Anthony Oberschall

Rational Choice in Collective Protests

A rational choice (RC) formulation of value-expectancy theory of participation in collective protests is described and applied to East German popular protests against the Communist regime in 1989. The heart of the RC model is a production function for collective good attainment, an assurance process that overcomes free rider tendencies and strategic interaction based on expectations.

Explaining terrorism: the contribution of collective action theory

Terrorism is an extreme, violent response to a failed political process engaging political regimes and ethnic and ideological adversaries over fundamental governance issues. Applying the theory of collective action, the author explains the dynamic of violence escalation and persistence. Recent Islamist terrorism stems from the conviction that a theocracy is the only answer to the multiple problems of Middle Eastern and Muslim countries. Checks on terrorism result both from external social control and from the internal contradictions of theocratic states.

The Great Transition: China, Hungary, and Sociology Exit Socialism Into the Market

I welcome this opportunity to comment on the market transition in China and Hungary, a topic I have been studying intermittently for a decade. It gives me a chance to share my thoughts on how sociologists should research and account for social change. In anticipation of my conclusions, I state them briefly and cryptically at the start: (1) The conceptual apparatus many sociologists apply to social change leads them to the wrong questions on institutional change. (2) Large sample surveys of households and multivariate techniques as used in the two China papers are of limited use for understanding institutional change; structural analysis used in the Hungary paper is an improvement but asked to bear too heavy a freight. (3) Theoretical and methodological relief are available and sociology does not have to reinvent the wheel: there exists an emerging social science of institutions and organization. I start with the China studies of Xie and Hannum and of Nee. Because neither provides a description and account of Chinese social organization necessary for understanding them and my critique, I begin with a brief overview of Chinese institutions. A decade ago when I taught in Beijing for a year, there were three institutions at the core of Chinese society: the family, the work unit in the city and the collective farm in rural China (just then changing), and the communist party-state. Each Chinese citizen belonged to a family, and every family had been a permanent member of a work unit (danwei) or a collective farm. The party-state, accountable only to itself, penetrated and controlled every work unit and collective farm, and thus also every family and every individual. Chinese social organization was rigid and hierarchic. Work units were isolated from each other-even physically bounded by brick walls-with solidarity, loyalty, and collective identity encapsula-ting members against outsiders. The style of organization resembled the traditional Chinese house or palace, which was built as a set of nested walls, courtyards, and gates defining a gradient of protection and secrecy to the outside

The Object of Labor: Commodification in Socialist Hungary.

Did socialist policies leave the economies of Eastern Europe unprepared for current privatization efforts? Under communist rule, were rural villages truly left untouched by capitalism? In this historical ethnography of rural Hungary, Martha Lampland argues not only that the transition to capitalism was well under way by the 1930s, but that socialist policies themselves played a crucial role in the development of capitalism by transforming conceptions of time, money and labour. Exploring the effects of social change thrust upon communities against their will, Lampland examines the history of agrarian labour in Hungary from World War I to the early 1980s. She shows that rural workers had long been subject to strict state policies similar to those imposed by collectivization. Since the values of privatization and individualism associated with capitalism characterized rural Hungarian life both prior to and throughout the socialist period, capitalist ideologies of work and morality survived unscathed in the private economic practices of rural society. Lampland also shows how labour practices under socialism prepared the workforce for capitalism. By drawing villagers into factories and collective farms, for example, the socialist state forced farmers to work within tightly controlled time limits and to calculate their efforts in monetary terms. Indeed, this control and commodification of rural labour under socialism was essential to the transformation to capitalism.

Nationalism, globalization, and orthodoxy : the social origins of ethnic conflict in the Balkans

Foreword by Roland Robertson Introduction: Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity in the Balkans: A World-Historical Perspective A Multidimensional Analysis of the Balkan National Revolutions (Part I) A Multidimensional Analysis of the Balkan National Revolutions (Part II) The Pursuit of Citizenship Invented Traditions, Symbolic Boundaries, and National Identity in Greece and Serbia 1830-1880 The Latecomers, Nationalism in Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Albania The Articulation of Irredentism in Balkan Politics 1880-1920 The Consequences of Modernity: National Homogenization and the Minority Question The Balkans in a Global Age Conclusions Bibliographical Note References Index

Social movements and the transition to democracy

The theory of collective action can and has been applied when people excluded from the polity oppose the authorities on the redress of wrongs and matters of public policy using both conventional and unconventional means. The theory specifies four macro‐societal conditions for social movements ‐ dissatisfaction, ideology, capacity to mobilize, and opportunity ‐ and a micro‐model of participation by challengers in opposition actions such as petitions, protests, demonstrations, and strikes. The benefits and costs of participation depend largely on the expectations of challengers of how many others will join. The third component of the theory is a conflict dynamic between challengers and targets, the movement participants and the authorities. Applied to the overthrow of communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989 and to the transition to democracy or to an authoritarian regime, the theory explains how popular movements without prior leadership and organization toppled seemingly powerful regimes. It explains how the intersection of exit strategies by communist leaders and entrance strategies by anti‐communist challengers accounts for the democratic outcomes in Eastern Europe and for xenophobic nationalism and the break‐up of Yugoslavia amid civil war.

