Abstract This essay reviews scholarship on mobilization and its various consequences for democracy and autocracy. It highlights how collective action can advance democratization, stall or reverse it, or reinforce authoritarian rule. The review synthesizes key themes in this literature, including organizational foundations, coalitions, diffusion, tactics, and discourse, as well as the long-term implications of mobilization for democratic consolidation and deepening. It also considers how authoritarian leaders and regimes actively mobilize their supporters, in both democratic systems and authoritarian contexts. The essay concludes by outlining directions for future research, emphasizing the need for multi-level approaches that bridge subnational findings and cross-national comparison.
Alternative financial institutions have grown as a source of credit for low-income borrowers deemed credit risks by banks. This article examines how predatory lending flourishes despite regulatory tightening. I theorize three varieties of regulatory capitalism in North America, the Asia-Pacific, and Europe, each shaped by its developmental history and each of which influences different forms of collateralization, regulatory evasion, and risk laundering that predatory lenders pursue for profit. In North America, a region characterized by liberal market economies and a fragmented regulatory environment, firms adopt tactics such as the use of scalable resale markets to collateralize borrowers' goods through pawnshop chains, regulatory evasion through legal arbitrage, and risk laundering in the form of secondary market sales. In the Asia-Pacific, where microloans are historically entrenched and formal institutions are weak, firms adopt tactics such as collateralizing personal gold and personal jewelry to defy traceability, regulatory evasion through product substitution, and risk laundering by shifting operations across the region. In Europe, which is characterized by coordinated market economies with strong consumer protections and high institutional trust, firms largely pivot away from collateralization toward bundling their collateral with insurance as a means of evading regulatory frictions, and pursue bond-based risk laundering. These processes enable lenders not only to circumvent regulatory tightening, but create new instruments to extract profit from borrowers.
This article highlights the role of a Parisian primary public school serving elite demographics in shaping children's class identities by teaching privilege management. Based on a year of ethnographic observations in 4th and 5th grade classrooms, this study examines the daily practices of a privileged school and its philanthropy program, Giving is Good. Drawing on critical scholarship on the education of elites, exposure and intervention are the two mechanisms through which the class transforms children's immediate social environment into a resource for philanthropic engagement. The results indicate that privilege management generates a disposition to talk about and navigate inequality with ease while maintaining face and privilege. Results also show a profound gendered discrepancy in how children "learn to give." In light of recent evolutions in citizenship education, the article discusses the implications of teaching philanthropy in public schools for political culture and how privileged children learn to think about other children who do not belong to the same social class.
Social reproduction scholars have made headway in integrating the analysis of capitalism, class, gender, and care. We offer two contributions to this literature. First, we provide a novel framework with insights into companies as sites of decommodification, shaping childcare cost distribution and affecting childbearing rates. Second, we extend social reproduction research geographically to the oft-overlooked region of Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe is home to 15 of the world's 20 fastest-declining populations, with low fertility as a prime cause. We argue that privatization catalyzes commodification, raising work intensity and financial-temporal uncertainty and eroding collective resources for social reproduction, thereby impacting childbearing. We explore this mechanism quantitatively by employing four distinct definitions of privatization across two datasets: one covering 52 Hungarian towns (1989-2006) and another spanning 29 postsocialist countries (1989-2012). We shed light on the details of the mechanism through a qualitative analysis of 82 life-history interviews in four Hungarian towns, surveying the lived experience of privatization.
