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The contemporary Religious Left (RL) in the United States has proven to be somewhat of an enigma, both for academics and for the activists and voters who desire such a movement to thrive. In this paper, I look at one piece of the puzzle: is the RL able to mobilize supporters to political activity? Combining data from both the individual and movement level, this paper tests whether activity at the movement level of the RL can translate into individual supporters' political activity. Using existing data for 2008 and newly collected data on the RL in the 2016 election cycle, I find that the movement was successful in mobilizing constituents in 2008, but not in 2016. This can be linked to the Democrats' effort to engage religious voters in 2008, and its inability to do so in 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on long-term ethnographic research, this article contributes to the growing scholarship on far-right social movements by presenting an in-depth account of the Italian far-right scene. In presenting personal accounts of three activists and situating them within the milieus in which they are active, it sheds light on a variety of factors that push youth to engage in far-right militancy. Many researchers of far-right extremism have asserted the need to provide more in-depth knowledge on far-right militants, yet there remain important gaps that this article strives to address. First, it demonstrates the value of the ethnographic approach in the study of far right, which offers unique insights into the motivations for involvement and the relations between ideas, beliefs, and practices. Second, it shows the importance of situating present-day activism in a historical context, not only by looking for long-term patterns but also by paying attention to the ways studied actors engage with historical comparisons. Third, in engaging critically with some commonsensical approaches to far-right activists, the paper suggests that ethnographic studies of far-right activism can give us fresh perspectives on broader social phenomena beyond the far right per se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The AIDS crisis in the US in the 1980s radically transformed the relationship between sexual minorities and capitalism. Opportunistic infections given free rein in human bodies by HIV rendered employees visible to employers and to health care providers as an economic risk, and set the stage for battles between health capitalists, politicians, and AIDS activists over access to health care. Health capitalism in 1980s America was both an arena of integration of queer Americans into mainstream society and also a political cul-de-sac, blunting the radical possibilities of sexual politics that were alive in the years before the AIDS crisis. In this article I focus on activist groups, primarily ACT UP, Gay Men's Health Crisis, National Gay Rights Advocates, and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and the liberal politicians who led legislative battles at federal and state level to force the health care system to respond to AIDS. In shifting our gaze from the Reagan administration and the religious right as the primary foils to AIDS activism, we can gain new insights into the direction of liberal politics in an era of supposed conservative ascendancy. An understanding of how AIDS activists and their allies negotiated questions of health access suggests that health care activism was in part a marker of class privilege, as gay activists and liberal Democrats openly embraced a medical model for sexual minorities that lifted them above the stigma of a public welfare system and integrated them further into heteronormative capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the idiom goes, birds of a feather flock together. This ancient proverb is frequently used to portray the phenomenon of people associating with those with have similar characteristics and tastes. However, in the name of weiquan lawyers, myriad lawyers flock together with different beliefs and diverse values. Within this pool of lawyers, in addition to those lawyers who are driven by public interest, some lawyers who have eagerly labelled themselves as weiquan lawyers are profit-oriented in nature. This paper aims to provide a new typology to present a better understanding of the role of weiquan lawyers, by jointly taking into consideration the lawyers' motivations and adaptive strategies. In this regard, weiquan lawyers in China can be categorized into four ideal types: routine practitioners, rational activists, progressive reformers, and cynical criticizers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The First Congress of Black Culture of the Americas, held in Cali, Colombia, in August 1977 and organized by Afro-Colombian intellectual Manuel Zapata Olivella, was the first Pan-Africanist conference held in Latin America. This paper examines the obstacles Afro-Latin American activists faced in organizing a racially defined event and analyzes how they articulated their own interpretations of black radical politics. It shows that a Pan-Africanist event in Latin America had to account for ideologies of racial harmony and mixture. Observers throughout the region mobilized these ideas to discredit the First Congress as a racist and illegitimate threat to mestizo nationhood. Afro-Latin American activists used it as a platform to debate and denounce ideologies of racial harmony and mixture which many argued cloaked racism and impeded black mobilization. However, for many of the delegates engaging with black radical politics did not imply an absolute rejection of these ideas, but instead highlighted the varying ways in which Afro-Latin American activists understood and contested these concepts in the 1970s. Many Afro-Latin American delegates, even those who were