Margaret Levi

Conceptualizing Legitimacy, Measuring Legitimating Beliefs

Legitimacy is a concept meant to capture the beliefs that bolster willing obedience. The authors model legitimacy as a sense of obligation or willingness to obey authorities (value-based legitimacy) that then translates into actual compliance with governmental regulations and laws (behavioral legitimacy). The focus is on the factors that elicit this sense of obligation and willingness to comply in a way that supports rational-legal authority. The framework posits that legitimacy has two antecedent conditions: trustworthiness of government and procedural justice. Using African survey data, the authors model the relationship between the existence of a relatively effective, fair, and trustworthy government and beliefs that government deserves deference to its rules. The authors find considerable evidence of a link between the extent of the trustworthiness of government and procedural justice and citizens’ willingness to defer to the police, courts, and tax department in a wide range of African societies.

Fair Trade: A Cup at a Time?:

Fair Trade coffee campaigns have improved the lives of small-scale coffee farmers and their families by raising wages, creating direct trade links to farming cooperatives, and providing access to affordable credit and technological assistance. Consumer demand for Fair Trade certified coffee is at an all-time high, yet cooperatives that produce it are only able to sell about half of their crops at the established fair trade price. This article explores the reasons behind this gap between supply and demand and suggests ways to close it. The authors also offer some perspective on the limits of ethical consumption campaigns such as Fair Trade coffee.

The Predatory Theory of Rule

THE state is currently the focus of considerable scholarly attention and controversy. Marxists emphasize the relative autonomy of the state from the dominant classes; Chicago-school economists write about the high costs the state imposes on its citizens; Weberians document the historical evolution of states into monolithic bureaucracies, and political philosophers, as well as public-choice scholars, search for rules that

Why We Need a New Theory of Government

In the 1970s I was among a group of scholars endlessly debating theories of the state. Others in the discussion were my recent predecessor as APSA President, Theda Skocpol, and my immediate successor, Ira Katznelson. What intrigued us was a vast literature, grounded in neo-Marxism and covering huge swaths of history and geography. Nearly all the important books and articles were by sociologists and historians, but with Structure and Change in Economic History, my then-colleague, economist Douglass North, transformed the debate by using economic models of transaction costs and property rights to model the states role in economic prosperity over time. Most political scientists now acknowledge the importance of this perspective, but it nonetheless helped precipitate twenty years of divergence between historical and new economic institutionalists. Margaret Levi is Jere L. Bacharach Professor of International Studies in the Department of Political Science, University of Washington, Seattle (mlevi@u.washington.edu). Among her books are the single-authored Consent, Dissent and Patriotism (1997) and Of Rule and Revenue (1988) and the co-authored Cooperation Without Trust? (2005) and Analytic Narratives (1998). Many people offered me comments. I did not always take their advice, but I am grateful to Amit Ahuja, Paloma Aquilar, Marcelo Bergman, Maureen Eger, Ann Gryzmala-Busse, Bea Kelleigh, Bob Kaplan, Edgar Kiser, Victor Lapuente-Gine, Michael Lipsky, Kenneth Kollman, Jose-Maria Maravall, Peter May, Leonardo Morlino, Steve Pfaff, Kate Pflaumer, Frances Fox Piven, Christoph Pohlmann, Nancy Rosenblum, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Bo Rothstein, Susan Stokes, Katherine Stovel, Joan Tronto, and Ashutosh Varshney. My greatest debt is to the two graduate students who read and commented on several drafts as well as located the materials I needed to write this presentation: John Ahlquist and Audrey Sacks.

The Analytic Narrative Project

In Analytic Narratives, we attempt to address several issues. First, many of us are engaged in in-depth case studies, but we also seek to contribute to, and to make use of, theory. How might we best proceed? Second, the historian, the anthropologist, and the area specialist possess knowledge of a place and time. They have an understanding of the particular. How might they best employ such data to create and test theories that may apply more generally? Third, what is the contribution of formal theory? What benefits are, or can be, secured by formalizing verbal accounts? In recent years, King, Keohane, and Verba (1994) and Green and Shapiro (1994) have provoked debate over these and related issues. In Analytic Narratives, we join in the methodological discussions spawned by their contributions.

