Context This paper is one of two that aim to explore further the theoretical framework of my research, and consider preliminary findings from the initial fieldwork. In this paper I return to the ‘political opportunities’ literature to consider what social movement theory would hypothesise about how movements emerge and have political consequences in a non-democratic context. I then test these h...

How does law change society? To gain new leverage on this long-standing question, this article draws on two lines of research that often ignore each other: political science research on the mobilization of law, and sociological research on the diffusion of organizational practices. Our insights stem from six case studies of diverse organizations’ responses to the accommodation provisions in the...

Discussions of chronic poverty emphasize the extent to which poverty endures because of the social relationships and structures within which particular social groups are embedded. In this sense chronic poverty is a socio-political relationship rather than a condition of assetless-ness. Understood as such, processes of social mobilization become central to any discussion of chronic poverty becau...

Both major contenders in Peru’s 1931 presidential contest made populist mobilization a centerpiece of their political strategies. Never before had a candidate for national office so completely flouted traditional channels of political power and so thoroughly staked his political aspirations on the mobilization of support from non-elite segments of the population. This paper asks: Why did these ...

in a recent article, gorik ooms has drawn attention to the normative underpinnings of the politics of global health. we claim that ooms is indirectly submitting to a liberal conception of politics by framing the politics of global health as a question of individual morality. drawing on the theoretical works of chantal mouffe, we introduce a conflictual concept of the political as an alternative...

This is an analysis of the spatial structure of political participation in the United States using spatial econometric techniques and newly available geo-coded data. The results provide strong evidence that political participation is geographically clustered, and that this clustering cannot be explained entirely by social network involvement, individual-level characteristics, such as race, inco...

While observers have focused on the political use of social media when exploring their democratic potential, we know little about users’ perceptions of these media. These perceptions could well be important to understanding the political use of social media. In exploring users’ perceptions, the article asks whether politicians and voters view social media in a similar way, and to what extent th...

this paper discussed the discursive strategies in selected political rally campaigns of the 2011 elections in southwestern nigeria with a view to revealing the dynamics of political persuasion and mobilization in contemporary natural political communication in nigeria. the data for the study were obtained from two political rallies in each of the six southwestern states in nigeria, making a tot...