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This article develops an interactive and relational conception of infrastructural state power for studying the capacity of authoritarian regimes to absorb popular protests. Based on an ethnography of the grassroots state in moments of unrest in China, the authors identify three microfoundations of Chinese authoritarianism: protest bargaining, legal-bureaucratic absorption, and patron-clientelism. Adopting, respectively, the logics of market exchange, rule-bound games, and interpersonal bonds, these mechanisms have the effect of depoliticizing social unrest and constitute a lived experience of authoritarian domination as a non-zero-sum situation, totalizing and transparent yet permissive of room for maneuvering and bargaining. This heuristic framework calls for bringing the subjective experience of subordination back into the theorizing of state domination. Adapted from the source document.

In the study of civil society, Tocqueville-inspired research has helped illuminate important connections between associations and democracy, while corporatism has provided a robust framework for understanding officially approved civil society organizations in authoritarian regimes. Yet neither approach accounts for the experiences of ostensibly illegal grassroots nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in an authoritarian state. Drawing on fieldwork in China, I argue that grassroots NGOs can survive in an authoritarian regime when the state is fragmented and when censorship keeps information local. Moreover, grassroots NGOs survive only insofar as they refrain from democratic claims-making and address social needs that might fuel grievances against the state. For its part, the state tolerates such groups as long as particular state agents can claim credit for any good works while avoiding blame for any problems. Grassroots NGOs and an authoritarian state can thus coexist in a \"contingent symbiosis\" that-far from pointing to an inevitable democratization-allows ostensibly illegal groups to operate openly while relieving the state of some of its social welfare obligations. Adapted from the source document.

In recent years, the right has become a powerful force in many parts of the world. This review focuses primarily on the United States, with comparisons to rightist movements elsewhere. Our focus is movements, not political parties or intellectual trends. The article begins with terms and definitions and distinguishes conservative from right-wing movements. We then review changing theoretical orientations and the major findings on ideologies and characteristics of these movements. We also survey contextual factors that influence rightist mobilization and strategies used by rightist movements. We pay particular attention to New Right and New Christian Right conservative movements and to right-wing skinhead and white supremacist movements. A final section examines methodological and ethical concerns that arise in studies of the right. The conclusion recommends directions for future research.

Why did the nation-state proliferate across the world over the past 200 years, replacing empires, kingdoms, city-states, and the like? Using a new dataset with information on 145 of today's states from 1816 to the year they achieved nation-statehood, we test key aspects of modernization, world polity, and historical institutionalist theories. Event history analysis shows that a nation-state is more likely to emerge when a power shift allows nationalists to overthrow or absorb the established regime. Diffusion of the nation-state within an empire or among neighbors also tilts the balance of power in favor of nationalists. We find no evidence for the effects of industrialization, the advent of mass literacy, or increasingly direct rule, which are associated with the modernization theories of Gellner, Anderson, Tilly, and Hechter. Nor is the growing global hegemony of the nation-state model a good predictor of individual instances of nation-state formation, as Meyer's world polity theory would suggest. We conclude that the global rise of the nation-state is driven by proximate and contextual political factors situated at the local and regional levels, in line with historical institutionalist arguments, rather than by domestic or global structural forces that operate over the long durée.

This article investigates how experiences with public policies affect levels of civic and political engagement among the poor. Studies of \"policy feedback\" investigate policies not just as political outcomes, but also as factors that set political forces in motion and shape political agency. To advance this literature, we take up three outstanding questions related to selection bias, the distinction between universal and targeted programs, and the types of authority relations most likely to foster engagement among the poor. Using a longitudinal dataset from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which follows a cohort of low-income parents and their newborn children in 20 U.S. cities, we estimate effects associated with three types of means-tested public assistance. We find that these policies' effects are not an illusion created by selection bias; the effects of targeted programs can both promote and discourage engagement; and such effects tend to be more positive when a policy's authority structure reflects democratic rather than paternalist principles.