openly critical of ideologies of racial harmony, called for multiracial forms of solidarity and expressed support for culturally mixed visions of the nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the protest against the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature to Peter Handke as an example of transnational memory activism. It analyzes from a transnational mobilization perspective how activists achieved a globally visible protest in Stockholm and what role memory played in the protest mobilization and framing. Genocide survivors and former refugees, human rights activists, journalists, and academics formed a transnational protest coalition. In this way, they drew international attention to their outrage at the honoring of an author who is criticized for denying the Bosnian genocide. The analysis shows that memories of the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia and genocide united the diverse protesters as a "memory community" and shaped their framing. The protesters warned of the potential repercussions of the Nobel Prize to Handke for the internationalization and normalization of genocide denial. They argued that locally, Serb nationalist politicians can find legitimation in it for divisive politics. Moreover, they put the prize in a larger context of globally rising right extremism and islamophobia that find inspiration in the very Serb nationalist ideology and its propagators of the 1990s conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay makes a distinction between the roles that activists and social critics can play in democratic societies and defends the separate tasks of a non-activist social critic. Drawing on Ralph Waldo Emerson's writings, I argue that non-activist social critics are better situated than activists to reach certain audiences, cultivate certain democratic capacities, and preserve their audience's agency while doing so. In Emerson's case, his concerns about his activist contemporaries led him to craft new ways of critically engaging his peers. At the same time, as Emerson's life also illustrates, non-activist critics are limited by their roles and must forgo some of their distinctive advantages in order to do activist work. Clarifying the scope of the social critic's role in this way helps critics to draw on the benefits of their position and avoid overstepping its constraints, thereby allowing them to more effectively promote political reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The politics of our post-Covid times are expressed through various registers. In Kolkata, one especially powerful artistic medium for such expressions was the revival of street theatre as young and senior theatre practitioners plunged into exploring critical issues that have been all-pervasive since the beginning of the pandemic. As people finally started to venture out, content to be amidst human congregations, street plays, being located in open-air spaces, proved both economical and safe. The issues these street performances highlighted and their modes of presentations could be described as what Tony Fisher calls 'activist theatre' – which mobilizes the people by interpellating its audience around a specific grievance or issue that possesses an emotional appeal. These performances are a form of artistic activism, or 'artivism' as termed by Chantal Mouffe: the use of aesthetic means for political activism, 'as a counter-hegemonic move against the capitalist appropriation of aesthetics'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracies in general and political parties in particular have undergone political personalization in recent decades. The power balance between politicians (one or many) and the team (the party as a collegial entity) has changed, and existing party typologies are no longer suited to the analysis of today's democratic politics. Although some new personalized party types have been added, what is missing is a systematic attempt to contrast them with the collegial option. This article proposes a new classification of political parties to fill the lacuna. It includes five ideal types of parties: two personalized-decentralized types, referring to collections of separated autonomous activists or to separated autonomous individual politicians (plural); a collegial type, which is about the centrality of the team and is based mainly on collective authorities and collective decision making; and two personalized-centralized types, referring to the centrality of an individual politician in her capacity as the party leader or that of a specific individual who "owns" the party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an innovative anthropological analysis of youth activism in contemporary Thailand by examining its past and current manifestations through an unusual theoretical nexus—that between (cosmological) politics and kinship tropes. Against the backdrop of the Buddhist kingdom's long-standing cult of the 'Father-King', the article focuses on the 2020 Thai democracy movement in relation to student demonstrations in the 1970s. It aims to explore the ambiguous permutations in the meanings of kinship that have marked Thai young people's democratic engagement in a range of social fields—including friendship, siblinghood, and comradeship. Drawing upon archival material, oral histories of student revolts, and extended ethnography with today's youth activists in a number of political sites—anti-government rallies, universities, and private homes—the article reveals how kin relationships, hierarchies, and affects are entangled in diverse political formations of youth dissent. Through a detailed reading of these complex entanglements, it shows how relationships of 'equal friendship' and 'hierarchical siblinghood' substantiate the symbolic grounds of Thai youth activism, as conflicting instantiations of 'filial