Solon Simmons

Structural Conflict in Contemporary Cities

A surprising number of modern American cities are experiencing efforts to drastically alter or even abandon their forms of local government. We discuss the major perspectives on municipal structural choice and then use both survey and census data in an attempt to explain this contemporary urban conflict over governance structure. Our findings demonstrate that no single institutional, political, social, or contextual theory satisfactorily explains this evolving struggle over governing arrangements in U.S. cities. Rather, a complex array of factors such as race, ethnicity, education, economic change, governmental composition, and specific municipal design features seem to be driving these movements for institutional change.

Civil Identity and Communicative Practice: The Rhetoric of Liberty in the United States

The field of conflict analysis and resolution, along with its sister subfields like peace studies, conflict management, and conflict transformation, drew its primary inspiration from the context of interstate conflict and diplomatic relations between separate and often sovereign powers. As such, much of the focus in the area has been on elites meeting behind closed doors in confidence with one another to maintain strategic silences about technical plans that might lead toward conflict resolution. This is often true of even more grassroots approaches that rely on directing the energies of social movements and the interest groups that support them. As central as these insider processes are, it is just as important to understand how ideas decided upon in settings favorable to reason and rationality play in the mass public, where subtlety is trumped by familiarity, technical efficiency by dramatized emotion, and long-term benefits are subsumed to immediate attributions of moral superiority. This is the realm of communicative practice.

If It Weren't For Those ?!@! Nader Voters We Wouldn't Be In This Mess: The Social Determinants of the Nader Vote and the Constraints on Political Choice

Much has been written about the effect of Ralph Naders recent experience in Presidential politics—in particular about the consequential election of 2000. The general view is that Naders direct effect on that contest was to cost Gore the election and the indirect effect was to undermine popular and professional support for third-party challenges from the left. In this paper, we revisit this debate by contrasting Nader voters with both Nader-supporting Gore voters and non-voters using data from the 2000 National Election Studies. In line with some predictions, we find that the Nader voters had a tendency to come from privileged positions in terms of income and occupation and to embrace consistently progressive policy positions. More surprising is the fact that Latino voters were disproportionately attracted to Nader and that Nader voters were mobilized to vote in numbers far higher than has been previously reported. This mobilization effect is also evident in Nader-supporting Gore voters under the age of 34. A final analysis suggests that little separates those Nader voters who were divided in their support for Gore.

Systemic Humiliation and Practical Politics: Class Thematic Reasoning and the Rise of Donald Trump

For decades, we will wonder, why did it happen? How could the 2016 election have upended in so remarkable a fashion? What forces animated the populist surge and nurtured the disruptions that tore through all the checks and balances that the private party systems have put in place to prevent an unqualified outsider from seizing control? Why was the opposition in the Democratic Party so ineffective in mounting effective resistance? Finally, what does this mean for conflict behavior and conflict resolution efforts in the United States moving forward? Definitive answers to these questions will be hard to find, but one thing that is certain is that the conventional view of politics and political dynamics—the climate of common sense that animates the leadership cadre of the country—was out of step with the voting public. How the leadership class came to be so out of touch with the fire of indignation in the mass public, how ideas that seemed so secure were cast aside, and how a mode of thinking that seemed so natural to elites, especially those on the left, became a minority view that helped to create a unified Republican government is a story that social scientists and historians will puzzle over for decades. At the heart of these developments is the problem of society-wide conflict and the role that systemic humiliation—both of those in the cultural/representational majority and of those outside it—plays in conflict dynamics. The asymmetry of cultural power is critical for any explanation of how an appeal to identity works, and power needs to be recognized in its various and separable forms, but the very surprise of an event like this demands a new explanation, albeit one that builds on older ideas about how economic and cultural forces combine and interact in surprising and often unpredictable ways.