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"Hechter, Michael"
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Alien rule
\"This book argues that alien rule can become legitimate to the degree that it provides governance that is both effective and fair. Governance is effective to the degree that citizens have access to an expanding economy and an ample supply of culturally appropriate collective goods. Governance is fair to the degree that rulers act according to the strictures of procedural justice. These twin conditions help account for the legitimation of alien rulers in organizations of markedly different scale. The book applies these principles to the legitimation of alien rulers in states (the Republic of Genoa, nineteenth- and twentieth-century China, and modern Iraq), colonies (Taiwan and Korea under Japanese rule), and occupation regimes, as well as in less encompassing organizations such as universities (academic receivership), corporations (mergers and acquisitions), and stepfamilies. Finally, it speculates about the possibility of an international market in governance services\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Nationalism and Rationality
Recent years have witnessed a virtual epidemic of nationalist violence in the world. In 1994, for example, eighteen of the twenty-three wars being fought were based on nationalist or ethnic challenges to states. About three quarters of the worlds refugees were ?eeing from, or were displaced by, ethnic or nationalist con?icts. And eight of the thirteen United Nations peacekeeping operations were designed to separate the protagonists in ethnopolitical con?icts.
Journal Article
Review of Degenerations of Democracy
This review is part of Global Perspectives Review Symposium on Democracy.
Journal Article
Norms in the Evolution of Social Order
Some primates use policing to deter free riding (Flack et al. 2006; Langergraber et al. 2017), and general deterrence theory is a lodestar of much research in criminology (Matsueda, Kreager, and Huizinga 2006). Since large-scale self-organized cooperation exists in the animal kingdom, this fact has posed a great explanatory challenge to evolutionary biologists. [...]the psychological theory of conformism should be brought to bear on the subject. (my emphases) Moral psychologists argue that moral norms—emphasizing honesty, empathy, and other prosocial values—have evolved uniquely in humans, and that they ultimately can explain the attainment of social order. According to its proponents, psychological nudges informed by cognitive psychology have the strongest effects when “the program designers have good reason to believe that a portion of the population will benefit by making some change in their behavior … the target population must agree that a change is desirable … [and] it is possible to make the change with one nearly costless action” (Thaler 2015, 341). [...]the recent popularity of cognitive psychology in some segments of the social science community has not led to adequate theories either, since psychological explanations of social order fall foul of the fallacy of composition.
Journal Article
Sociological Rational Choice Theory
Although rational choice theory has made considerable advances in other social sciences, its progress in sociology has been limited. Some sociologists' reservations about rational choice arise from a misunderstanding of the theory. The first part of this essay therefore introduces rational choice as a general theoretical perspective, or family of theories, which explains social outcomes by constructing models of individual action and social context. \"Thin\" models of individual action are mute about actors' motivations, while \"thick\" models specify them ex ante. Other sociologists' reservations, however, stem from doubts about the empirical adequacy of rational choice explanations. To this end, the bulk of the essay reviews a sample of recent studies that provide empirical support for particular rational choice explanations in a broad spectrum of substantive areas in sociology. Particular attention is paid to studies on the family, gender, and religion, for these subareas often are considered least amenable to understanding in terms of rational choice logic.
Journal Article
National polarization and international agreements
The network of international environmental agreements (IEAs) has been characterized as a complex adaptive system (CAS) in which the uncoordinated responses of nation states to changes in the conditions addressed by particular agreements may generate seemingly coordinated patterns of behavior at the level of the system. Unfortunately, since the rules governing national responses are ill understood, it is not currently possible to implement a CAS approach. Polarization of both political parties and the electorate has been implicated in a secular decline in national commitment to some IEAs, but the causal mechanisms are not clear. In this paper, we explore the impact of polarization on the rules underpinning national responses. We identify the degree to which responsibility for national decisions is shared across political parties and calculate the electoral cost of party positions as national obligations under an agreement change. We find that polarization typically affects the degree but not the direction of national responses. Whether national commitment to IEAs strengthens or weakens as national obligations increase depends more on the change in national obligations than on polarization per se. Where the rules governing national responses are conditioned by the current political environment, so are the dynamic consequences both for the agreement itself and for the network to which it belongs. Any CAS analysis requires an understanding of such conditioning effects on the rules governing national responses.
Journal Article
Grievances and the Genesis of Rebellion: Mutiny in the Royal Navy, 1740 to 1820
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 casecontrol 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.
Journal Article
Principles of Group Solidarity
Social scientists have long recognized that solidarity is essential for such phenomena as social order, class, and ethnic consciousness, and the provision of collective goods. In presenting a new general theory of group solidarity, Michael Hechter here contends that it is indeed possible to build a theory of solidarity based on the action of rational individuals and in doing so he goes beyond the timeworn disciplinary boundaries separating the various social sciences.
eBook
From Class to Culture
This article contends that class politics has receded in advanced capitalist societies during the last century, while cultural politics has increased, & it focuses on social & political institutions, rather than on occupational structure, to explain the shift. Participation in solidary groups has consequences for the social bases of politics, & the political salience of such groups is affected by social institutions that are independent of occupational structure. The first such institution is direct rule. Whereas indirect rule tends to promote class politics, direct rule favors cultural politics. Rapid expansion of direct rule since the 1960s has muted class politics & increased cultural politics. This relationship is not deterministic, however; other institutions can mitigate the effects of direct rule on the social bases of politics. 186 References. Adapted from the source document.
Journal Article