insubordination' to monarchical parenthood. While youth activists advocate for an egalitarian, 'friendship-based' polity, explicitly questioning the democratic viability of Thailand's Buddhist kin(g)ship, they are simultaneously caught up in (seemingly inescapable) hierarchical sibling relationships that validate the latter's ontological legitimacy in practice, generating subtle tensions. It is argued that attention given to the varied cultural shapes of these tensions can make it possible to unearth the deep, kinship-based core of Thai social conflict that is concealed beneath public forms and straightforward political stances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary Republican Party has been the site of asymmetric partisan entrenchment and factional infighting. We test whether factional pressure from a far-right faction (the Tea Party) exacerbated the party's rightward movement with a granular analysis of Republican factionalism at the congressional district level. We develop a measure of local factionalism using novel datasets of activist presence and primary contests. Then, we conduct a difference-in-differences analysis to assess whether local factionalism in the Tea Party era heightened Republican partisanship and legislative extremism at the district level. We find that districts that experienced factional pressure moved rightward on both measures. These findings help clarify how the Tea Party captured the Republican Party and support a focus on the role of party factions in fomenting partisan conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does protest spread in contemporary China? This paper analyses one case of cross-firm protest and two cases of cross-village protest in order to demonstrate a mechanism for protest diffusion, a topic rarely studied in the existing literature. It argues that central policies, protest leadership and a connective structure that links protest leaders and followers enable people with shared economic interests to protest together. Protests emerged when protest leaders, who were trained politically by the state and enjoyed moral standing in a small community, started popularizing policy documents among followers. Protest diffusion occurred when representatives from each participating unit coordinated with one another and coalesced around the core leaders, who decided tactics for the entire protest. The protestors, however, did not form coalitions across different administrative boundaries. Thus, protest leaders did play a decisive role in the spreading of a protest. However, the state also moulded and restricted the scale of the diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How does exile affect online dissent? By internationalizing activists' networks and removing them from day-to-day life under the regime, we argue that exile fundamentally alters activists' political opportunities and strategic behavior. We test the effect of exile on activists' public discourse in the case of Venezuela, through an analysis of over 5 million tweets by 357 activists spanning seven years. Our results suggest that after going into exile activists increasingly emphasize foreign-led interventions to shape their home country politics, focus less on local grievances, and become more harshly critical of the regime. This is partly due to the changes in exiles' networks: after leaving, activists increase their interactions with foreign actors and tweet more in English. This work contributes to our understanding of the relationship between exile—one of the most ubiquitous yet understudied forms of repression—and dissent in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Who are the people who, in the face of extreme repression, unexpectedly take to the streets en masse in an authoritarian state? This article aims to answer this question with reference to the case of the Belarusian anti-Lukashenka mass mobilization of 2020. It employs unique data from an original online protest survey among citizens of Belarus who were 18 or older and residing in the country at the time of the protests (Onuch et. al.; MOBILISE 2020 & 2021; n = 17,174), fielded August 18, 2020–January 29, 2021.2 This survey was designed to: (a) capture as many protesters as possible; and (b) capture a large enough sample of non-protesters as a comparative reference group enabling us to better understand how different anti-Lukashenka protesters (n = 11,719) were from non-protesters (n = 5,455). Guided by theoretical and empirical expectations of contentious politics scholarship, we first provide descriptive statistics about the socio-demographic characteristics of the protesters, self-reported protest grievances and claims, and median protester preferences on a range of attitudes and policies. This portrait of the protesters is followed up by regression analysis to test whether these patterns hold at a statistically significant level when comparing protesters and non-protesters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses a comparison with Ukraine to investigate why protests against Lukashenka in 2020 failed to oust the Belarusian dictator. First, in contrast to his counterparts in Ukraine, Lukashenka successfully built new authoritarian economic and coercive institutions in the 1990s that raised the costs of opposition activity and reduced challengers' access to business support. Second, Belarus has lacked a strong national identity that was critical to opposition success in Ukraine. In Ukraine, relatively powerful anti-Russian nationalism repeatedly motivated a core group of anti-incumbent activists and facilitated the opposition's control over local power structures that supported protest activities at critical moments. In Belarus, weak national identity and consequent dearth of committed activists in national government institutions in the 1990s hampered efforts to challenge