the meaning of past interracial coalitions changed for both sides.

With original data from Mexico I argue that political divisions among capitalists are determined by their varying political relationships to other organized classes. I demonstrate that in 1975 a minority of agrarian capitalists formed a movement for organizational autonomy from the government to defend private property, free enterprise, and capitalism. The majority of capitalists, however, rejected this movement as “unpatriotic.” Neither the heterogeneity of the capitalists’ markets nor the various ways in which state policy impinged on their material interests explains this ideological divide. Rather, the data suggest that the agrarian capitalists’ variant experiences with peasant struggles from below (and the contingent outcomes of such struggles) significantly shaped their political agendas and, thus, their conflicts over organizational forms. Capitalist interests, I conclude, are not fixed by an iron law of profitability any more than intraclass differences are resolvable in the monologically simple manner commonly assumed. Rather, capitalist agendas emerge dialogically through the political and ideological conflicts engendered by organized challenges from below.

It is commonly assumed that transnational activist networks have greater power to compel state and private sector actors to address rights-based grievances as networks grow and activists gain greater visibility in the mass media. However, evidence from case studies of transnational mobilization suggests that the opposite may hold true under given circumstances. This article examines the struggle for an independent union in the Tijuana-based Han Young welding facility, which in 1997 and 1998 became one of the most important tests to date of labor law and institutions across the U.S.-Mexico border. Drawing international press, the Han Young factory conflict eventually drew in national labor unions, a multinational corporation, state governments, the U.S. and Mexican congresses, powerful private-sector lobbies, Mexican district courts, labor secretariats, national and regional media in Mexico and the United States, and eventually then Mexican president Ernest Zedillo and then U.S. president Bill Clinton. Despite the prominence of the case, however, the Han Young struggle ended in almost total defeat for labor. Evidence from the Han Young case suggests that as conflicts become more complex and drawn out, transnational activists' real influence may decrease, as redress of particular demands requires increasingly complex and surgical interventions to resolve problems. When conflicts implicate internecine power struggles among government actors, solving problems requires confrontations not only over social demands, but also over implementation of agreements when they are reached.

This article explains Mauritius’s exceptional state building and development during late colonialism as the product of a conjuncture of two separately determined historical processes. The first causal chain involves the creation of a bureaucratic state, which was built over two centuries of French and British colonial rule. The second main causal path concerns the development of a society with dense associational ties. This process was set into motion by land distribution that occurred in the late nineteenth century and resulted in the emergence of several villages of small landholders. The essay argues that a prolonged period of labor riots beginning in the late 1930s and the more interventionist policy of the British government after World War II combined to initiate a “critical-juncture period” that increased relations between state and societal actors. This increased embeddedness made possible state-society synergy, which promoted broad-based development by engaging and strengthening both state institutions and societal associations, thereby endowing Mauritius with the institutions necessary for broad-based development after colonial independence as well.

Anti-immigrant sentiments in California during the early 1990s raised questions about that state's association with nativism, the impact of recessions on public anxieties, and the validity of public opinion polls in measuring related attitudes and concerns. A series of California Field Polls administered statewide between 1982 and 1998 (most samples exceeding 1,000 persons) were used to examine Californians’ attitudes regarding legal and illegal immigration, amnesty for undocumented aliens, identification cards for immigrants, and job competition between immigrants and Americans. Employing cross-tabulations and logistic regression, the study found a consistent relationship between responses to the issues and such demographic variables as political ideology, education, age, income, Protestant religion, and Latino ethnicity as well as between those responses and shifts in respondents’ financial perceptions and expectations. The study concludes that California was more likely a microcosm of the nation, reflecting its dual attitudes toward immigrants, rather than the leader of a neonativist movement.

Progressive Era campaigns to establish juvenile courts maintained that police and criminal courts failed to distinguish between children and adults. They suggested that law enforcement agencies either sentenced juveniles as if they were adults, imposing excessive punishments, or let kids go, failing to discipline them and encouraging them to commit further crimes. However, this case study of juvenile arrests in turn-of-the-century Detroit indicates that, before the creation of juvenile court, criminal justice institutions had more complex interactions with delinquent youth than has been recognized previously. Boys typically were arrested for very different offenses than were adults, and the police and courts often segregated children and adolescents from the harshest elements of the criminal justice system. The police sought every opportunity to decide the outcome of juvenile arrests themselves, without a court hearing, particularly if boys had committed only status offenses such as truancy or if crime victims decided not to prosecute. When juveniles did appear in criminal courts, judges found ways to soften their experiences, rarely jailing younger boys and instead sentencing some to reform school for ostensible rehabilitation. After 1900, efforts to protect young offenders from criminal justice institutions expanded as specially assigned police officers increasingly sought to discipline delinquents prior to arrest and the courts introduced an unofficial form of probation. Rather than constituting a break from the past, the creation of Detroit’s juvenile court in 1907 mainly made official juvenile offenders’ growing separation from the criminal justice system.

The proliferation of garment industry sweatshops over the past 20 years has generated numerous cross-border (transnational) organizing campaigns involving U.S., Mexican, and Central American labor unions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). This article examines one such campaign that took place at the Honduran maquiladora factory known as Kimi. The Kimi workers (along with their transnational allies) struggled for six years before they were legally recognized as a union, and they negotiated one of the few collective bargaining agreements in the entire Central American region. The factory eventually shut down, however. Based on Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink's “boomerang effect” model, this case study analyzes why these positive and negative outcomes occurred. It concludes with some observations about “the enemy” and offers short-, medium-, and long-term suggestions for the broader antisweatshop movement.

Recent accounts of transnational activism have examined a variety of social movement organizations (SMOs) but have paid little attention to labor transnationalism. This article utilizes and adapts this new transnational social movements scholarship to understand contemporary labor activism in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) countries. Exploring the preexisting networks and intramovement cleavages that helped spawn labor opposition to NAFTA, it focuses on labor activists' complaints under the treaty's labor side accord. I explore how rising political opportunities associated with the treaty and its new institutions created new political arenas, targets for activists, and incentives for cross-border collaboration. The cross-border political exchanges that formed part of labor activists' strategies to utilize these new institutions helped activists create new movement frames, transnational identities, and coalitions. While these outcomes support the findings of literature on transnational SMOs, they point to the particular dilemmas labor activists faced in confronting these issues due to their vulnerability, the status of unions as formal organizations embedded in national institutional structures, and the difficulty of imagining policies and strategies that might be effective in this new transnational sphere.

This roundtable celebrates the twentieth anniversary of Stephen Skowronek’s Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (1982). Skowronek’s book introduced scholars to the emerging field of historical institutionalism, offering an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing government and public policy. Tackling three different policy areas, the book offered a pathbreaking examination of institutional development and a treatment of political actors that moved beyond standard accounts of elites who responded only to societal or corporate demands. Building a New American State demonstrated how politics could be understood only historically, since current conditions were layered over preexisting institutions. Through this book, Skowronek became one of those rare authors able to influence scholarship in several academic fields. The theoretical and substantive insights of his book influenced the first and second generations of scholars who built the field of American Political Development, using historical data to examine how institutions structured politics over long periods of time and how policies reconfigured politics. This roundtable explores how this classic book affected the study of government in the disciplines of political science, history, and sociology. The authors discuss ways each discipline developed a distinct version of American Political Development. The roundtable also explores how the interdisciplinary project of historical institutionalism has evolved since the early 1980s and new directions in which the field might go.