In this chapter, we focus on the meso- and micro-levels of social organisation, below the macro-levels discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. We first discuss social network theory, including crucial concepts such as ties, density and multiplexity, and explain the relationship with innovation diffusion and norm enforcement. We then explore to what extent social network theory can be applied to historical situations, distinguishing between functional and emotional ties. Examples and case studies of historical network studies are taken from English and Afrikaans. The chapter also discusses related models such as coalitions and communities, in particular, communities of practice, text communities and discourse communities. The final part of the chapter addresses individual variation and style shifting on the basis of examples from English and German data.

During 1969, growing GI dissent intersected with movement outreach and the opening of new coffeehouses to expand civilian/military collaboration. More government leaders publicly supported antiwar activism. The Woodstock festival was the most visible sign of increased overlap between political and cultural dissent. Various elements of the movement coalesced into the most spectacular outpouring of antiwar passion in the nation’s history during the October Moratorium. Repression of the antiwar movement escalated under the Nixon administration. Activists faced local red squads and vigilante attacks on GI coffeehouses, as well as administration threats against the media, conspiracy trials, and intelligence agencies using COINTELPRO and Operation CHAOS. The president’s fear of stimulating additional antiwar sentiment contributed to his decision to keep secret his expansion of the air war into Cambodia. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger met with various dissenting groups to buy additional time. Once Nixon developed his Vietnamization policy, it forced the movement to adapt to new circumstances, but local grassroots activism and conventional dissent persisted.

Richard Nixon stimulated the greatest antiwar activity in 1970 with the Cambodian invasion. Massive student protests in the spring grew spontaneously and by fall many campus activists channeled their energy into electoral campaigns. Liberal groups joined them. Government leaders, especially in the US Senate, tried unsuccessfully to restrict the war’s continuation. Leftists and radicals made a splash through the spring New Mobilization demonstrations and with the reemergence of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, but by year’s end the coalition split along ideological lines. By late 1970, mass demonstrations planned by umbrella coalitions were giving way to events conducted by single sponsors. This also reduced the movement’s radical presence. From this point antiwar activism appeared more locally and regionally, even as it retained national impact. Local actions, such as during the national student strike, often appeared and operated without waiting for national coordinating bodies to catch up. Most antiwar events occurred on college campuses and in local communities, not in Washington, DC, and they continued even when the lack of national demonstrations made it appear inactive.

“Alignment” is an umbrella term to describe a relationship between two or more states that involves mutual expectations of some degree of policy coordination on security issues under certain conditions in the future. The types of alignment explored in this chapter are alliances, thin and thick security institutions, coalitions, and strategic partnerships. The distinguishing features of these alignments are their differing levels of formality and the reason for their creation, or their objectives. Strategic alignments remain one of the dominant means that sovereign states possess to cooperate and coordinate their actions around common threats and political interests. States are either pulled into distrustful relations through security dilemmas or they are obliged to work together to solve common problems. Alliances, security institutions, coalitions, and strategic partnerships offer a variety of ways that states may seek to address security issues, threats, or challenges to their territories or interests.

Social networks are a valuable object of investigation in historical sociolinguistics, as they can contribute both to the onset of change and to the maintenance of linguistic norms. However, their characteristics make them complex to analyse, as their intrinsic variability may hinder the identification of phenomena that span different networks across time and space. This chapter is focused on Late Modern English materials, to present new resources through which network contiguities can be studied; this is the case, for instance, with the exchanges of emigrants, political activists, scholars and business correspondents. After addressing a few methodological issues, the chapter presents an overview of the materials at hand and outlines how networks and coalitions have had an impact, not only on the usage of participants (as shown in recent studies) but also on how language has been perceived, described and codified.