Food Coercion in Revolution and Civil War: Who Wins and How They Do It

Revolutions have provoked not only important social changes and bloody civil wars, but a huge literature. There is controversy and confusion on how to integrate seemingly disparate modes of explanation into a coherent analysis: social structure, the decisions and policies of key actors (be they leaders or organized entities like parties and assemblies), and the choices made by ordinary people. Structural theories have proven useful for describing revolutionary situations; choice theories are useful in clarifying the revolutionary process; how to integrate the two to explain revolutionary outcomes remains contentious.

How democracies fight insurgents and terrorists

Democracies violate some of the laws of war in the Geneva Conventions and some peacetime criminal justice norms when they fight insurgents and terrorists. Restraints on excesses and abuses weaken in a national security emergency. A balance between security measures for effective counter terrorism and maintaining democratic values tends to tip for security at the expense of civil liberties. On the basis of the British experience in Northern Ireland, the Israeli response to the Palestinian intifada, and the Bush administrations “war on terror,” I find that the “maximum security state” improvised by the Bush administration after 9/11 violates democratic norms beyond what is required for security, but that the “business as usual” approach advocated by others is ineffective for thwarting terrorist acts and bringing terrorists to justice. Instead, emergency measures should be grounded on “good intelligence and the rule of law,” which criminalizes recruitment of terrorists and advocacy for terrorism, and which authorizes robust detection, identification, surveillance and search, yet leaves unchanged the rest of criminal justice for arrest, detention, interrogation and prosecution.

The Two-State Solution: Wrong Goal or Wrong Leaders?

Abunimah starts with the wrong question when he is puzzled about how theorists of constitutional design for ethnically heterogeneous societies have applied their craft to Palestine. Democratic power-sharing theory, be it consociational or incentives based, and constitutional design more broadly, are premised on the choice and commitment of the peoples in these societies for living together in the same state. The stateness issue precedes the choice of constitutional design. According to Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (1992), ‘A “stateness” problem may be said to exist when significant proportions of the population does [sic] not accept the boundaries of the territorial state . . . as a legitimate unit to which they owe obedience . . . The neglect in the literature of the question of legitimacy of the state is unfortunate because this variable . . . is of fundamental theoretical and political importance for democracy.’ While the legitimacy of the state is an obvious problem in how to accommodate self-determination claims in multiethnic states, as in the Sudan, legitimacy is an equally salient prior issue for joining separate entities into a single state, as would be true for a single state in Palestine, or whether entities separated by civil war should reintegrate into a single state, as in Cyprus and Kosovo. In all these instances, the democratic consent of the people on stateness plays the first role, and constitutional design and power-sharing modes come into play only after the stateness issue is decided by the people. The Northern Ireland Peace Agreement states at its start in section 1, paragraph 1, that the UK and the Government of Ireland ‘recognize the legitimacy of whatever choice is freely exercised by a majority of the people of Northern Ireland with regard to its status, whether they prefer to continue to support the Union with Great Britain or a sovereign united Ireland’. The Annan constitution for Cyprus in 2004 was put to a referendum because legitimacy of the state is a precursor to the institutions of power sharing (Oberschall, 2007). Quebec in Canada had several referendums on stateness. If and when Belgium makes a decision on unity versus partition, it will surely be put to a referendum, and it is inconceivable that the European states would refuse to recognize the popular vote as the final arbiter on stateness. The Soviet Union broke up into successor Ethnopolitics, Vol. 10, Nos. 3–4, 457–459, September–November 2011

Birth of a market economy: Hungarian agriculture after socialism

Abstract Based on field work, surveys and statistics from the 1980s to 1995, we compare socialist with postsocialist farming in Hungary on dimensions that differentiate socialism from capitalism: private property; markets; farm entrepreneurship; incentives, bankruptcy and soft budget constraints; market coordination. Some theorists have called for shock treatment and abrupt change as the most effective and in the long run least costly way from socialism to capitalism. Others have favored institution building and a gradual transition to the market economy, and in farming, cooperative enterprises as a halfway house to capitalism. We studied privatization of collective farms into shareholder-owned agribusinesses, and how agromanagers, skilled farm employees, unskilled workers, and the retired fared. Mature capitalism is complemented by social welfare institutions. The dismantling of collective farming in Hungary weakened the enterprise social safety net. Those who had human and social capital have fared relatively well. For the retired and unskilled workers, the job rights, user rights and social entitlements under socialism that they lost were compensated only in part by the private property they gained. Losses in farm output, employment and profitability were due both to the economic depression and to privatization. Farm enterprises have become more efficient but the market economy is not yet working satisfactorily.