This article redirects attention from the question of how business ties have an impact on politics to the question of how political ties have an impact on business. Specifically, do divisions within the field of politics become divisions in the field of business networks? To study co-evolution of political and economic fields, we conducted a historical network analysis of the relationship between firm-to-party ties and firm-to-firm ties in the Hungarian economy. We constructed a dataset of all senior managers and boards of directors of 1,696 corporations and the complete set of all political officeholders from 1987 to 2001. Findings from our field interviews and dyadic logistic regression models demonstrate that director interlocks depend, to a significant extent, on political affiliations. Although the political and economic fields have been institutionally separated, firms and parties have become organizationally entangled. Firms of either left or right political affiliation exhibit a preference for partnerships with firms in the same political camp and increasingly avoid ties with firms in the opposite camp. Our analysis reveals that political camps in the Hungarian economy occurred not as a direct legacy of state socialism but as the product of electoral party competition.

While Foucault described population as the object of biopower he did not investigate the practices that make it possible to know population. Rather, he tended to overemphasize it as an object on which power can act. However, population is not an object awaiting discovery, but is represented and enacted by specific devices such as censuses and what I call population metrics. The latter enact populations by assembling different categories and measurements of subjects (biographical, biometrie and transactional) in myriad ways to identify and measure the performance of populations. I account for both the object and subject by thinking about how devices consist of agencements; that is, specific arrangements of humans and technologies whose mediations and interactions not only enact populations but also produce subjects. I suggest that population metrics render subjects interpassive whereby other beings or objects take up the role and act in place of the subject.

This article assesses the association between national welfare state regimes and public insecurities about crime across Europe. A multilevel analysis of respondents in 23 countries sampled in the 2004/05 European Social Survey finds a strong relationship between insecurities about crime and national levels of social expenditure and decommodification of social welfare policy. Some social protection measures are more strongly associated with national levels of fear of crime than others, especially public non-monetary support for children and families that strengthens the individual's capacity to cope with problems on their own. We conclude with the idea that state-level social protections may buffer the development of widespread fear of crime by increasing self-efficacy and thereby mitigating various social and economic fears.

The authors extend previous research on women's participation in politics by examining the role of female elites in political parties in selecting & supporting women as political candidates. They hypothesize that political parties, in their role as gatekeepers, mediate the relationship between country-level factors, such as women's participation in the labor force, & political outcomes for women. The article focuses on three outcomes for women: the percentage of female political party leaders, the percentage of female candidates in a country, & the percentage of women elected. New cross-national measures of women's inclusion in political parties are developed & analyzed in a cross-national, path-analytic model of women in politics to find that (1) women's position in party elites translates into gains for women as candidates only under proportional representation systems, (2) women's position in party elites increases the likelihood that female candidates will be elected only in nonproportional representation systems, & (3) parties may be overly sensitive to the perceived liability of women as candidates, when in fact, women have success as candidates across all regions of the world. Tables, Figures, Appendixes, References. Adapted from the source document.

According to previous research conducted mainly in the United States, psychological needs pertaining to the management of uncertainty and threat predict right-wing conservatism, operationally defined in terms of resistance to change and acceptance of inequality. In this study, we analyze data from 19 countries included in the European Social Survey (ESS) to assess two sets of hypotheses: (1) that traditionalism (an aspect of resistance to change) and acceptance of inequality would be positively associated with right (versus left) orientation, and (2) that rule-following (an aspect of the need for order), high need for security, and low need for openness to experience would be associated with right (versus left) orientation, adjusting for quadratic effects associated with ideological extremity. In addition, we determine the extent to which the pattern of relations among needs, values, and political orientation was similar in Eastern and Western European contexts. Results from regression and structural equation models indicate that traditionalism and, to a lesser extent, rule-following predict right-wing conservatism in both regions, whereas acceptance of inequality predicts right-wing orientation in the West only. Although openness to experience was associated with preferences for greater equality in both regions, it was associated with left-wing orientation in Western Europe and right-wing orientation in Eastern Europe. Needs for security, conversely, were associated with right-wing orientation in Western Europe and left-wing orientation in Eastern Europe. Thus, we find evidence of both universal and context-specific effects in our analysis of the cognitive and motivational antecedents of left-right political orientation.