This chapter presents a case of nonelectoral strategies of political influence by agrarian elites in Argentina and the limitations of such strategies. Until 2008, Argentine landowners influenced politics through lobbying and, when this failed, through protests. The chapter presents evidence of how Argentine agrarian elites did not invest in electoral representation prior to 2008 because they did not experience an existential threat. It also shows how landowners decided to enter the electoral arena with the rise of an existential threat in the form of confiscatory taxes in 2008. Given Argentine agrarian elites fragmentation, they deployed a candidate-centered strategy, sponsoring the candidacies of a dozen agricultural producers for Congress under diverse party affiliations. However, institutional features and ideological differences among producers’ associations blunted the effectiveness of the strategy and led to its abandonment. Later on, with the consolidation of Propuesta Republicana (PRO) as a viable electoral alternative and the continuity of hostile polices, part of the Argentine agrarian elite has engaged in party-building. However, economic cleavages within Argentine agricultural producers continue to undermine the kind of sector-wide party-building effort that we saw in Chile during the democratic transition.

This chapter analyses a case of party-building by agrarian elites in Chile. It presents evidence of Chilean landowners’ financial support of the political right, their identification with rightwing legislators, and the programmatic convergence between agrarian elites’ preferences and the policy positions of rightwing parties, Renovación Nacional (RN) in particular. The chapter argues that agrarian elites in Chile decided to invest in an electoral strategy of political influence at the time of the democratic transition because they feared a center-left government would endanger their property rights. It presents evidence of how this perceived threat was founded on landowners’ previous experience with democracy during the 1965–1973 period, when their farms were expropriated. The chapter also illustrates how low intragroup fragmentation facilitates party-building. Shared political and economic interests among the Chilean economic elite in general, and agrarian elites in particular, decreased the coordination costs associated with building a party to represent them. The chapter analyses the tax reform of 1990 and the Water Code reform of 2022 to show how the partisan strategy works.

This chapter analyzes the organizational prerequisites for the strategy of instrumentalism, by charting changes in the organizational structure of the National Educational Workers Union (SNTE) of Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s. It examines the threats to the corporatist model posed by the dissident movement and the regime response to help the union leadership regain control. President Carlos Salinas sheltered the union from the potentially disruptive effects of education decentralization policies and strengthened SNTE with policies to improve teacher pay. These concessions shaped the union’s internal organization, providing the resources Elba Esther Gordillo needed to build a dominant faction. The consolidation of power in the national union leadership was crucial for the strategy of instrumentalism.

This chapter argues that the organizational structure of the Argentine teachers’ confederation (CTERA), with power rooted in provincial and municipal actors, is crucial for explaining why teachers engaged in ongoing protests. It examines the process of union rebuilding in the wake of democratization, after harsh repression during the military regime. Even if newly elected leaders offered little support to the union because of the debt crisis, union leaders made some progress in consolidating CTERA through their own initiatives. The chapter then turns to decentralization under President Carlos Menem as a point of inflection. This undermined national union leaders, weakening their hold on the base. Once organizational hierarchies were weakened, movementism became the union’s political strategy.

After 22 years of uninterrupted authoritarian government headed by Yahya Jammeh, The Gambia formally began a transition to democracy after the December 2016 elections. Given the inadequate development of local legal tradition and lack of resources to fully equip the judiciary, The Gambia has a history of having foreign judges on the bench. This chapter provides insights from The Gambia’s distinctive experience in using foreign judges in the contexts of decolonisation, an authoritarian regime, and transition to democracy. The Gambian context raises important questions about the role of foreign judges in a new democracy emerging from colonial and authoritarian rule. Accordingly, through a historical and contemporary critical review, the chapter provides an overview of the rationale for the use of foreign judges and its impact on judicial independence and the rule of law.

This edited volume explores the nature of authoritarian policing, its transformation and resilience, and its rule of law implications. The discussion of the evolution of policing takes place in the context of the overall development of the police, their professionalization, institutional autonomy and neutrality, legality, and their credibility within the communities they manage and serve. What makes policing “democratic” is a contested concept and the definition varies depending on the level of abstraction and the particular focus of the inquiry. While regime type, which is itself a contested concept, the close nexus between the coercive power of the police and the state, it is never dispositive. Thus, the dichotomous categorization of authoritarian policing (AP) and democratic policing (DP), while useful as a starting point for comparative analysis, misses a large amount of nuance and often overlooks the plurality of either system, neglecting the fact that a police system can be authoritarian or democratic in multiple ways and in different aspects of policing. This volume rejects this simple binary view. It aims to untie and unpack the nexus between the police and the political system and to explore the plurality of both AP and DP.

