This article develops a political articulation-based explanation of divergence in democratic inclusion between two champions of liberal democracy in Latin America: Chile and Uruguay. Political articulation scholars depart from the traditional reflection models of political parties as mere expression of preexisting social cleavages, highlighting the relative autonomy of parties’ practices and their strategic role in structuring state-society relations. My work extends this current trend in comparative-historical sociology to the Latin American Left turn after the demise of the market-fundamentalist Washington Consensus, empirically identifying a set of strategies that boost Left parties’ capacity to articulate on a specifically class basis. These strategies, I argue, are endowed with causal efficacy, driving democratic variation beyond the restrictions and opportunities of the institutional environment. Combining process tracing account of historical sequences with my own analyses of labor statistics, protest events, and party linkages and manifestos, I show that differences in Left parties’ ability to build linkages with labor and advance its institutional representation as a class actor are at the root of the divergence in political inclusion between these two countries. This finding has substantial implications for contemporary democratic theory: after neoliberalism, strongly organized mass parties of the Left may not be a necessary condition for a given democracy’s stability and consolidation, but they may be a sufficient condition for a particular democracy’s realization of the normative ideal of political equality.

The article links the digital records of individual proprietors in the manuscript censuses 1851–81 for the whole of England and Wales using the BBCE database to identify career changes of employers and own account proprietors. It investigates continuing proprietorship, entry to business from previous activity, and switching out of business. The article identifies the effects on switching of demography, gender, household relationships, sector markets, and opportunity/necessity measured by location and access to railways. Previous analysis of nineteenth-century proprietor careers has been based mainly on local case studies and large firms. This article allows examination across the spectrum of small and large businesses for a representative sample large enough to generalize to the behavior of the whole population. The analysis shows a larger proportion of flows between employer, own account, and worker status than often expected, indicating a relatively open and flexible Victorian economy, and higher than in the modern United Kingdom. Farm and nonfarm activities show contrasted patterns, with farm proprietors more stable with less switching, as to be expected. Switching appears to have slowed slightly over time, with incumbency increasing for both farm and nonfarm employers, and for both men and women, but own account proprietorship was often relatively ephemeral. The article assesses the factors influencing switching using logistic regression. This confirms age, sex, marital status, family position, location, and sector as significant for explaining switching/nonswitching. The results demonstrate that although open and flexible, proprietorship was highly varied between sectors, with changes of railway accessibility mainly significant for farmers.

Debates about patterns of time use in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain go back to the seminal work of E. P. Thompson in the 1960s. But the lack of systematic evidence means that many of these questions remain unresolved. In an attempt to advance those debates, this essay uses three catalogs of political events to reconstruct the working week in Britain over the long nineteenth century. Three patterns emerge. First, observance of Saint Monday appears to have been widespread in the early nineteenth century before declining slowly in the mid-1800s, a process that happened faster in factory towns than elsewhere. This finding supports the orthodox narrative about Saint Monday against its recent challengers (in particular Hans-Joachim Voth). Second, I find that political organizers in the early nineteenth century were reluctant to profane the Sabbath by arranging public meetings on Sundays, but that this came to an end during the heyday of Chartism. Third, these catalogs also provide some, more speculative, evidence that the working day and the working week became more ordered as the nineteenth century wore on.

This study provides a novel analysis of occupational stratification in Sierra Leone from a historical perspective. By employing census data for early-nineteenth-century colonial Sierra Leone, the present study offers a valuable snapshot of a colony characterized by a heterogenous population of indigenous and migratory origin. The study shows that an association between colonial group categorization and socioeconomic status existed despite the colony being of very recent foundation implying a hierarchical structure of the society. Although Europeans and “mulattoes” occupied most high-status positions, as common in the colonies, indigenous immigrants were also represented in high socioeconomic strata thanks to the opportunities stemming from long- and short-distance trading. However, later arrivals, especially liberated slaves, belonged within the lowest socioeconomic strata of the society and worked as farmers or unskilled labor, suggesting that the time component may also have influence socioeconomic opportunities.