Lukashenka's consolidation of authoritarian power. In addition, weaker national identity undermined the capacity of opposition forces to control local power structures that might have aided opposition protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the resurgence of activist government in Europe during the COVID-19 pandemic and examines whether this trend will continue beyond the crisis. It discusses the role of EU institutions in facilitating state interventions and considers the potential for activist government in areas such as the green and digital transitions. The article also addresses the challenges posed by existing EU treaties and the neoliberal economic order. It concludes that the future of activist government in the EU is uncertain and depends on factors such as the success of initiatives like Next Generation EU. The text also briefly mentions other topics covered in the issue, including internet regulation, artificial intelligence, reverse discrimination, and effective judicial protection. [Extracted from the article]

Parties and social movements play an important role in many theories of political science. Yet, the study of intraparty politics remains underdeveloped as random samples are difficult to conduct among political activists. This paper proposes a novel procedure to sample different parties over time and space by utilizing the advertising option of the social media webpage Facebook. As this method allows for quotas and the collection of large samples at relatively low cost, it becomes possible to improve the representativeness through poststratification and subsample robustness checks. Three examples illustrate these advantages of Facebook sampling: First, a Facebook sample approximated intraparty decisions and the outcome of a leadership contest of the Alternative for Germany. Second, a weighted Facebook sample achieved similar estimates as a representative local leader survey of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Third, by evaluating subgroups of key demographics for parties with unknown population parameters, two Facebook samples show that the color-coded conflict in Thailand was driven by different concepts of regime type, but notby a left-right divideoneconomic policy-making. Facebook sampling appears tobe the bestand cheapest method to conduct time-series cross-sectional studies for political activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we be present yet not physically in person? Three bed performances in Argentina suggest such a possibility. In a country marked by the disappearance of 30,000 citizens, artists and activists have sought to make the absent present. These bed performances reveal that by mediating presence and expanding it beyond the here and now, what was thought to have disappeared, remains. Pastoral associates stand in front of huge screens to pray for hundreds of people at the same time. Emmanuel TV Studios, Lagos, Nigeria, 1 June 2021. See "The Healing of Maseko: Live and A-live Presences in the Theatre of the Spiritual" by Abimbola A. Adelakun. (www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1vRT6imV4o; screenshot by TDR) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although prior scholarship has made considerable progress in measuring politicians' positions, it has only rarely considered voters' or activists' perceptions of those positions. Here, we present a novel measure of U.S. senators' perceived ideologies derived from 9,030 pairwise comparisons elicited from party activists in three 2016 YouGov surveys. By focusing on activists, we study a most-likely case for perceiving within-party ideological distinctions. We also gain empirical leverage from Donald Trump's nomination and heterodox positions on some issues. Our measure of perceived ideology is correlated with nominate but differs in informative ways: senators with very conservative voting records were sometimes perceived as less conservative if they did not support Trump. A confirmatory test shows these trends extended into 2021. Even among activists, perceived ideology appears to be anchored by prominent people as well as policy positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under what conditions can voting turnout be transformed into a contentious repertoire? Based on the two case studies of the Umbrella Movement and the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement in Hong Kong, I compare how movement actors used the electoral arena to leverage their causes. I propose a new relationship between street and electoral politics – short-term mobilization that turns voting turnout into a contentious repertoire. I posit three necessary scope conditions for movements to perceive this electoral strategy as viable: (1) protest cycle precedes and/or overlaps with the electoral period, (2) election perceived to be competitive, and (3) closing of political opportunity window for street mobilization. I further argue that the tactics movements pursue in the electoral arena is conditional on the relationship between movement actors and political elites, and regime type. In democratic regimes where parties and elections are institutionalized and less volatile, movements are on a more solid ground to invest in a long-term electoral strategy with existing parties. Contrarily, electoral competition in authoritarian regimes tends to skew toward incumbent's advantage. Movement activists and political elites may seek short-term strategic mobilizations focusing on the election at hand rather than a long-term plan. This argument illuminates the common ground between collective action and voting, and thus bridging the two sets of literature for further engagement, as recent movements such as the Black Lives Matter and the Sunrise Movement in the United States and Navalny's anti-Putin movement in Russia are mobilizing their supporters to take on the electoral arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

