Contentious Politics as a Causal Variable

In its multiple guises and forms, contentious politics has long been a shared obsession in the sister subfields of comparative politics and political sociology. Yet scholars almost uniformly treat contentious collective events such as civil wars, strikes, riots, protests, electoral violence, insurgencies, and revolutions as outcomes to be explained – not as forces that help explain political outcomes in their own right. What Kasza wrote more than a decade ago about researchers’ neglect of warfare as a motor of politics holds doubly true when we consider the literature on contentious politics more broadly. Contentious politics receives far more attention as a product than as a producer of political phenomena.

This book has offered a theoretical framework for studying the politics that contentious politics produces. It has hopefully shown that a steadfast focus on contentious politics as a causal variable can bear surprisingly diverse analytic fruit. In ordinary times, to be sure, elites command the political process. No theory of politics can ignore the fact that, even in the healthiest and most representative democracies, elected politicians and appointed bureaucrats enjoy considerable day-to-day latitude in how they conduct a nation's political business. Yet politics in ordinary times is profoundly shaped by the legacies of politics in extraordinary times. Wherever the masses have made their collective and contentious presence felt on the national political stage, ruling elites cannot easily ignore the vivid lessons of that past experience for how they govern in the present.