In the United States, tax favoritism—an approach that has weakened the extractive capacity of the federal government by providing tax loopholes and preferences for taxpayers—has remained since the 1930s. It has consumed the amount of tax revenue the government can spend and therefore weakened the possibility of the redistribution of fiscal resources. It has also made the federal tax system complicated and inequitable, resulting in undermining taxpayer consent. Therefore, since the 1930s, a tax reform to create a simple, fair, and equitable federal income tax system with the capacity to raise revenue has been long overdue. Many scholars have evaluated the Tax Reform Act of 1969 (TRA69), which Richard M. Nixon signed into law on December 30, 1969, as one of the most successful steps toward accomplishing this goal. This article demonstrates that TRA69 left tax favoritism in the United States. Furthermore, it points out that TRA69 turned taxpayers against the idea of federal taxation, a shift in public perception that greatly impacted tax reform in the years to follow.

Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis, this article presents a systematic comparison of differences in the institutional success of sociology in 25 European countries during the academic expansion from 1945 until the late 1960s. Combining context-sensitive national histories of sociology, concept formation, and formal analyses of necessary and sufficient conditions, the article searches for historical explanations for both successful and inhibited processes of the institutionalization of sociology. Concretely, it assesses the interplay of political regime types, the continuous presence of sociological prewar traditions, political Catholicism, and the effects of sociological communities in neighboring countries and how their various combinations are related to more or less well-established sociologies. The results can help explain adversary effects under democratic conditions as well as supportive factors under nondemocratic conditions.

Family systems shape social institutions, yet they are rarely considered in histories of economic development. In this article, we show that a suite of social conventions—such as age gaps at marriage, bride price, sequestration, and discrimination and violence against women—are overrepresented in polygamous societies as compared to monogamous societies. This dichotomy can be explained on the grounds that polygamy produces a chronic scarcity of marriageable females. We argue that this suite, which we call gamos and which we quantify by two different methods, has demonstrably significant consequences for social, institutional, and economic development.

The 1960s-era, Nashville nonviolent civil rights movement—with its iconic lunch counter sit-ins—was not only an exemplary local movement that dismantled Jim Crow in downtown public accommodations. It was by design the chief vehicle for the intergenerational mentoring and training of activists that led to a dialogical diffusion of nonviolence praxis throughout the Southern civil rights movement of this period. In this article, we empirically derive from oral-history interviews with activists and archival sources a new “intergenerational model of movement mobilization” and assess its contextual and bridge-leading sustaining factors. After reviewing the literatures on dialogical diffusion and bridge building in social movements, we describe the model and its sustaining conditions—historical, demographic, and spatial conditions—and conclude by presenting a research agenda on the sustainability and generalizability of the Nashville model.

What social conditions produce positivism? One position, common to both positivists and some of their major critics, suggests that positivism is an “ideology” or “worldview” of industrial capitalism. Positivism therefore resonates with the basic experience of capitalism for all social groups. Intellectuals draw on this experience in formulating positivist social science. A second position suggests that positivism is a strategy of distinction by which intellectuals attempt to accumulate symbolic capital against their rivals. This position suggests that positivism is a resource for establishing a social science that imitates the methodology of natural science. Our article argues for a third view focused on the internal structure of the intelligentsia as a social group. Positivism could emerge in both industrial capitalist and preindustrial contexts; however, the types of positivism differ in these two cases because the structure of the intelligentsia differs. In preindustrial contexts, such as nineteenth-century Italy, which is the focus of our analysis, positivists claim an ontological continuity between natural and social sciences. In industrial contexts, on the basis of which most theories of positivism rest, positivists claim a methodological similarity between natural and social sciences. We conclude our analysis by reflecting on the implications of our study for work on positivism and social ontology in the social sciences.

The historical-comparative study of social democracy and cooperative organization are the foster children of historical sociology. This article offers a first account of systematic ideological differences in social-democratic ideology regarding private ownership and different cooperative traditions in the housing sphere of Northern European and continental German-speaking countries. The long-run trajectory of housing welfare regimes in these two country groups has been one of divergence: Nordic countries have moved to Anglo-Saxon levels of high homeownership, high levels of mortgage indebtedness, and house price increases, whereas private tenancy, lower indebtedness, and lower price increases still characterize their German counterparts. Based on historical case studies of Germany and Norway, we argue that the divergence in these two countries can be understood by the different social-democratic and cooperative solutions to the urban housing question from the 1920s onward. Supported by a pro-ownership social democracy, Norway started to develop housing cooperatives of the owner cooperative type, whereas German social democracy was in favor of associations of the tenant cooperative type. The differential growth of these two types of cooperatives and disparities in social democratic party ideology contributed to the urban housing divergence between the two country groups that has been observed ever since. We argue, more generally, that varieties of social democracy and welfare-anticipating cooperative organizations are important in helping us understand the welfare differences between countries.