Coalitions of Contention: The Case of the WTO Protests in Seattle

Coalitions of organizations are cooperative arrangements that require ongoing management of conflicts among members and potential members. Using data on both successful and unsuccessful attempts at coalition building during the 1999 protests against the WTO in Seattle, we explain the variation in the formation of one type of coalition of organizations, the ‘event coalition’, in which social movement organizations coalesce around a specific protest event. We find that objectively common organizational interests and framing are necessary but not sufficient for explaining coalition partnering. Organizational representatives must also calculate a benefit from pooled resources and be able to commit credibly to delivering promised resources and to resolving the inevitable tensions that arise among coalition partners.

Organizing Power: The Prospects for an American Labor Movement

A comparative perspective on labor unions reveals that the best of all worlds for the workers is coordinated bargaining at thenational level and significant rank-and-file engagement at the local level. But the achievement of national and coordinated bargaining is an unrealistic goal in the foreseeable future in the United States. What American labor can do, however, is to become once again a social movement. In order for organized labor to play its critical role as a countervailing power within the American political system, there must be intensified organizing, internal democratization, increased electoral and lobbying clout, and social-movement unions willing to mobilize with others and, if necessary, on the streets. This paper was originally prepared for presentation at Theme Panel 7, “Politics of Labor,” at the 2002 meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in Boston. The commentators at APSA—Glenn Adler, Ron Blackwell, Sakhela Buhlungu, and Linda Kaboolian —gave me generous and insightful feedback. So did Frances Fox Piven, Robby Stern, Victoria Murillo, Katrina Pflaumer, George Lovell, Jennifer Hochschild, Bernhard Ebbinghaus, Wolfgang Streeck, Fritz Scharpf, Bruce Ackerman, and four anonymous reviewers. I particularly want to thank my two most trusty critical readers: John Ahlquist, my research assistant, and David Olson, my long-term colleague and collaborator. I did not always take their advice but always appreciated it. Previous books include Of Rule and Revenue; Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism ; and the co-authored Analytic Narratives

Union Democracy Reexamined

Trade union leaders serve dual, seemingly contradictory roles. They must command militant organizations in conflicts with employers. Simultaneously, they must be accountable and democratically responsive to their members. Few unions possess the institutions or leadership to accomplish both. This article analyzes the practices of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), in which effective contract negotiation (including leadership during strikes) and an informed, active rank-and-file democracy are mutually supportive. We offer an alternative to standard accounts of union democracy. While the claims are based on a detailed case study, the theoretical model and its insights hold for labor unions and organizations more broadly.

Analytic Narratives Revisited

We welcome the animated debate raised by Analytic Narratives concerning social scientific methods and the scope of rational choice. Advocates of mathematical and rational models have long claimed they have much to tell us about situations where behavior can be quantified or where the situation under study recurs many times. However, it was thought impermissible for rational choice theories (and rational choice) to venture into the analysis of big events. Political scientists like Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba (1994) implicitly conceded the issue by concentrating on the problem of case selection when the number of cases is small but greater than one. We believe unique events are too important to leave aside, and we use rational choice, particularly game theory, as a means to study unique events. A symposium on AN is a difficult exercise. The writing of analytic narratives is still in its infancy, and the topics and aims of the volume range across disciplines and over more than a millennium. The commentaries by Daniel Carpenter, Sunita Parikh, and Theda Skocpol reflect a patience and openness that we can only applaud. Overall they agree on the merits of the enterprise but debate the nature, relevance, and extensiveness of our contribution. The question that we must therefore confront is not whether to craft analytic narratives but what constitute the standards for research in this vein. Our critics perceptively indict us for a number of misdemeanors and perhaps even a few felonies. To most of Carpenter’s, Parikh’s, and Skocpol’s charges we plead guilty with honor. Rather than responding to each of their criticisms individually we recognize that they fundamentally concern four issues: (1) Does AN actually deliver what the introduction promises? (2) Where is the narrative? (3) Where is the analytical method? (4) How do we transform an approach to problems into a research area in social science?

Are there limits to rationality

Sociologists have traditionally tended to overstate the role of norms in explaining human behavior. Economists, on the other hand, have tended to downplay the role of norms. Increasingly, rational choice theorists have begun to explore the interaction between normative and instrumentally rational motivations. There are at least two major points at issue in these discussions. First, how does one conceptualize norms, especially in relation to rational action? Second, how does one go about studying the variation in the reliance on norms? Jon Elsters paper offers a controversial answer to the first question. Ralph Turners paper offers some guidance for answering the second (1). Building on both Elster and Turner, I shall bring a somewhat different perspective to bear on both these issues.