Our concluding chapter examines race, civil society, and social movements. What do political actors do when the chain of democratic accountability and responsiveness is broken? How do we understand the origins of protest movements and more radical forms of political participation? How do ordinary citizens in a diverse democracy contest and claim power for the people and effect change?

The events in Egypt between 2011 and 2013 present a series of empirical puzzles unanswered in the comparative political scholarship: We see puzzling variation with respect to the particular processes of party formation, political mobilization, and opposition group survival or dissolution in the context of regime transitions. These puzzles are particularly evident in Egypt, where a repressed opposition group (the Muslim Brotherhood) won the 2011 founding elections only to be forced from office eighteen months later, while other opposition groups that were active in protesting the Egyptian regime did not even form a political party to run in the 2011 elections. Common explanations for events in Egypt focus on idiosyncratic features of the Egyptian political landscape and fail to explain similar events in other cases in Eastern Europe, Africa, and South America. An approach that takes into account the mechanisms linking the authoritarian past to the events surrounding founding elections offers not only an explanation for events in Egypt but also illuminates comparative cases of founding elections more generally. The book uses comparative process tracing to excavate the mechanisms at play in Egypt and then test them in five comparative cases, linking the authoritarian political ecosystem to the outcome of founding elections.

In this chapter, I show that existing theories of colonial legacies in South Asia cannot explain the full spatial variation of Maoist control in India. I engage with alternate explanations by Verghese (2016) and Iyer (2010) and show empirical and conceptual weaknesses in their arguments. Different types of colonial indirect rule created the ethnic inequalities and weak state capacity that are exploited by the Maoist rebels to foment insurgency and need to be included in the theoretical framework to explain this spatial variation. I develop a general theoretical framework of how colonial indirect rule can create opportunity structures in the form of weak state, ethnic mobilization networks in the form of excluded ethnic groups with grievances, and how these structural conditions are then exploited by rebel leaders who provide ideological frames of rebellion to start and sustain rebellion. While none of these conditions is sufficient to produce rebellion, rebel agency in the form of ideological frames in conjunction with such opportunity structures and ethnic networks is a jointly sufficient condition to explain insurgency. My theory conceptualizes rebellion as part of a long-term process of state formation unlike the current myopic frameworks of civil war theory.

This chapter examines the complexity of rights-claiming in South Korea related to the violence on Jeju Island around April 3, 1948. The Jeju case demonstrates that rights claiming and counterclaiming over seventy years shaped the transitional justice process, which can be divided into four distinct periods according to the nature and dynamics of rights claims and counterclaims. I find that rights claims by both sides were not made in a vacuum but within a thick layer of existing discourses and narratives, colored by existing power structures. Over the decades, interesting dynamics of claim diversification and frame resonance occurred depending on the opportunity structures in a particular time and space. I found that rights claims diversify when the counterclaims are strong and the opportunity structure opens up. In addition, frame resonance influences the effectiveness of rights claims.

Chapter 4 focuses on the Russian case, showing that even weakly organized oppositions can influence electoral outcomes. The chapter demonstrates how central concepts in social movement theory, social movement organizations, opportunity structure, and mobilizing frames also influence the information environment in which elections are held. The narrative illustrates that between 2008 and 2011, the Russian opposition altered popular perception by creating a coalition across different types of protest groups. It also underscores that the opposition’s unwillingness and inability to work with labor organizations limited the reach of the nascent movement and precluded cross-class coalition that is central to regime breakthrough. Nonetheless, these changes generated new information about the structure and reach of opposition as the 2011 election approached. The regime response included organizing new, state-sponsored organization, the articulation of competing frames, and the judicious use of repression. While these efforts shored up core regime support they failed to stifle opposition signals and may have demonstrated growing fears as the next election cycle approached.

This chapter examines the forces that produced Indonesia’s highly mobilized but politically independent labor movement. It describes the authoritarian legacies that shaped the first phase of its evolution when the labor movement had no choice but to use street politics as its primary weapon in the struggle for more worker-friendly labor policy. In a second phase, new opportunities opened by the decentralization process led unions to experiment with electoral engagement. The focus of these efforts was at the local level where union activists backed executive candidates from many different parties, pragmatically trading their political support for pro-labor measures. In a third phase, unions drew on their past organizational learning and experimentation to extend their electoral engagement to the legislative arena. Reluctant to tie themselves directly to a single party, union strategists chose to place union cadres on legislative tickets of many different political parties. Autonomous electoral participation now complemented street politics as central features of labor’s political strategy.