And even for those who had, the official justification for revisiting their citizenship status was that their parents had been "in transit" or residing with irregular migratory status in the Dominican Republic at the time of their birth. Leveraging years of fieldwork and lived experience in the Dominican Republic, I Legal Identity, Race and Belonging in the Dominican Republic i goes well beyond most treatments of the topic in scope and depth. While recognising the right of sovereign states to regularise citizenship rolls and issue formal identification documentation, Hayes de Kalaf is quick to add that the integrity of these processes depends on the fairness of more fundamental decisions concerning who is a citizen. [Extracted from the article]

This is the first comprehensive biography based on unique archival sources about Gregory Ignatius Zhatkovych, a Pittsburgh-based lawyer, who in 1918–1919 was instrumental in the creation of Czechoslovakia and the inclusion of its far eastern region, Subcarpathian Rus'/Ruthenia, into the new country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are currently witnessing the emergence of global humanitarianism as a fully fledged historical field. Eighteenth-century transatlantic abolitionists, nineteenth-century imperial missionaries, twentieth-century aid workers, and twenty-first-century activists inhabit the pages of more and more published books and articles. Global humanitarianism denotes a sphere of action as well as an object of study. Questions as to where or what the global is persist. The books under review all operate within the sphere of Western influence: North America, the British empire, or former colonies. They also have similar protagonists. They are largely populated with practitioners of humanitarianism, rather than the objects of their beneficence. This raises some questions. Where does global humanitarianism take place and who does it encompass? Is global humanitarianism inherently enmeshed with Western expansionism and unequal power dynamics? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses the relationship between the imposed Central African Federation (1953–63) and the ways in which East and Central African thinkers and leaders conveyed and pursued the possibilities of decolonization. Existing literature on federalism in twentieth-century Africa fails to place regional projects in dialogue, studying in isolation East Africa and Central Africa, 'utopian' and oppressive regionalisms. But such clear dividing lines were not articulated in the four discursive 'sketches' of East and Central Africa that this article brings to light: those of anti-Federation organizations in Nairobi and Ndola in 1952; students at Makerere College (Kampala) in 1953; mobile Malawian activists in regional and pan-African forums around 1955–8; and East African party publicity representatives around 1958–60. At each of these critical moments, thinkers creatively constructed various relationships between geographical space and chronological change, through the lens of a broader, interdependent East and Central Africa, as a means to fend off perceived threats to a precarious advancement towards a democratic future. Attending to the evolution of these ideas shows not only how the Central African Federation placed material constraints on regional solidarity, but how 'thinking regionally' could support the case for national borders, even before decolonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 16 April 2014, the Sewol Ferry capsized in the southern region of South Korea: 304 passengers died, including 250 high school students. Despite an international outcry, there has not yet been a comprehensive investigation into what caused the Sewol to sink and why the passengers were not rescued promptly. This article discusses how performance can represent something that defies explanation because we do not know how or why it happened. Yellow Ribbon's Talent Show, Namsan Arts Centre's From Pluto, and Camino de Ansan performed the role of the students who died. Taking these three case studies, this article analyzes the ways in which they strive to represent the unrepresentable as they attempt to document the sinking and achieve justice, while memorializing the victims and arguing for the necessity of a more safety-conscious society. Areum Jeong is Assistant Professor in Humanities at Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute. Jeong's research takes a transnational approach to Korean and Korean-American film, literature, theatre, and performance. Her current book project explores how performance documents death, loss, and memory in South Korean and diasporic communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the first published ethnographic map of Ukraine, which appeared in Lviv in 1861. While carefully analyzing new archival and published sources from both the Habsburg and Romanov empires, it puts this map into the wider context of a contemporary Ukrainian national movement. I argue that Russian Ukrainian activists of 1860s were unquestionably interested in the extent of Ukrainian national territory and had handwritten maps of Ukrainian national territory in their possession. Contrary to the conventional narratives that the 1861 map was drawn in Lviv by Mykhailo Kossak, I argue instead that the map could have been produced by the Russian Ukrainian activist, Mykhailo Levchenko, and was later transferred to Galicia for publication. Stipulating the need to account for sources from both the Romanov and Habsburg empires—studying both cartographic and textual sources—I argue that similar studies should necessarily be located at the juncture of history of cartography and the intellectual history of mental mapping. Only such approach will provide an undistorted picture