Travel is an essential part of everyday life for most people, and it inevitably brings inconvenience at times, but women have often experienced particular and distinctive constraints and harassments while traveling that may inhibit or reduce their mobility. However, we know relatively little in detail about how, why, and how much women traveled in the past. This article provides new evidence about female mobility in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain by analyzing the daily movements that were recorded in the personal diaries of nine young women. The diary entries show that all the women traveled frequently both alone and with others, used a variety of transport technologies that were available at the time, and rarely recorded incidents that caused them concern or alarm. Mobility was not only essential for carrying out everyday activities but it was also central to the development of friendships and, especially, courting. Both social class and location did have some influence on the ways in which the young women traveled, on their freedom to travel alone, and on the inconveniences they faced. However, overall, the similarities between the experiences of the nine diarists were much greater than the differences. Although it is not possible to generalize widely from just nine accounts, these diaries do provide new insights into female mobility in the past.

The initial period of construction of the Spanish railway network is often criticized for its radial structure, centered on Madrid. In this article, the authors describe the role of the state during the initial stage of railway network construction and confirm that although the political will to construct a centralist network certainly influenced its morphology, other social and economic criteria were also influential. With regard to the political motives behind the radial network, the authors argue that part of this interest could have come in response to perceived needs to strengthen the presence of the Spanish state throughout its national territory and to promote a process of state-building. Finally, it must be stressed that the central hypothesis of our article is that the radial structure of the network was a natural consequence of the strategic geographical position of the country’s capital and of the distribution of economic activity within Spanish territory. The article proposes two methodological approaches for evaluating the extent to which the radial design of the network was justified, bearing in mind the locations of Spain’s most productive regions. The results of these two exercises suggest that the radial configuration with which the Spanish rail network was originally designed probably arose naturally as a result of the distribution of economic activity within the country and of the relative advantage that this bestowed on certain regions due to their geographic position.

This collection of articles combines a set of works that study the contribution of transport infrastructure to the process of state building in different countries in Western and Central Europe. The focus and the themes treated vary, but have two common denominators: firstly, they are based on either completely original, or previously little-used, primary sources; and secondly, each work reveals new ways of interpreting how transport networks have shaped the territories into which they were introduced. Each article is an example of the wealth of potential approaches available and also helps us to interpret the processes involved in state building, which are a necessary precedent to European Integration (EI). To put the seven works that make up this special issue into context, I shall start this introduction by examining three aspects that complement them. I shall firstly clarify what we mean by EI. Secondly, I shall examine whether EI processes existed prior to the creation of the institutions that were set up after World War II to promote integration. Then, thirdly, and finally, based on the previous analyses, I shall look at the emergence of a railway network in Europe and the role that the European states played in this process. The fourth section will present the articles.

Conscription records are considered to be the best sources for studying heights over cohorts. This article discusses the various steps and selection mechanisms involved in the conscription system of the Netherlands, which was more or less similar to the systems found in other European countries. Starting with a birth cohort of 4,436 boys, we run a series of regressions on the likelihood to be registered at all and to have one’s height recorded. We discuss the effects of cohort attrition through mortality and migration, and explore familial, social, and religious reasons for evading registration and (medical) examination. We find various kinds of selections, but their effects on the distribution and averages of heights are limited. Thus, heights culled from conscripts records are indeed an excellent indicator of a cohort’s biological standard of living. However, researchers focusing on social variation in height need to be aware of the unequal opportunities to evade registration and measurement.

This article challenges the conventional view of veterans’ politics in the United States as an “iron triangle” or a “subgovernment,” terms that connote a low-profile field dominated by a small number of elite actors operating consensually behind closed doors. It shows instead that veterans’ affairs were at the center of a heated national debate to which both grassroots activists and national leaders contributed as part of a larger social movement, as demonstrated by the controversy over the First Hoover Commission. Created by Congress in 1947 to find ways to make the executive branch more efficient, the commission’s proposals to reform veterans’ affairs were all defeated by the countercampaign of the largest and most influential veterans’ group of the era, the American Legion. Former soldiers were not alone (they benefited from the assistance of key state actors such as the heads of the Veterans Administration and of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs) but their mobilization proved decisive. This episode shows that even veterans of World War II, traditionally seen as the most deserving cohort of former soldiers in US history (the “Greatest Generation”), had to organize to defend their benefits against attacks. The privileged position of veterans in the US welfare state is therefore less the result of their exalted cultural status (as is often presumed) than of their ability to mobilize politically and to override the preferences of significant numbers of public and private actors—just like any other group making claims on the state.

