Suzanne Shanahan

The changing logic of political citizenship : Cross-national acquisition of women's suffrage rights, 1890 to 1990

The authors analyze the acquisition of womens suffrage in 133 countries from 1890 to 1990. Throughout the twentieth century the influence of national political and organizational factors has declined and the importance of international links and influences has become increasingly important. These findings indicate that the franchise has become institutionalized worldwide as a taken-for-granted feature of national citizenship and an integral component of Nation-State identity : the prevailing model of political citizenship has become more inclusive

School Desegregation, Interracial Exposure, and Antibusing Activity in Contemporary Urban America

Prior research emphasized either resource mobilization or grievance explanations of antibusing activity. This article argues that both explanations imply that racial competition generated collective action against busing. It suggests that increases in interracial exposure in schools and neighborhoods trigger racial and ethnic conflict. This article examines these competition arguments using data on antibusing events, school desegration, and interracial residential exposure in SMSAs from 1968 through 1990. The results suggest that the amount of school desegregation significantly raised rates of protests against busing. Furthermore, there is little evidence that the federal origin of court-ordered busing increased antibusing activity.

Racial Policy and Racial Conflict in the Urban United States, 1869–1924

This article extends existing explanations of racial conflict by suggesting how legislation and court rulings instigate processes of legitimation and competitive exclusion, which in turn affect the likelihood of racial violence. We argue that federal legislation and court cases that reinforced the white-nonwhite racial boundary stigmatized nonwhites and prompted whites to attack nonwhites. However, legislation and court rulings that dismantled segregation and eradicated discrimination against racial minorities also instigated racial violence, as whites mobilized efforts to contain competition. A final argument suggests that when legislation successfully restrains competition from a specific population, collective violence against that group will diminish. Using data on collective violence against Asians and African Americans from the 76 largest cities in the U.S. from 1869 through 1924, we find support for these three claims. In particular, we find that while immigration and economic competition raise levels of racial conflict, state policies concerning race also increase the rate of racial violence significantly.

For Export Only: Diffusion Professionals and Population Policy

Export-only diffusion occurs when innovators do not adopt an innovation themselves, but rather promote it to others for adoption. Potential adopters do not take their cues from early adopters, but rather from diffusion professionals who make it their job to spread a practice or institution. The global spread of national-level, population-control policies during the Cold War is one such instance: developed and promoted by wealthy countries that did not themselves adopt such policies, they came to be widespread among poorer countries, thanks in large part to the mobilization of diffusion professionals. This article offers an analytical account of this diffusion, as well as an event-history analysis of 163 countries over the period 1950–1990 demonstrating the importance of linkages between policy adopters and the non-adopting institutions of diffusion professionals.

Prisoners and Paupers The Impact of Group Threat on Incarceration in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Cities

This article uses data on prisoners incarcerated for misdemeanors in late-nineteenth-century U.S. cities to assess a three-part argument that asserts that threats to white dominance prompted efforts of social control directed against African Americans and foreign-born whites: (1) For African Americans, competition with whites for jobs instigated efforts by whites to enforce the racial barrier. (2) For the foreign-born, upward mobility became associated with white identity, which allowed those who “became white” to be seen as less threatening. We thus expect the threat from foreign-born whites to be highest where their concentration in poverty was greatest. (3) We suggest that violence against a given boundary raises the salience of group threat, so a positive relationship should exist between prior violence against a group and its level of incarceration for misdemeanors. Using panel analyses of cities from 1890 through 1910, we find supporting evidence for the first two arguments and partial support for the third.

THE CHANGING MEANING OF FAMILY: INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AND IRISH ADOPTION POLICY, 1949-99

This article examines child adoption discourse to investigate the changing cultural conceptions of children, family, and individual rights. Through an analysis of Irish child adoption debate from 1949 to 1999, the author explores the relationship between the worldwide individual rights imperative and culturally specific, national ideals of family. This analysis reveals two general policy dynamics. First, these debates reveal how policies are often “discursively dependent.” The seemingly arbitrary framing of a social problem in one era sets the agenda, language, and framework for debate in future periods. Second, they demonstrate how state social policies are complicit in the changing social construction of family and help constitute “motherhood,” “fatherhood,” and “childhood” as core social categories and as inalienable individual rights and identities. Concretely, in the case of Ireland, these dynamics have together yielded an otherwise unanticipated history of adoption policy and policy discourse.