In the early nineteenth century the idea of self-making emerged along America’s many frontiers: western lands and growing cities; plus political, commercial, technological, cultural, material, communication, and religious frontiers. These all beckoned, demanding new choices and encouraging new feelings of self-agency. As before, the label “self-made” could point to a flawed person who had gone astray. However, use of the idea of “self-made” began to shift toward positive connotations that sanctified individualism and ambition if applied to religious, social, or patriotic service. Storytellers who grasped that connection transformed self-seeking and ambition from dangers into bulwarks against aristocracy’s evils. Competitors for political power told stories of self-improvement, self-fashioning, and self-making to align themselves with progress for their nation. Electoral politics increasingly induced ambitious candidates to claim that they had risen from lowly origins by their own efforts. Frontier tales of spirited heroes, such as Andrew Jackson and David Crockett, appealed to audiences who appreciated a rough-and-ready masculinity that the Founders had disdained.

Over the last few decades, the concept of Indigeneity has gained traction in Cambodia and Thailand, partially because of its potential to assist Indigenous Peoples in gaining more control over contested lands and forests. The Cambodian government recognizes Indigenous Peoples and their communal land titles. Since 2009, when a sub-decree was issued for registering Indigenous communities and their lands, dozens of villages in northeastern Cambodia have obtained communal land titles. The government of Thailand, however, does not officially recognize the existence of Indigenous Peoples. Nevertheless, the concept of Indigenous Peoples is gaining support in Thailand. Over the last few years, Indigenous activists in both countries have increasingly engaged in electoral politics. The Cambodia Indigenous Peoples’ Democracy Party (CIPDP) contested the commune and national elections of 2017 and 2018, respectively. In Thailand, Indigenous activists have also become more involved in electoral politics, especially during the 2019 national elections, when the first ethnic Hmong person was elected to Parliament. This Indigenous engagement in electoral politics represents a new strategy to gain more cultural and language rights at the legislative level, as well as tenure over land and other natural resources.

This chapter explores the link between eternity clauses and electoral democracy by looking at two instances of unamendable democracy: party bans, both direct and indirect, and the protection of parliamentary mandates. These two approaches are illustrated via a range of case studies: the ban of anti-democratic parties in Germany; bans of ethnic, separatist, and religious parties in Turkey; indirect unamendability and its chilling effect on party competition in Israel; and the judicial protection of parliamentary mandates as unamendable in Czechia. Whereas such measures are adopted in the name of protecting democracy, the analysis here indicates that courts will not always strike the right balance between safeguarding and unduly narrowing democratic commitments. In some cases, they may even unintentionally undermine multipartyism itself or significantly influence electoral outcomes. Thus, the bluntness and open-ended nature of unamendability risks having a chilling effect on electoral democracy in both fragile and more stable democratic contexts.

Chapter 7 identifies and tests implications of the argument for contemporary Brazilian politics. Specifically, I test whether black identifiers with high levels of education exhibit distinct patterns of behavior, mainly in the electoral arena. I compile and analyze high-quality election survey data collected by reputable domestic firms between 2002 and 2018 and show that highly educated, black voters have become a loyal leftist constituency, rallying consistently around the leftist Workers’ Party since 2002. These voters are more ideologically leftist than either their lesser-educated black or better-educated white counterparts. This pattern holds even in the face of political instability stemming from major corruption scandals in 2005 and 2015, as well as the rise of far-right populist leader Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. This chapter illustrates the expectations of the policy feedback literature, showing that policy reforms “feed back” into the political process by altering the identities, interests, and behavior of citizens.

Asylum seekers, the war in Iraq, and the threat of terrorism dominated foreign policy in the first years of the twenty-first century not only in the political arena but also in the polls. Not since the 1980s and the debate about Asian immigrants had questions of immigration loomed so large; not since the Vietnam War had the deployment of Australian troops in a US-led invasion of a distant land proved so divisive; and never before had Australia had to grapple with the threat of international terrorism. Border protection and terrorism figured prominently in the run-up to the 2001 election; security issues and, to a lesser extent, the war in Iraq were factors in the election held in 2004.

Regional interests and tensions are manifest in regional bloc voting in multiparty elections (1990s–2010s). We present an electoral geography analysis of constituency-level voting in presidential elections in twelve countries from 1990 to 2015 (44 elections). We describe the economic attributes of the electoral blocs using forty rounds of DHS surveys for geocoded education and ethnicity data, nighttime luminosity, historical maps of producer regions, and raster data for population densities and contemporary crop production profiles. Most electoral blocs arise in rural regions that are wealthier, better educated, more densely populated, and more deeply incorporated into the national economy than other rural areas. Most are specialized in high-value export crops (or traded food crops.) Some have nonagricultural production profiles as labor-exporting or mining regions. Most coalesce within provincial-level administrative units. Almost all are multiethnic. The evidence is consistent with the argument that state institutions work to channel politics arising from uneven economic development into the national political arena. Microlevel mechanisms contributing to this outcome are related to interests, organizations, ideology, and actions of political agents and coalition-builders.

This chapter considers the structure of territorial cleavage from a national perspective. It focuses on patterns of polarization between regional electoral blocs, or “territorial oppositions,” in national politics. Axes of territorial cleavage arising between predominantly rural regions tend to take canonical forms associated with core–periphery politics in countries that are undergoing national economic integration and the growth of the central state. Stable axes of sectional competition, whereby leading regions square off against each other or against those on the periphery, are visible in the electoral data and in persistent policy cleavages in countries in this study. In broad outlines, these conform to models of territorial opposition in national politics advanced by earlier scholars (Lipset & Rokkan 1967; Gourevitch 1979; Bayart 2013). The analysis is built around four countries – Kenya, Zambia, Malawi, and Uganda – that serve as archetypes of different patterns of territorial opposition and core–periphery politics. Tanzania is a shadow case.

Although liberals and conservatives tended to disagree about the specific ways in which the franchise might be expanded, both parties accepted by 1860 that reform was inevitable. Yet to whom should the vote be extended and on what basis? These questions animated discussions within and outside the House of Commons. They also informed significant works of nonfiction in this decade, including several of John Stuart Mill’s most important writings, as well poetry and fiction, including many of Anthony Trollope’s parliamentary novels. This chapter constellates Mill’s speculative thought and Trollope’s fiction in order to consider the persistent tensions between thought and feeling that are constitutive features of Victorian liberalism itself.

Modern Thai constitutionalism, though often meaningful and rich in form and substance, has experienced great volatility since its inception in 1932. At the same time, behind the twenty constitutions that have emerged since then, some recurring ideal-typical figurations that have dominated certain periods of constitutional politics in Thailand can be observed. These historically derived ideal-typical notions of constitutional politics mostly represent inherently hegemonic conceptions. They are defined for instance by how they conceive western and autochthonous elements of constitutionalism, majoritarian electoral politics and the monarchy, the rule of law and authoritarian governance by men. This chapter explores some of the most significant historical experiences and ensuing figurations of Thai constitutionalism that together form a rich reservoir of different, sometimes diverging notions to understand and practice constitutional governance in Thailand.