My presidential address identifies the pathways to disadvantage that complicate our understanding of purposive action. The article explains that (1) first, deception can deepen inequality; (2) disadvantages can emerge in midcourse, as new and unanticipated distributions of resources, sanctions, and opportunities unfold during the course of action; (3) the rules targeting one area of social life can disadvantage groups of people in other areas; and (4) disadvantaging policies can emerge through isomorphism (isomorphic disadvantage), sometimes by virtue of what other policy commissions across the globe are doing about the same social problem. Finally, (5) when there is an unlucky turn of events that leads to a deepening of disadvantage, its consequences depend on more than mere chance to make those disadvantages durable. My article concludes with a brief discussion of the implications for reparations and repair. While these pathways may not be exhaustive, they systematize the sociological intuition that things are not as they appear. And although my discussion of repair is brief, it gestures toward the possibilities that the past offers for understanding the process and the rules of remedy.

The societal integration of immigrants is a great concern in many of today’s Western societies, and has been so for a long time. Whether we look at Europe in 2015 or the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, large flows of immigrants pose challenges to receiving societies. While much research has focused on the socioeconomic integration of immigrants there has been less interest in their demographic integration, even though this can tell us as much about the way immigrants fare in their new home country. In this article we study the disparities in infant and child mortality across nativity groups and generations, using new, high-density census data. In addition to describing differentials and trends in child mortality among 14 immigrant groups relative to the native-born white population of native parentage, we focus special attention on the association between child mortality, immigrant assimilation, and the community-level context of where immigrants lived. Our findings indicate substantial nativity differences in child mortality, but also that factors related to the societal integration of immigrants explains a substantial part of these differentials. Our results also point to the importance of spatial patterns and contextual variables in understanding nativity differentials in child mortality.

This article measures inequality at the provincial level in Spain for different benchmark years between 1860 and 1930. It then empirically assesses the relationship between economic growth and inequality. The results confirm that, although growing incomes did not directly contribute to reducing inequality, at least during the early stages of modern economic growth, other processes associated with economic growth such as the rural exodus to urban and industrial centers, the demographic transition, and the spread of literacy, among others, notably improved the situation of the bottom part of the population.

This article focuses on large-scale petitioning campaigns, or petitionnementen as they were called, organized between 1828 and 1878, including contemporary reflections and debates on this new phenomenon. Although there were only a handful of petitionnementen, they had a remarkable impact—not only on the issues at hand but also on the balance of power between Crown, Cabinet, Parliament, and people. Mass petitions necessarily challenged the political system, whose legitimacy was based on elections under a limited franchise. Based on parliamentary reports, pamphlets, and other sources reflecting on petitioning in general and the petitionnementen more specifically, this article asks how petitioners claimed legitimacy, and how politicians and other observers responded to those claims. Special attention is given to the international context within which Dutch petitioning practices developed. The article focuses on three case studies, representing the major petitioning campaigns of this period: the Southern petition movements of 1828–1830 that were a catalyst for the Belgian revolution (thus reinforcing the association between mass petitioning and revolution), the Anti-Catholic “April Movement” of 1853, and the so-called People’s Petitionnement of 1878, against the liberal education law. Remarkably enough, in the Netherlands it was not progressive reformers, but most prominently conservative Orthodox Protestants who organized petitionnementen.

During the last 30 years, economic and social historians have collected and analyzed large amounts of anthropometric data to explore key aspects of the human past. Attention has also been devoted to the examination of factors that can exert an influence on stature. This article outlines the different ways in which climate might influence stature, either directly or indirectly. It then uses geographical information system software to explore the relationship between variations in temperature and precipitation and the average heights of men in France, India, Mexico, Spain, and the United States over the last two centuries. It is possible to observe an influence of climate on stature in some countries, especially during the nineteenth century, but the relationship weakens across time and largely disappears in recent decades. The attenuation of this relationship is attributed to a process of “technophysio evolution” as countries modernized and developed economically.