The dominance of capital cities (urban primacy) is an enduring characteristic of Australian states. There has been limited empirical research examining the drivers of primacy in states despite some being extreme examples of the phenomenon, both in magnitude and scale. In light of institutional theories of settlement patterns, we developed a profile of Australian urbanization using a century of time-series data, descriptive statistics, and an empirical model of city populations. In Australian states high measures of primacy have endured with little evidence of disruption despite the enormous size of these states, their wealth, and population growth – factors associated with declining and low primacy. Statistically, state capital city status has a significant effect on city population size variation, with results suggesting primacy in states is in part a product of Australian federalism. This contrasts with views that suggest Australia’s scarcity of large non-capital cities is due to isolation, low population, and environmental determinism. The findings in this paper have major implications relative to national and/or state strategies that aim to decentralize population away from the primate cities.

Conflicts resulting from the dual legitimacy problem of presidential systems (where the president and the legislature are elected by different majorities) sometimes result in legislative gridlock – a point made by those who criticize the alleged perils of presidentialism. The socialist government of Salvador Allende (1970–73), that ended with the breakdown of democracy, is often used as a poster child for legislative gridlock. With information on the 23,798 bills and 12,809 laws enacted in Chile between 1932 and 1973, we compare the passage of legislation in eight presidential terms and demonstrate that not to be the case. Legislative output showed an upward trend after the 1943 constitutional reform but was on a downward trend since the mid-1960s, before the 1970 constitutional reform restricted the scope of bills that legislators could introduce. Under Allende, while 1653 bills were introduced (438 of which were presidential bills), 642 laws were passed (38.8% and 68.2%, respectively) – compared to 53.8% and 39.9% for all presidents in the period, respectively. The evidence does not justify the claim that there was legislative gridlock under Allende. Instead, variations in legislative output across presidential terms in Chile can be explained by changes in the rules of the legislative process.

This article rethinks the dynamics of collective contention by emphasizing the role of tactical ambiguity. In the face of high political uncertainty, contentious mobilizations work best when they avoid explicit claim-making and engage instead in what I call equivocal challenges—i.e. provocative actions whose meaning will be defined by the response they elicit from specific targets. I provide detailed illustrative support for this argument through a study of the 1948 Bogotazo, by analyzing network data and repertoires of action extracted from archival sources. I conclude that rushed claim-making in contexts of political uncertainty may very well be a losing tactic and that conversely collective equivocation has significant political payoffs.

Through a close reading of scattered, disparate, and largely unconnected secondary sources, supplemented with the analysis of primary sources, and backed by economic theory, this paper explores the origins, development, and socio-economic impact of so-called cosignatory lending institutions. These historical institutions were designed to issue small loans to small businesses and households and shared a reliance on cosigners to secure loans and on weekly instalments to repay them. Their shared lending format was flexible enough to display regional variations and this enabled cosignatory lending institutions to operate in societies characterized by notable differences in wealth and economic structure. It also allowed cosignatory lending institutions to fare better in a more urbanized, heterogeneous context than the more well-known credit cooperatives. As such, this systematic overview helps us better understand how credit markets were made more inclusive in urban contexts, which historical circumstances played a role in this, and perhaps even whether and how the success of cosignatory lending institutions may be replicated in present-day developed and less-developed economies.

The lynching literature often considers how the Populist Party affected lynching, yet the Southern Farmers’ Alliance—a short-lived but influential voluntary association that mobilized large numbers of white farmers—is overlooked. We argue that this is a critical oversight, as the Alliance was the origin of populism in the South. Specifically, we hypothesize that where the Alliance had more local organizations, the greater the likelihood of lynching from 1888 to 1895, the peak period of populism. To test this, we focus on two states with different experiences with the Alliance: North Carolina, in which the state’s Alliance was a strong supporter of the Populist Party, and South Carolina, where the Democrats sought to court Alliancemen and deter the creation of, and voting for, the Populist Party. Our empirical findings reveal that lynchings were more common in counties where the Farmers’ Alliance had more organizations in South Carolina, but no similar connection exists in North Carolina. These findings suggest that the Southern Farmers’ Alliance is, at times, pivotal to understanding populism’s connection to lynching in the late-nineteenth century American South.