of a process of national territorialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do stigmatized minorities advance agendas when confronted with hostile majorities? Elite theories of influence posit marginal groups exert little power. I propose the concept of agenda seeding to describe how activists use methods like disruption to capture the attention of media and overcome political asymmetries. Further, I hypothesize protest tactics influence how news organizations frame demands. Evaluating black-led protests between 1960 and 1972, I find nonviolent activism, particularly when met with state or vigilante repression, drove media coverage, framing, congressional speech, and public opinion on civil rights. Counties proximate to nonviolent protests saw presidential Democratic vote share increase 1.6–2.5%. Protester-initiated violence, by contrast, helped move news agendas, frames, elite discourse, and public concern toward "social control." In 1968, using rainfall as an instrument, I find violent protests likely caused a 1.5–7.9% shift among whites toward Republicans and tipped the election. Elites may dominate political communication but hold no monopoly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comparative analysis of emotional taxation was conducted to investigate the affective cost of entering the political process among 1,019 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI) activists in the United States (n = 355), the United Kingdom (n = 230), South Africa (n = 228), and Australia (n = 206). Four consistent trends were identified across these four contexts, with important implications for the study of social movements, youth activism, gender, sexuality, and race. First, levels of emotional taxation resulting from LGBTQI activist work were consistently very high. Second, emotional burdens were systematically greater for young, nonwhite, and transgender activists. Third, emotional taxation was compounded for activists whose identities crossed multiple marginalized groups. This finding supports the validity and importance of intersectional approaches to LGBTQI issues. Fourth, the sources of emotional taxation varied greatly among activists, and transgender activists were particularly stressed by public engagements such as major events and marches. Transgender nonwhite activists also indicated relatively high levels of emotional stress related to online forms of engagement, such as posting on Twitter and Facebook. These findings could help identify the kinds of activists who participate, the kinds of issues advocated for, and why certain tactics are used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I still thought [Biko] was shamming. I had had experience before with this tendency. —Colonel Goosen, 1977 inquest There was also a BBC reconstruction of the inquest with a well-known actor who played Sydney Kentridge—which I said that he wasn't as good as Sydney Kentridge, they should have had Sydney play himself. —George Bizos, 13 May 2008 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research commonly finds that citizens are loss averse: they dislike losses far more than similarly sized gains. One implication is that arguments for policy change framed in terms of losses to be avoided often have a larger impact on public opinion than arguments framed in terms of gains to be enjoyed. Although several scholars have observed this pattern with respect to public opinion, we know far less about the effect of loss- and gain-framed arguments on political activism. This is a critical omission given the disproportionate impact of political activists on the policymaking process. Using field and survey experiments, we investigate the impact of gain- and loss-framed arguments on climate change activism. We find that loss-framed arguments can be less mobilizing, even when they are otherwise more persuasive, than gain-framed arguments. Our results deepen our theoretical understanding of what motivates political activism, especially in an era of professionalized politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the debate on Ukrainian statehood going on in the 1960s in Suchasnist', the most intellectually prestigious journal among Ukrainian emigrants in the West. These intellectuals and political activists interpreted the renaissance of Ukrainian national culture in the 1960s (the so-called shistdesiatnytstvo) in various ways and proposed different political strategies to influence their original homeland and its future political and cultural developments. In the Ukrainian diaspora, two opposing factions emerged: the first, despite condemning Soviet imperialism, favorably evaluated the birth of a movement for the defense of human rights in Soviet Ukraine and was happy to exploit the rapprochement between the USSR and USA to finally have an opportunity to make contact with the motherland. The other did not consider the Ukrainian SSR as a real example of a Ukrainian state and acknowledged its existence only for tactical reasons; this faction thought that contact should be avoided and that the Soviets should be offered no opportunity to address the Western public. Eventually, at the beginning of the 1970s, even those who had opposed collaboration with any subject from Soviet Ukraine decided to embrace the cause of human rights and join the struggle led by the Ukrainian dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Party activists are important for building party–voter links. This study focuses on the motivations of these activists and the hypothesis that economic factors are associated with more programmatic and policy-driven platforms. I examine a novel comparative survey data set of party activists collected in multiple districts in South Korea and Mongolia to determine whether national economic development, the local economy, or individual income shapes activist