Political democratization does not necessarily lead to democratic policing; rather, authoritarian legacy always poses a challenge for the integration between democracy and coercive policing. This chapter presents a case study of Taiwan to unveil such authoritarian legacy. After its democratization in the late 1980s, Taiwan has been gradually transformed its authoritarian policing into democratic policing subject to judicial review. However, as Taiwan’s peaceful democratic transition did not come with radical political changes, authoritarian legacy persists and continues to affect policing practices. Nonetheless, throughout both authoritarian and democratic periods, the police in Taiwan have obtained strong legitimacy and been perceived as one of the most trustworthy government agencies. As such, questions to explore in this chapter include: Why has authoritarian policing been this adaptive in Taiwan? How has the coexistence between authoritarian legacy and liberal democracy been made possible? What are the impacts on democratic governance and efficacy of legal reforms?

This chapter describes the historical backdrop against which mobilizational citizenship developed in Chile’s urban margins from the 1960s onward. It offers parallel accounts of developments across Chile’s urban margins, as well as in the communities used as case studies in this book: the Lo Hermida and Nuevo Amanecer neighborhoods. While descriptive in nature, the chapter makes several key steps. First, it addresses key moments of collective action occurring in underprivileged urban communities before the coup d’état in 1973. Second, the chapter describes the powerfully disruptive impact of the dictatorship in communities at the urban margins. Third, it chronicles the wave of anti-dictatorship protests that occurred in the 1980s. Fourth, the chapter describes the dynamics of mobilization and civil society in poblaciones after the democratic transition in 1990. Since the early 2000s, an increasing number of social groups have been demonstrating over social rights in Chile and highly disruptive, large-scale protests erupted in late 2019. The chapter demonstrates the responsiveness of active communities in the urban margins and shows how they provided the organizational structure requisite for protest diffusion.

Only a few weeks after Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire, Ennahda returned to Tunisia from exile. The same year Ennahda won Tunisia’s first free and fair elections in its history. On the night of the election, Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of Ennahda, vowed to uphold the revolutionary goals of building a free and prosperous Tunisia. And his party kept this promise to build Tunisian democracy with other stakeholders. Why did Ennahda adhere to democratic principles in power and became a force for compromise, deliberation, and engagement? This chapter shows that competing political visions have coexisted within the party organization since its establishment in the 1980s, and since the 1990s liberal Islamists pulled Ennahda towards democratic commitments not only when they were in opposition but also after coming to power in 2011. To explain this process, the chapter first turns to the origins of the Islamist movement in Tunisia and its political and ideological evolution over time including Ghannouchi’s philosophical contributions. Then it explores the shifting balance of power among factions and factors, determining this balance with a specific emphasis on organizational resources and implications for Tunisian democracy.

After 84 years of struggle, the Muslim Brotherhood rose to prominence in Egyptian politics in the wake of the Arab uprisings. On the night of his election, Mohamed Morsi promised to unite all Egyptians – Muslim and Christians, men and women – and to advance the revolutionary cause for democracy, human rights, and dignity. Over the next 365 days, rather than uniting and democratizing his country, he alienated large segments of the population through exclusionary politics, majoritarianism, and polarization. Why did the Muslim Brotherhood follow majoritarian and polarizing politics after coming to power? This chapter seeks to solve this puzzle by way of unpacking the Brotherhood’s internal power dynamics and disagreements regarding democratic politics. To that end, the chapter begins with a short historical account, tracing the Brotherhood’s changing relationship to politics and emerging splits within. Then, it turns to the shifting power balance between the old guard and liberal Islamists, and how the former sidelined the latter. The chapter discusses three critical episodes in this process: the Wasat Party initiative of 1996, the 2009–10 internal elections, and the post-2011 purge of the liberals. It concludes with a discussion of what the old guard’s perception of democracy looks like in action with details from Morsi’s year in presidency.

Chapter 7 lays the foundations for the second half of the book, which focuses on the question of institutional persistence within and beyond conflict. It chronicles the road to political transition and peace in both Guatemala and Nicaragua. The chapter then examines a key difference between the two settings: the coalitional configurations that emerged from war. It provides an in-depth examination of how these dynamics played out within the three institution-level cases examined in the previous chapters. Specifically, it illustrates how the Moreno Network and Detective Corps in Guatemala laid the foundations of institutional survival by broadening the distributional coalition—the web of interest groups with a stake in the fraudulent customs arrangements and extrajudicial killing, respectively. Meanwhile, the FSLN’s transformation into the political opposition in Nicaragua following its 1990 electoral defeat resulted in persistent coalitional volatility, which bred chronic instability within postwar institutions.

