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Welcome to the official website of the Comparative and Historical Sociology section of the American Sociological Association. Please navigate the site using the contents bar to the left.

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CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR 2011 SECTION AWARD WINNERS!

Barrington Moore Book Award

David Garland, 2010. Peculiar Institution: America's Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Statement from award committee: David Garland's A Peculiar Institution offers a wide-ranging, elegantly written account and explanation of American "exceptionalism" with respect to the death penalty. It proceeds through critiquing that very notion of exceptionalism by demonstrating that from a long term comparative historical point of view, American developments were largely in step with those of other Western states and that the contemporary move towards abolition through non-implementation of death sentences parallels those other developments. At the same time, important differences remain and are convincingly explained by highlighting the localized, fragmented nature of American political institutions as well as the persistence of local racial hierarchies. These two peculiarities of American society explain how the death penalty came to serve as a substitute for and legalized transformation of lynchings by local mobs. The books develops this argument through a careful comparison of states within the US and of countries within the Western world, thus exploring the potential and promise of the comparative method to the fullest. It offers a brilliant combination of cultural, political-institutionalist, and historical analyses rather than a sermon, even though the topic lends itself so easily to the latter. Garland also makes important advancements on the theoretical front by building upon and at the same time transcending Foucault's theory of penal institutions. In its combination of narrative elegance, empirical depth and theoretical sophistication, the book stands out as a model of what comparative historical sociology can accomplish.

Honorable Mention:

Dan Slater, 2010. Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Statement from award committee: Ordering Power introduces a carefully developed, precise argument about the specific sorts and historical timing of contentious politics that lead elites to perceive and act on a sense of collective threat. Encompassing elite coalitions in turn provide the critical support for authoritarian regimes, which are then able to effectively extract resources and penetrate the territory through an integrated bureaucracy (as in Malaysia and Singapore). Other forms and sequences of contention lead to fragmented regimes (in the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam) or military rule (as in Indonesia or Burma). The analysis is based on a series of brilliantly and lucidly executed country comparisons, rather than the usual chapter-by-chapter case studies. The book speaks to, challenges and modifies a number of important theoretical arguments about state capacity and democratization. It opens up new territory for the comparative historical sociology by illuminating hitherto neglected South East Asian cases and providing a new framework for understanding post-colonial political development.

Best Article Award

Co-Winners:

Danielle Kane and Jung Mee Park, 2009. "The Puzzle of Korean Christianity: Geopolitical Networks and Religious Conversion in Early Twentieth-Century East Asia." American Journal of Sociology 115(2):365-404.

Statement from award committee: "The Puzzle of Korean Christianity" is an exemplar for the analytical virtues of comparative-historical work. It sets a wonderful puzzle: why were Christian missionaries successful in Korea, given their utter failure in Japan and China? The three-case controlled comparison allows, first, for an effective rejection of common explanations for the success of conversion. A careful historical analysis of each of the three cases, in turn, allows for a novel alternative. Kane and Park convincingly show that processes at the micro level, namely, the success or failure of missionary activities, depended on geopolitical conditions at the macro level. Kane and Park then utilize their empirical findings to develop an original theory of conversion with theoretical implications that are likely to go far beyond the original question. Specifically, "The Puzzle of Korean Christianity" shows that comparative-historical analyses should not ignore even similar global geopolitical developments when analyzing national developments, for diversity across cases lies not in the specificity of each case but rather in the interaction between those national specificities and the shared global context. This article stands out as an outstanding research template for any scholar embarking on a comparative-historical study.

Andreas Wimmer and Yuval Feinstein, 2010. "The Rise of the Nation-State across the World, 1816 to 2001." American Sociological Review 75(5):764-790.

Statement from award committee: "The Rise of the Nation-State across the World," by Wimmer and Feinstein, offers an extraordinarily rigorous study of 145 of today’s states to test existing explanations for the diffusion of the nation-state model. Wimmer and Feinstein have gathered a remarkable set of data, from the number of wars fought in the empire to the length of railway tracks in each nation-state, to find supportive evidence for the historical-institutionalist account of the rise of the nation-state and to reject the more dominant global theories, including modernization and world polity. Specifically, they find evidence that the rise of the nation-state is driven by domestic political struggles, in cases when nationalists prevail over non-nationalist forces. In addition to domestic conditions, the regional context is also influential, as nationalist forces can be empowered by the dominance of nationalist forces in neighboring states. Particularly powerful, and supportive of comparative-historical tendencies, is the article’s counter-intuitive conclusion that what ultimately becomes a global phenomenon rests, in fact, in domestic and regional processes. This article’s theoretical contribution to our understanding of the rise of the nation-state will no doubt be followed by a new wave of comparative-historical studies that will explore, and further develop, what remains one of the formidable questions of comparative-historical sociology.

Theda Skocpol Dissertation Award

Robert S. Jansen, 2009. "Populist Mobilization: Peru in Historical and Comparative Perspective." Ph.D. Dissertation, Sociology, UCLA. (Dissertation Chair: Rogers Brubaker.)