motivations. The results challenge the economic account and, instead, shed light on the importance of party characteristics, such as size, ideology, and whether a party has its roots in authoritarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pro-independence parties won a narrow majority of parliamentary seats in the December 2017 elections in Catalonia. Should Catalonia at some point become independent from Spain, the respective status of Catalan and Spanish is a major issue about which there is significant divergence of opinion, not least within the independence movement in Catalonia. This article approaches the question of language officiality in a hypothetically independent Catalonia through the theoretical lens of linguistic authority, particularly the concepts of anonymity and authenticity. The data, an on-line discussion thread following an interview with a Catalan language activist, reveal a striking diversity of language ideological positions on both the nature of linguistic authority in Catalonia as things stand, as well as how such authority should be constructed and managed in the event of independence, particularly as regards questions of officiality. (Catalonia, linguistic authority, language ideologies, officiality)* [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this article, I compare progressive and conservative religio-political activists' commitment to their movements (the religious left and right, respectively). I rely on data from the Public Religion Research Institute's 2009 surveys of individuals they identified as religious left activists and religious right activists. Do these activists actually say they identify with the movement with which pollsters assume them to affiliate? How potentially influential do they perceive their movements to be? Third, to what extent do activists support their movement's core social movement organizations? I conclude by arguing that the evidence is mixed that the American religious left lacks influence because its activists tend not to be unified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior work has shown party activists and religious divisions to be two of the leading causes of party polarization in American politics. Using the Convention Delegate Studies, we examine the interaction between these two culprits and their impact on party polarization. We leverage a novel measure of secularism in the latest wave of the Convention Delegate Studies to demonstrate that active secularism is distinct both conceptually and statistically from low religiosity. Furthermore, we show that both religiosity and secularism drive party activists to take more extreme policy positions, to identify themselves as more ideologically extreme, and to exhibit less support for compromise. As the Democratic and Republican Parties have become more secular and religious, respectively, these results suggest religious polarization may compound existing divisions between the two parties and exacerbate the partisan divide in American politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role that democratic organizations play in fostering political activism in America. Activists make democracy work by attending meetings, engaging others, trying to make their voice heard, and participating in myriad other ways. Yet, we still need a deeper understanding of what role organizations play in cultivating that activism. The article presents data from three field experiments showing that creating a relational organizational context makes targets more likely to sign petitions, recruit others, and attend meetings. The article argues that civic organizations can have a powerful impact on activism. In doing so, it introduces a new set of variables related to organizational context to consider in understanding the sources of participation. The article thus extends a burgeoning body of experimental research on the social bases of voter turnout by examining not only voting but other forms of activism that are increasingly common modes of citizen involvement in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article probes the philosophical and political significance of the relationships between wheelchair activists and their wheelchairs. Analyzing disability memoirs and the work of a professional wheelchair dancer, I argue that wheelers frequently experience complex relationality and queer kinships with their wheels. By bringing the artistry of disabled writers and dancers into conversation with the notions of human-material relations in the work of Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, and Mel Chen, I show how alternative animacies shape wheelers' conceptions of interdependence and movement. The sensuous pleasure they take in their wheels queers conventional conceptions of how humans should relate to things. New materialist philosophy has increasingly drawn attention to the porous boundaries between the human and material world. But where posthumanist philosophers have largely aimed to dethrone the sovereignty of the human, disability activists use alternative animacies to raise up a devalued and discounted portion of humanity: to emphasize the agency and capacity of those whose lives are often cast as pitiable and powerless, to express a queer feminist disability culture and politics, and to claim the transgressive vitality and vibrant artistry of life with disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author compares the Caucus era of political science in 1960s with the Perestroika era in 1990s. Topics discussed include demand for variety of roles of political scientists such as political activists and advisors, rise of anti-communism and racism during the era of the Caucus, growth of inequality and emergence of Islamicist challenges during the era of perestroika and need for ineffective and open power for justified politics.

