International Journal of Comparative Sociology

How have communities in Latin America responded to neoliberal agrarian reforms? We address this question via an incorporated comparison of two regions affected by rural restructuring: La Laguna, Mexico and Viejo Caldas, Colombia. Prior to the introduction of market-led reforms, agricultural producers in both regions were heavily dependent on state support, yet in neither did they mobilize to resist neoliberal policies that were incompatible with the prevailing system of state-managed commercial agriculture. What explains this outcome? We argue that acquiescence to neoliberalism was, paradoxically, a legacy of agrarian unrest: In response to major mobilizations, historic land reforms were carried out in La Laguna and Viejo Caldas during the 1930s that created regional political economies organized around cotton and coffee, respectively. Over time, these economies evolved into regimes of ‘partial possession’ wherein the social reproduction of rural livelihoods came to depend on specific state institutions: the Ejido Bank in Mexico and Fedecafé in Colombia. We attribute the absence of organized opposition to neoliberal reforms in La Laguna and Viejo Caldas to the conservatizing political transformation that partial possession engendered. In so doing, we highlight the importance of regional histories in shaping popular responses to neoliberal restructuring across the variegated landscape of Latin America’s countryside.

Global levels of democracy are higher than ever before, and democratic principles are now institutionalized as a world cultural norm. Nevertheless, a number of countries continue to feature governing systems that restrict political rights. Against this backdrop, I revisit traditional claims by world-system theory regarding the impact of the core/periphery hierarchy on national political systems. In doing so, I draw attention to the uneven character of democratic growth across world-system zones. Using an updated trichotomous measure of world-system position, and drawing from Freedom House and Polity IV ratings of democracy, I construct an annual time-series dataset producing a maximum of 5445 observations across 161 countries during the 1972–2008 period. Employing a series of random-effects tobit models with year-by-covariate interaction terms, I compare democratic growth among nations in the core, semiperiphery, and periphery. The results indicate significant gaps in democracy between core and non-core nations that are not dissipating over time, and that are perhaps growing slightly larger. In a series of robustness checks, I find that using an alternative measure of world-system position, an alternative measure of democracy, and an alternative estimation strategy produce similar results. In sum, despite the global spread of democracy, world-system boundaries remain fundamental in hindering cross-national convergence.

Sociologists have paid scant attention to the possibility that the structure of the macro-economy is an important determinant of income inequality. Although prior research finds negative links between the size of the public sector and income inequality, no study to date considers whether the size of consumer markets has distributional consequences as well. To investigate this possibility, the present study measures the size of national consumer markets with the System of National Accounts used by governments to calculate gross domestic product (GDP). Based on data from 18 advanced capitalist countries over nearly a 40-year period, two-way random effects regression models reveal a strong and positive link between the size of consumer markets and income inequality. This finding is robust to the inclusion of numerous control variables, and to the consideration of endogeneity within the causal relationship. The proposed theoretical explanation centers on ideas developed by Polanyi, and suggests that economic activity in consumer markets creates higher levels of individual differentiation, and hence higher levels of income inequality, than economic activity in other sectors of the economy. The study concludes by highlighting ways future research can advance our theoretical and empirical understanding of this topic.

There are many contending paradigms in the study of inequality and stratification, with little dialogue across empirical, methodological and theoretical divides. To bridge some of these gaps, this article presents and analyzes a new dataset on urban wages across the world. The data provide compelling evidence that national residence has been a significant and stable force shaping wage distribution. But the data also indicate that some occupations (e.g. tradable-good producers in low-wage regions) have experienced significant upward mobility. These processes highlight the need to critically reassess how the categories of ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ are mobilized to justify global inequality.

This article reassesses the link between the structural and cultural aspects of social security. Do Esping-Andersen’s ‘Three Worlds’ exist empirically if one considers a comprehensive set of formal institutions simultaneously? And if so, do such regimes coincide with coherent differences in people’s value orientations in this field, or informal cultures? In order to answer these questions, nonlinear principal components analysis was applied to a group of countries at the core of the original Esping-Andersen typology. Nonlinear PCA seems to be a promising tool for comparative research because the technique is able to handle discrete data and nonlinear relationships, and the number of variables can exceed the number of countries. The outcomes of the analyses suggest that the ‘Three Worlds’ of formal social security had a firm empirical basis in the 1990s, and that the typology remains largely valid today, albeit with some qualifications. Furthermore, three different informal ‘cultures of social security’ emerged, with country clusters quite similar to those of the structural regime typology.