Liberal moments and democracy’s durability: Comparing global outbreaks of democracy—1918, 1945, 1989

Conclusion Liberal Moments are constructed by ideational as well as more materials phenomena; by the crisis situations of war, the moments of peace that follow, and the liberal norms at play at each junsture. Understanding Liberal Moments is crucial to understanding the development of the international syaytem in the 20th century and the prospects for democracy or dictatorship across polities. These Moments have been times of heady enthusiasm, when the most liberal ambitions of key actors in the world community have been put forward. The patterns and extent of their unraveling are key indicators of the character of national politics thereafter. Daniel M. Green is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware. His writings have appeared inDemocratization, Governance, Humboldt Journal of Social Research, and theReview of African Political Economy. He is currently finishing a book on the politics of economic reform in Ghana and editing a volume entitledConstructivist Comparative Politics: Theoretical Issues and Case Studies.     

The Enduring Effects of Social Pressure: Tracking Campaign Experiments Over a Series of Elections

Recent field experiments have demonstrated the powerful effect of social pressure messages on voter turnout. This research note considers the question of whether these interventions’ effects persist over a series of subsequent elections. Tracking more than one million voters from six experimental studies, we find strong and statistically significant enduring effects one and sometimes two years after the initial communication.     

Making sense of communitarianism: the Bolivian experience

In Bolivia, the state and society is undergoing radical transformations. The indigenous movements have revitalised traditions such as communitarianism, and ‘communitarian development’ has come to the forefront of Bolivian politics. The aim of this article is to identify what communitarian development means in the Bolivian context; how it is conceived and how it is practiced. I examine how communitarian development is conceptualised in the Aymara indigenous movement and in policy documents, and analyse what communitarianism might mean to people who uphold such values. I identify and discuss five different but intertwined significations; communitarian economy, communitarian work, communitarian management, communitarian law and communitarian values. I show that Bolivian communitarianism contains conceptualisations of cultural phenomena, which emerge at the nexus of experiences and expectations for the future, and argue that, despite tensions and pitfalls, communitarian development has the potential to increase indigenous wellbeing and agency and to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of what communitarianism is, or could be.