This article examines two closely related themes: the triangle of tradition, capital and the state; and resistance to neotraditional leadership and local activism for democracy. I investigate an uprising in the Topnaar Traditional Authority in the Erongo region of Namibia by young community activists who aimed to promote democracy in their community in a context of manifold accusations of self-enrichment and corruption against the neotraditional leadership. The article demonstrates that the corporatization of tradition is a double-edged sword: neotraditional leaders expand their local power towards their subjects in the short term, but it often produces severe conflict that may result in the delegitimization of neotraditional authority in the long run. However, the Topnaar youth uprising and quest for democracy was less about challenging neotraditional authority per se and more about replacing the incumbents as well as obtaining a fair share of political power. It resulted from the perception that the neotraditional-cumcorporate ventures no longer served the cause of a common good; this, in turn, contradicted the general ideal of equality among the Topnaar. The corporatization of tradition thus generated local grievances and stimulated demands for democratic participation. Since the uprising gained at least some of its momentum from my research on neotraditional authority, I also reflect on my role. Cet article examine deux themes etroitement lies : le triangle tradition-capital-Etat, et la resistance au leadership neotraditionnel et l'activisme local pour la democratic. L'auteur examine un soulevement au sein de 1'Autorite traditionnelle Topnaar dans la region d'Erongo en Namibie, conduit par de jeunes activistes communautaires qui visaient a promouvoir la democratie dans leur communaute dans un contexte de multiples accusations d'enrichissement personnel et de corruption a l'encontre du leadership neotraditionnel. L'article demontre que la corporatisation de la tradition est une arme a double tranchant: les leaders neotraditionnels etendent leur pouvoir local vers leurs sujets a court terme, mais avec pour effet souvent de produire des conflits graves susceptibles d'aboutir a la delegitimisation de 1'autorite neotraditionnelle a long terme. Cependant, avec le soulevement des jeunes Topnaar en quete de democratie, il s'agissait moins de defier 1'autorite neotraditionnelle a proprement parler et davantage de remplacer les personnes en exercice et d'obtenir une juste part du pouvoir politique. II decoulait de la perception que les entreprises a la fois neotraditionnelles et privees ne servaient plus la cause de l'interet commun; ceci, a son tour, etait contraire a l'ideal general d'egalite chez les Topnaar. La corporatisation de la tradition a done genere des griefs locaux et encourage des exigences de participation democratique. Ces travaux de recherche sur Pautorite neotraditionnelle ayant donne une certaine impulsion a ce soulevement, l'auteur se penche egalement sur son propre role., Community meeting for Topnaars this Saturday. The Topnaar community is invited to attend a very important meeting ... Important issued [sic] such as the development of the Topnaar community would [...]

The 2014 Sunflower Movement succeeded in blocking Taiwan's Congress from ratifying the Cross-Strait Services Trade Agreement (CSSTA), a bill that proposed to liberalize trade with China. Since most of the participants in this movement were students and NGO members, they had limited economic and political resources to influence policy change, which makes their success in stopping a trade deal remarkable. Many attribute this important success to an elite alliance with politicians inside the government, fueled by a personal rivalry between political elites. However, I argue that changing public opinion is the more important force behind the creation of the alliance. With original data from interviews with political elites, their staff members, and activists in Taiwan, in addition to secondary information, I confirm public opinion to be the major reason for the political alliance. This case illustrates that in some circumstances, public opinion outweighs the importance of elite rivalry in influencing political elite decisionmaking, and it could represent a key mechanism of democratic policy-making. Keywords public opinion, social movements, cross-Strait relations, INTRODUCTION On the evening of March 18, 2014, Taiwanese university students and NGO workers stormed the assembly hall of Taiwan's legislature. Their occupation of Taiwan's capitol initiated a 24-day social [...]

To what extent is a diverse news media environment good for activists who seek attention for their cause? Scholars agree that activist groups depend on the media to reach policymakers and bystanders. Yet prior scholars have overlooked how factors that contribute to media environment diversity--including journalistic norms, market structures, outlets' partisanship, and audiences' news consumption habits--can have contradictory implications for activist groups. Disaggregating questions of gaining publicity from questions of the message and reach of coverage, this article shows that while pluralistic media environments are more accessible to activists, more homogeneous media environments help groups that manage to break into the mainstream news reach wider audiences with more coherent narratives. These findings challenge common assumptions about the news media in Japan and Korea. A paired comparison of hepatitis C-related activism in both countries demonstrates how the forces democratizing access to the media are paradoxically reducing the persuasive potential of publicity. Keywords activism, comparative media systems, social movements, Japan, South Korea, hepatitis C, democratic politics, Scholars and policymakers debate how good diversity in the news media environment is for democracy. On the one hand, political communications scholars note that commercialization and new technologies have fostered [...]