Statement from award committee: The 2011 Theda Skocpol Dissertation Award is awarded to Robert S. Jansen for “Populist Mobilization: Peru in Historical and Comparative Perspective” (UCLA 2009, Dissertation Adviser, Rogers Brubaker). Robert Jansen’s dissertation represents a major contribution to comparative-historical scholarship on populism. Breaking with prior work that identifies populism with a specific rhetorical style, social base, or substantive set of policy objectives, Jansen argues that populism is best understood as a form of political mobilization. Populism is conceived as a type of political practice, a distinctive organizational means for accomplishing a range of social, political and economic ends. Jansen’s dissertation identifies the historical preconditions for the emergence of populism, thus understood, and suggests how populist mobilization, once introduced into a political field, may generate conditions that favor its cyclical reincarnation.

Jansen's dissertation combines a broad comparative analysis of populist mobilization throughout Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century with a fine-grained historical analysis of a critical and previously neglected juncture in the history of populist mobilization. Drawing on original archival research, Jansen reconstructs the 1931 presidential elections in Peru, demonstrating that it was a critical episode in the history of populist mobilization that left the Peruvian political field forever transformed. Jansen’s analysis offers a persuasive case for why this particular historical episode must be considered to advance theoretical understanding of populism. Further, his analysis of 1930s Peru forces us to rethink what we thought we knew about other, better known, cases of populism in the region. Exemplifying the best of recent scholarship in the comparative-historical tradition, Jansen's dissertation combines conceptual clarity and innovation, creative and productive reliance on prior scholarship, and original archival research to generate new theoretical insights about a topic of major historical and contemporary significance.

Honorable Mention:

Besnik Pula, 2011. "State, Law and Revolution: Agrarian Power and the National State in Albania, 1850-1945." Ph.D. Dissertation, Sociology, University of Michigan. (Dissertation Chair: George P. Steinmetz.)

Dissertation abstract: Prevailing approaches in the comparative historical study of peasant mobilization assume the relationship between peasants and state institutions to be inherently antagonistic. By contrast, this dissertation argues that locally embedded legal cultures are crucial in mediating and delimiting the institutional role of the state in agrarian social life. Using the case of national state building in post-Ottoman Albania, the dissertation shows that establishing national control over regionally-based socio-legal institutions was a crucial challenge faced by Ottoman successor states. Relying on official Albanian state documents only recently made available to international scholars, the dissertation shows that efforts by national bureaucratic elites to transform traditional socio-legal arrangements were a contentious process with direct impact on local state capacities and peasant politics. The dissertation demonstrates the divergent impact of legal centralization on peasant politicization by comparing two agrarian regions: (1) the çiftlik agrarian class system in Albania’s fertile lowland regions and (2) the smallholding and self-governing communities of Albania’s rugged highlands. In the lowlands, the state successfully established national administration over local political and juridical authorities, but the consequence of this was the increasing politicization of agrarian class relations. The nationalization and reform of lowland socio-legal institutions resulted in the disintegration of Ottoman-era legal protections of peasant subsistence rights, leading to intensified social conflict between peasants and landowners. Peasants engaged in public acts of politicization of agrarian relations which involved the state both as an actor as well as a legal institutional arena. As a result, during the revolutionary mobilization in the 1940s, lowland peasants responded sympathetically to the radical agrarian platform of the Albanian communist movement. In the highlands, efforts to assert national authority over local communal organization and traditions of customary law resulted in a different type of peasant resistance. From once guaranteeing local communal autonomy, the state moved to delegitimize communal peasant law and socio-legal practices. Highland peasant communities responded by directly challenging the state’s administrative practices via acts of subversion and became more accepting of conservative politics. The dissertation underscores the link between legal cultures, peasant politics and the historical variability of state capacities.

Reinhard Bendix Student Paper Award

Joshua Bloom (UCLA). "Insurgent Influence on Truman's Civil Rights Policy: A Theoretically Informed Event Structure Analysis."

Statement from award committee: This innovative paper challenges standard social movement theories of the manner in which political opportunities shape subsequent mobilization by examining President Truman’s adoption of a civil rights agenda in the 1940s. Truman’s reversal of his earlier intransigence on racial issues is conventionally understood as an important precursor to the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement. Bloom rejects this standard interpretation, suggesting instead that an earlier round of black nationalist insurgency led Truman to shift his position on racial issues. Thus, rather than state action creating the political opportunity that allowed for mobilization, mobilization was itself the cause of a critical change in state policy, creating the space for subsequent rounds of mobilization. Bloom establishes this argument through an impressive application of Griffin’s Event Structure Analysis, developing a rigorous “within-case” test of his theory. The committee was impressed both by the paper’s substantive contribution to social movement theory and its sophisticated use of comparative and historical research methods.

Honorable Mention:

Josh Pacewicz (University of Chicago). "Old Factions, New Partnerships: How the Changing Integration of Economic and Civil Institutions Produces Avoidance of Partisan Politics in Local Life."

Statement from award committee: In this ambitious paper, Pacewicz reconstructs the notion of civil society in order to offer an account of declining partisanship at the local level in two Midwestern communities. Pacewicz suggests that the tendency of most scholars to examine civil society apart from other spheres of social life has obscured the causes of declining partisanship, which can only be understood by treating civil society as one component of “total systems” encompassing civic and non-civic institutions. The committee was impressed with the innovative theoretical argument of this paper, as well as its impressive use of multiple research methods, combining archival sources, ethnographic data, and network methods of analysis.