Steven Pfaff

Exit‐Voice Dynamics in Collective Action: An Analysis of Emigration and Protest in the East German Revolution1

What triggers protest in a highly repressive regime? Do opportunities to exit an unfavorable regime through flight spur collective action aimed to reform or replace it? Drawing on Hirschman’s microeconomic theory of exit and voice as responses to organizational decline, this article offers a sociological theory of exit‐voice dynamics that considers the implications of social embeddedness for collective action. A unique data set on migration and protest in the East German revolution of 1989–90 is used to analyze county‐level variations in exit and voice alongside indicators of political loyalty, social movement organization, and social and economic conditions. The analysis finds strong support for the reformulated exit‐voice model and its prediction of an inverted‐ \documentclass{aastex} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{bm} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{pifont} \usepackage{stmaryrd} \usepackage{textcomp} \usepackage{portland,xspace} \usepackage{amsmath,amsxtra} \usepackage[OT2,OT1]{fontenc} \newcommand\cyr{ \renewcommand\rmdefault{wncyr} \renewcommand\sfdefault{wncyss} \renewcommand\encodingdefault{OT2} \normalfont \selectfont} \DeclareTextFontCommand{\textcyr}{\cyr} \pagestyle{empty} \DeclareMathSizes{10}{9}{7}{6} \begin{document} \landscape

Structure and Dynamics of Religious Insurgency: Students and the Spread of the Reformation.

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Grievances and the Genesis of Rebellion Mutiny in the Royal Navy, 1740 to 1820

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Religious Oddities: Explaining the Divergent Religious Markets of Poland and East Germany

Presently, Islam in Europe has a weak and divided political voice. This article draws on collective action theory and the religious economies model to analyze Muslim interest organizations in democratic polities. The authors develop general theoretical propositions and apply them to a case study of mosque – state relations in the federal state (land) of Berlin. The study shows that institutional features of the German polity and diaspora Islam make collective action difficult and provide opportunities for factions (“spoilers”) to under-mine broad-based collective action if they perceive centralizing organizations as compromising doctrinal and organizational autonomy. In addition, conflicts between organizations representing conservative Muslim interests and secularly oriented ones further complicate collective action. The result is narrow interest articulation by smaller, less diverse groups. Based on our study, the authors consider the general applicability of our propositions and their implications for European polities.

Nationalism, charisma, and plebiscitary leadership: The problem of democratization in Max Weber's political sociology

The Protestant Reformation swept across Central Europe in the early-sixteenth century, leaving cities divided into Evangelical and Catholic camps as some instituted reforms and others remained loyal to the Roman Church. In offering a new explanation of the Reformation, we develop a theory that identifies ideologically mobilized students as bridge actors—that is, agents of religious contention who helped concatenate incidents of local insurgency into a loosely organized Evangelical movement by bridging structural holes. Building on existing literature, we offer a novel way to measure the influence of contending religious movements through university enrollments; we propose that the institution of reform can be partially explained by the varying degree of exposure that cities had to Evangelical activist and Catholic loyalist university students. Based on statistical analysis of a novel dataset comprising cities in the Holy Roman Empire with a population of 2,000 or more from 1523 to 1545, we find support for the role of university students as bridge actors linking critical communities at universities to arenas of urban contention. The greater a city’s exposure to heterodox ideology through city-to-university ties, the greater its odds of instituting the Reformation.

Reconsidering Virtuosity Religious Innovation and Spiritual Privilege

This article analyzes social and penal control strategies in the GDR with special emphasis on the role of the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) in East German society, which by reinforcing party control of state and society through surveillance and political policing was an essential element of the socialist system. Empirical evaluation of the case of the GDR suggests that the carceral society Foucault imagined cannot achieve its aims of creating a self-regulating, obedient citizenry where a disciplinary regime diverges from popular values and aspirations. Such a regime may secure compliance so long as its power seems unassailable, but once its authority is threatened it may suddenly experience a revolt that is a more accurate reflection of popular sentiments. The citizens of the GDR adapted to the panoptic, disciplinary regime enforced by the Stasi by maintaining the outward appearance of conformity and compliance. At the same time, however, the state failed to penetrate the private lives of individuals. Ritualized manifestations of political loyalty hid the private break that increasing numbers of individuals had made with the regime. The withdrawal of psychological investment in public affairs was manifested in the active life of the niche society, a social sphere that eluded government control and remained partially opaque to the techniques of surveillance employed by the Stasi.

The Diffusion of Social Movements: Actors, Mechanisms, and Political Effects

Rebellious collective action is rare, but it can occur when subordinates are severely discontented and other circumstances are favorable. The possibility of rebellion is a check—sometimes the only check—on authoritarian rule. Although mutinies in which crews seized control of their vessels were rare events, they occurred throughout the Age of Sail. To explain the occurrence of this form of high-risk collective action, this article holds that shipboard grievances were the principal cause of mutiny. However, not all grievances are equal in this respect. We distinguish between structural grievances that flow from incumbency in a subordinate social position and incidental grievances that incumbents have no expectation of suffering. Based on a case-control analysis of incidents of mutiny compared with controls drawn from a unique database of Royal Navy voyages from 1740 to 1820, in addition to a wealth of qualitative evidence, we find that mutiny was most likely to occur when structural grievances were combined with incidental ones. This finding has implications for understanding the causes of rebellion and the attainment of legitimate social order more generally.

Illiberal Politics in Neoliberal Times: Culture, Security and Populism in the New Europe

Over the past two decades a new paradigm within the sociology of religion has been amassing empirical support and theoretical refinement (Finke/Stark 1992; Iannaccone 1991; Jelen/Wilcox 1998; Gill 1998; Stark/Bainbridge 1987; Stark/Iannaccone 1994) while also garnering its share of criticism (Bruce 1999; Chaves/Gorski 2001; Lechner 1989; Olsen 1999). This attempt at a general theory has been described as offering “supply-side” or “rational choice” explanations of religious change and proposes an alternative to the traditional family of secularization theories (Gorski 2000). Advocates of the new paradigm have attempted to garner empirical support through a wide-ranging series of studies of religiosity in Western Europe (Men/Wilcox 1998; Stark/Iannaccone 1994) North America (Finke and Stark 1992) and South America (Gill 1998). Critics have offered case studies that attempt to disprove the predictions of the new theory (Bruce 1999; Lechner 1989; Olsen 1999) and appear “tempted at this stage to bow to historians such as Hugh McLeod, who argue that sociological explanation for such a broad phenomenon as religion over such a broad range of countries is impossible” (Bruce 1999: 115).