Chapter 10 returns to the Nicaraguan context, examining the country’s experience of postwar chronic instability within land tenure. It traces how frequent elite political realignments drove the breakdown of the undermining rules governing land titling. After losing the 1990 elections, the FSLN retained considerable influence and pressured the new UNO government into compromise; however, within the property sector, a new decision-making coalition came to dominate – one comprised of UNO technocrats, US government agencies, and international civil society groups dedicated to resolving the confusion and conflict sown by previous policies. As a result, new procedures to formalize land acquisitions emerged. However, this neoliberal coalition was again unsettled with the return of the FSLN to the political scene through a series of bargains with the ruling Liberal Party in the 2000s. The eventual second period of FSLN rule beginning in 2007 has further reconcentrated land and resulted in politically motivated confiscations.

The final chapter traces Yugoslavias violent disintegration and Serbias post-Yugoslav destiny. In 1990 Milošević and his Socialists (the renamed Communists) won in multi-party elections, but the following year Yugoslavia disinegrated. A short 1991 war in Slovenia was followed by more brutal and prolonged Croatian and Bosnian conflicts, characterized by ethnic cleansing and, in the case of Bosnia, genocidal violence. Serbs were the principal perpetrators but also the victims of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo and of international sanctions, which cripled the countrys economy and society. The 1999 Kosovo war led to a NATO military intervention against Belgrade. The following year Milošević lost elections and was forced to step down. Supported by the West, Kosovo declared independence in 2008, two years after Montenegro left a union with Serbia. The difficult transition to democracy of the post-Milošević era was halted by a return to populism, like elsewhere in the world. Serbias future will be shaped by the legacies of the historical developments discussed in this book. It will also depend on a world that emerges out of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

In the final years of Brazil’s military dictatorship, as the nation inched toward democratic transition, a new genre emerged on the literary landscape: autobiographical accounts penned by survivors of the armed struggle waged between 1969 and 1973. The most widely read works of this literature of revolution are memoirs that present strikingly similar portraits of Brazilian revolutionaries as straight, white men, with at least two notable exceptions: Passagem para o próximo sonho (1982) by Herbert Daniel (who recounts what it was like to be a gay militant) and Revolta das vísceras (1982) by Mariluce Moura (who recounts her experience as a Black heterosexual woman in a clandestine revolutionary organization). Both writers blend autobiography and fiction to produce innovative accounts about how sex informed their political trajectories, and how politics shaped them as sexual beings. The two books are among the few revolutionary works that lend themselves to an intersectional analysis of Brazil’s clandestine left. They also stand out as critical interventions in debates over the nation’s protracted transition to civilian democracy.

In the final years of Brazil’s military dictatorship, as the nation inched toward democratic transition, a new genre emerged on the literary landscape: autobiographical accounts penned by survivors of the armed struggle waged between 1969 and 1973. The most widely read works of this literature of revolution are memoirs that present strikingly similar portraits of Brazilian revolutionaries as straight, white men, with at least two notable exceptions: Passagem para o próximo sonho (1982) by Herbert Daniel (who recounts what it was like to be a gay militant) and Revolta das vísceras (1982) by Mariluce Moura (who recounts her experience as a Black heterosexual woman in a clandestine revolutionary organization). Both writers blend autobiography and fiction to produce innovative accounts about how sex informed their political trajectories, and how politics shaped them as sexual beings. The two books are among the few revolutionary works that lend themselves to an intersectional analysis of Brazil’s clandestine left. They also stand out as critical interventions in debates over the nation’s protracted transition to civilian democracy.

This chapter has four objectives: (1) to explain the main concepts and the normative stance of the book, (2) to develop the main theory of the book, (3) to overview the history of constitutions and constitutionalism in the Arab world in relation to the book’s theory, and (4) to provide a concise introduction to the Arab Spring constitutional bargains across the region.

This chapter uses recent developments in Hungary to examine how the equivalent of political revolution can occur through changes that are, taken individually, in compliance in the constitution but collectively amount to wholesale transformation of the constitutional order. It confronts the question of what limits, if any, exist on constitutional revolutions of this type.