Chapter 6 investigates a setting with a narrow policy scope and low expectations. Unlike their Brazilian counterparts, Chilean mayors are not expected to implement important policies; the national government controls most public goods provision. Consistent with the book’s theory regarding settings with low expectations, mayors in Chile enjoy an incumbency advantage. The chapter also establishes that the ayors’ ability to obtain a return from holding office hinges on fiscal transfers and public goods spending. Chile also offers a natural experiment for examining theoretical expectations about the sources of personal versus partisan incumbency bias. During the most recent electoral cycle, some mayors were subject to term limits, while others were allowed to seek reelection. The chapter analyzes the impact of this institutional change using a differences-in-differences design. The results suggest that Chilean mayors’ incumbency advantage is strictly personal, as the theory predicts for settings with personalistic parties.

• ◦ This case study illustrates how a particular auction design, used for public procurement, can unintentionally provide fertile ground for bidding rings.

• ◦ Essentially, the average bid auction format awards the contract to the bidder whose bid is nearest to the average bid. The average bid auction format has been advocated in order to prevent contracts being awarded to bidders with unrealistically low bids that might result in low quality or ex post renegotiation.

• ◦ This case study shows how it facilitates collusion. The setting is the tendering of public work projects in Turin, Italy over 2000–2003 where subgroups of construction firms formed cartels and coordinated their bids to enhance their chance of winning the contract at an inflated price.

• ◦ To understand the ease with which bidders can collude when participating in an average bid auction, suppose the current expectation (in the absence of coordination) is that firms bid aggressively. In order to have a chance to win, a firm would have to submit a relatively low bid in order for it to be close to the average bid. Now consider firms forming a cartel. All they need to do is agree to submit high prices. That will reap higher profits and without the temptation to deviate as is present with the usual auction design where the contract is awarded to the lowest bidder. A firm that thinks about submitting a lower bid will move its bid farther away from the average bid and thus reduce its chances of winning. Once firms agree to submit high bids, such an agreement is self-enforcing. The average bid auction format thus makes collusion more likely because cartel stability is so easy to maintain.

• ◦ The case study also explores an incentive for a subset of firms to form its own coalition in order to increase their chances of winning. If it comprises enough firms, they can move the average bid up or down in a manner to cause their bids to be closer to the average bid than the bids of firms outside of their coalition. As a result, a collection of bidders can respond to a coalition by forming its own coalition. The proliferation of these coalitions is well documented for the Turin case.

• ◦ This understanding of cartel conduct is used to develop a marker for collusion based on the frequency of joint participation.

This chapter traces how, in an increasingly unstable domestic and regional context, the ruling coalition of religion and secular nationalists promoted a “Turkish-Islamist Synthesis 2.0” (TIS 2.0). This agenda infused the anti-pluralist, Turkish-Islamic synthesis of the 1980s with an attempt to Islamicize public life. Such efforts culminated in a major critical juncture: abandonment of Turkey’s 150-year-old parliamentary tradition for an executive presidency.

The consolidation of the TIS 2.0 enlivened resistance among diverse groups who came together in the seventh major pluralizing coalition since the late Ottoman period. Coalescing around multiple – but not always compatible – visions of living in diversity, the coalition brought together pro-secular Turks on the right and left including municipal actors, youth, women and LGBTQ+ activists, ethnic and religious minorities, and environmentalists, among others. Innovating frames for political, religious, ethnic, and gender pluralism, the coalition registered a major success, retaking city governments in the 2019 elections, an outcome it repeated in 2024.

This chapter grapples with a major tension in interdisciplinary Turkish/Middle Eastern area studies, comparative politics, and the study of religion and politics: namely, how to deal with the persistence of Orientalist explanations despite their explanatory poverty. It does so via an intellectual history, identifying three “waves” or logics via which analysts and practitioners have sought to reckon with Orientalist binaries and their limitations. The chapter argues that today, a third wave within which this project is situated, seeks to dispense with Orientalism and Occidentalism alike toward making clear-eyed sense of the complex, interacting forces that shape politics in Muslim-majority countries, like anywhere else.