This article explores the role of informal customary institutions (usos y costumbres) in local public goods provision in Mexico. It argues that the presence of informal customary institutions offers submunicipal village communities considerable advantages in local distributive politics. Hamlet communities with dense customary institutions have higher collective action capacity to organize their citizens for small-scale protests in municipal centers, which grants them access to more social infrastructure projects controlled by municipal politicians. This article therefore suggests a novel theoretical mechanism through which customary institutions affect development outcomes: collective contentious action. The study tests the main empirical implications of this theory, drawing on an original survey of submunicipal community presidents in the states of Puebla and Tlaxcala and qualitative interviews.

This article comparatively analyzes the strategies and political impact of “pro-life” and feminist movements in the struggle over abortion policy in Mexico. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, it argues that anti-abortion movements are more likely to influence policymaking in contexts where they can tap into hegemonic religious institutions’ networks and alliances and indirectly provide incumbents with legitimizing moral and financial support in exchange for restrictive reforms. Partisan contexts shape incumbents’ need for such support. Feminist activists, by contrast, have neither elite connections nor access to similar mobilization resources. To make this argument, the analysis examines pro-life and feminist movements in two Mexican states: Yucatán, where Congress passed a restrictive reform; and Hidalgo, where an identical initiative failed.

This article examines organized opposition to feminist and LGBTI political projects in Colombia. Although there is a large body of literature on feminist movements and a growing literature on LGBTI movements, there is little research on resistance to them. Through an intersectional feminist lens, this study analyzes the “anti-gender” campaign organized against the gender perspective in Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement to demonstrate the limitations of backlash theory and certain normative understandings of human rights. In contrast to assumptions that backlash is predetermined, the study demonstrates that the anti-gender mobilization against the peace agreement was circumstantial rather than inevitable. To highlight the productive nature of backlash, it traces how opponents employed human rights rhetoric to establish an alternative present and promote an imagined future rooted in exclusion and repression. In addition, it shows that mobilized backlash against feminist and LGBTI movements does not necessarily decelerate or reverse the respective movements’ agendas.

Brian Leftow continues to argue against my use of the constitution relation in explaining the Trinity. I consider his arguments, and have a bit more to say about Leftow's own formulation of trinitarian doctrine.

Graham Oppy has criticized several Thomistic versions of the cosmological argument in a series of publications over the years, most recently in a Religious Studies article responding to my book Five Proofs of the Existence of God. Here I reply to his criticisms, arguing that while Oppy raises important issues, a besetting weakness of his approach is a failure adequately to grapple with the metaphysical underpinnings of the arguments.

This article presents an analysis of the use of populist framing mechanisms by grassroots right-wing organizations. It brings together the social movement literature on framing and the populist literature to understand how actors build an emergent field of activism in a highly contentious context. Based on the analysis of a sample of 4,574 Facebook posts published by 5 civil society organizations during the campaign to oust Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, it argues that two mechanisms, reductionism and antagonism, enabled actors to focus on similar targets and diagnostics while maintaining relevant differences when seeking to motivate followers and present prognostic frames. These were key mechanisms used by all the actors, albeit with different contents, depending on the frame task. This article contributes to filling gaps in the framing and populist literatures and sheds light on the relevance of populist communication in the rise of right-wing activism.

The battles of the Pacific War formally ended between mid-August and early September, 1945. However, the declarations of peace and surrender ceremonies that occurred during this time did not end informal battles across the Asian continent. Renegade Japanese military personnel refused to lay down their arms and repatriate quietly to their country. Some combed the waters between Japan and Korea in search of returnees attempting to repatriate with financial and material means in excess of that which the United States military governments allowed. Others sought to disrupt the occupation process by patrolling the streets of Korean cities and engaging in illegal and often violent activities. Koreans also caused problems by joining the Japanese in their postwar adventures or by harassing Japanese preparing to return to Japan and the Korean sympathizers who attempted to help them. Reportage of such actions appeared in the G-2 Periodic Report, which kept a daily record of such actions. These documents today open windows into the chaotic situation that the postwar era brought to Japanese and Koreans. Primarily through these reports, this paper sees the postwar belligerence that continued beyond official declarations of cease fire and peace in 1945 as kindling that sparked the broader conflicts of the late 1940s, and evolved to all-out war from the summer of 1950.

What explains ideological congruence between citizens and political parties? Although the literature on congruence has recently provided some answers to this question, most of these works have focused on the effect of systemic and partisan factors. They have paid less attention to the effect of people’s characteristics on ideological congruence, which is built by the interaction between citizens’ positions on public issues and those of the political parties that represent them. Our general research hypothesis is that party-voter congruence is stronger when parties reduce the uncertainty about their ideological positions and citizens can understand these signals better. Analysis of Latin American data supports this hypothesis, showing that people’s cognitive ability, specifically education and political knowledge, has a positive effect on party-voter ideological congruence. Moreover, this relationship is moderated by parties’ attributes, such as ideological ambiguity and radicalism.

Improving knowledge about African historical demography is essential to addressing current population trends and achieving deeper understanding of social, economic, and political change in the past and present. I use census and parish register data from Tanganyika to address the origins of twentieth-century population growth, to describe how major changes in fertility and child mortality began in the 1940s, and to emphasise the significance of the large rise in fertility between the 1940s and 1970s. Through this work and my wider survey of parish registers in Malawi, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zambia, I consider the relationships between power, evidence, and meaning in these data sources. Alongside the macro gaps in Africa's population history are significant microsilences — lacunae in the sources and data which reflect the hegemonic structures within which they were produced. I suggest a moral demography approach to their analysis, borrowing from the reflexive and dialectic method found in studies of moral economy.