Jack Andrew Goldstone

More social movements or fewer? Beyond political opportunity structures to relational fields

If social movements are an attempt by “outsiders” to gain leverage within politics, then one might expect the global spread of democracy to reduce social movement activity. This article argues the reverse. Granted, many past social movements, such as womens rights and civil rights, were efforts to empower the disenfranchised. However, this is not typical. Rather, social movements and protest tactics are more often part of a portfolio of efforts by politically active leaders and groups to influence politics. Indeed, as representative governance spreads, with the conviction by all parties that governments should respond to popular choice, then social movements and protest will also spread, as a normal element of democratic politics. Social movements should therefore not be seen as simply a matter of repressed forces fighting states; instead they need to be situated in a dynamic relational field in which the ongoing actions and interests of state actors, allied and counter-movement groups, and the public at large all influence social movement emergence, activity, and outcomes.

Theories of Revolution: The Third Generation

The work of Ted Robert Gurr, Chalmers Johnson, Neil Smelser, Samuel P. Huntington, and Charles Tilly has dominated the recent study of revolutions. However, Jeffrey Paige, Ellen Kay Trimberger, S. N. Eisenstadt, and Theda Skocpol have lately produced theories of revolution that are far better grounded historically than those in earlier works. Five major points were neglected by earlier theorists: (1) the variable goals and structures of states; (2) the systematic intrusion of international pressures on the domestic political and economic organization of societies; (3) the structure of peasant communities; (4) the coherence or weakness of the armed forces; and (5) the variables affecting elite behavior. Starting from these points, Paige, Trimberger, Eisenstadt, and Skocpol have produced analyses of the causes and outcomes of a variety of revolutions. Yet significant challenges to the theory of revolutions—such as extending the range of cases analyzed, clarifying the grounds of peasant behavior, and tying theoretical analysis to demographic data—still remain.

Global Report on Conflict, Governance and State Fragility 2007

The resignation of the last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, in December 1991 launched an era of dramatic change in world politics. The fifteen years since the end of the Cold War have seen a major increase in globalization, as technical “revolutions” in information and communications systems have made world politics far more transparent and increased the effects of changes in any one region on other parts of the world. They have also exposed a nascent global system peppered with fragile, failing, and failed states, and in which large areas have been ravaged by years of violence, contestation, and uneven development.

The Weakness of Organization: A New Look at Gamson's The Strategy of Social Protest

In The Strategy of Social Protest William Gamson asserted that the organization and tactics of a social protest group strongly influence the groups chances for successes. This assertion was based on an analysis of the rates of success of 53 social protest groups arising in America between 1800 and 1945. This article shows frist that Gamsons results are based on a series of very weak assumptions and on frequently spurious zero-order correlations. When data on the rates of protest group success are reanalyzed, no effect of organizational or tactical parameters is evident. Additional data on the timing of social protest group success are then introduced, and a stochastic model is presented which closely fits the data (r > .95). With the help of this model, the timing of success is also shown to be substantially independent of the organization and tactics of the protest group. Finally, a new interpretation of the probability of protest group success, based on the incidence of broad national crises, is suggested.

One effect to rule them all? A comment on climate and conflict

A recent Climatic Change review article reports a remarkable convergence of scientific evidence for a link between climatic events and violent intergroup conflict, thus departing markedly from other contemporary assessments of the empirical literature. This commentary revisits the review in order to understand the discrepancy. We believe the origins of the disagreement can be traced back to the review article’s underlying quantitative meta-analysis, which suffers from shortcomings with respect to sample selection and analytical coherence. A modified assessment that addresses some of these problems suggests that scientific research on climate and conflict to date has produced mixed and inconclusive results.

Prison Riots as Microrevolutions: An Extension of State-Centered Theories of Revolution

Prisons have long been used as a testing ground for social theory. This article explores the applicability of state‐centered theories of revolution to the phenomena of prison riots. Prison riots are found to have numerous features in common with revolutions, including prior administrative crises, elite (guard) alienation and divisions, and a widespread popular (prisoner) sense of injustice and grievances regarding (prison) administration actions (not just toward imprisonment per se). The state‐centered theory provides a better “fit” to prison riots than current functionalist, rising expectation, or management theories.

The Rise of the West—or Not? A Revision to Socio-economic History*:

The debate over the “Rise of the West” has generally been over which factor or factors—cultural, geoographic, or material—in European history led Europe to diverge from the Worlds pre-industrial civilizations. This article aims to shift the terms of the debate by arguing that there were no causal factors that made Europes industrialization inevitable or even likely. Rather, most of Europe would not and could not move toward industrialization any more than China or India or Japan. Rather, a very accidental combination of events in the late seventeenth century placed England on a peculiar path, leading to industrialization and constitutional democracy. These accidents included the compromise between the Anglican Church and Dissenters, and between Crown and Parliament, in the settlements of 1689; the adoption of Newtonian science as part of the cosmology of the Anglican Church and its spread to craftsmen and entrepreneurs throughout Britain; and the opportunity to apply the idea of the vacuum and mechanics to solve a particular technical problem: pumping water out of deep mine shafts in or near coal mines. Without these particular accidents of history, there is no reason to believe that Europe would have ever been more advanced than the leading Asian civilizations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The demographic revolution in England: a re-examination.

Wrigley and Schofield recently argued that from 1541 to 1841 real wages, acting on nuptiality, determined English fertility, with a lag of roughly 40 years. Correcting Wrigley and Schofields real wage series and dividing nuptiality shifts into changes in the incidence and the timing of marriage reveal several new phenomena. First, wage shifts acted with a lag of only 15–20 years and affected only the incidence of marriage. Secondly, before 1750 changes in the incidence of marriage created a homoeostatic equilibrium, as periods of population growth and proletarianization showed substantial withdrawal from the marriage market, reducing fertility and population growth. Thirdly, after 1750 this homoeostatic equilibrium broke down. Despite rapid population growth and proletarianization, fertility rose because of the unprecedented emergence of a group of ‘young marriers’, comprising roughly 20 per cent of the population. Their emergence probably reflected the increasing availability of steady employment for pr...

How to Construct Stable Democracies

Why are some states politically stable and others not? An extensive study by a dozen experts analyzing political instability during the last 50 years suggests two critical ingredients to succeed (and how to fail) in building stable democracies around the world.

Forging social order and its breakdown: Riot and reform in U.S. prisons

Two cases of prison reform in the 1990s had widely divergent results. New Mexico privatized several prisons and these prisons were quickly beset by multiple riots. New Yorks publicly run Rikers Island prison, by contrast, adopted reforms that ended many years of riots and violence. Prevailing theories of prison riots cannot account for these divergent outcomes. A state-centered theory of social order explains both cases, showing how prison administrators and state and national governments can create the conditions under which social order breaks down or is restored. This analysis has implications for forging social order in other hierarchical institutions, such as schools, that are responsible for the welfare of their dependent clients