This article analyzes and demonstrates the declining social selectivity of migration distance in Europe’s long nineteenth century and argues that this drove a radically new process of democratization of long-distance migration. It uses innovative spatial and quantitative analysis of nominal data on more than 5,000 international migrants who moved to the booming port city of Antwerp in present-day Belgium between 1850 and 1910. Examining the changes in migrants’ origins and trajectories on the one hand, and in their profiles in terms of gender and occupations on the other hand, it argues that the main evolutions observed represent an overall loosening of the ancien régime link between migration distance on the one hand and social selectivity on the other hand. By focusing on gender and social class as markers of social selectivity and by mapping the impressive expansion of the trajectories of Antwerp’s growing number of long-distance migrants, it lays bare the spatial, gender, and social dimensions that contributed to a general process of democratization of long-distance migration. As such, it sheds new light on the dynamics of Europe’s so-called “mobility transition” in the long nineteenth century.

The question of deradicalization looms large in the historiography of western European socialism. But in this contested field, the contributions of the New Left historian, Ralph Miliband, have been curiously neglected. Through his work on the British Labour Party, Miliband developed a distinctive account of deradicalization that foregrounds the fact that when parties enter government, party elites find themselves transplanted into new, alien institutions. Over time, he argued, they then come to internalize the worldviews of those institutions and reshape their parties accordingly. This essay presents the first quantitative and cross-national test of this “experience of governing hypothesis,” using Comparative Manifesto Project data from western European socialist parties between 1945 and 2021 and a novel matching technique for panel data. Miliband’s theory is strongly supported by this analysis, which also demonstrates the value of taking a multi-dimensional approach to deradicalization.

Throughout the nineteenth century, powerful railway unions in the USA and the UK cultivated an expansive system of voluntary sickness, death, unemployment, and superannuation benefits. By the early twentieth century, the movements had diverged: while the British Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants relinquished its commitment to voluntarism in favor of state healthcare and pensions, the American Railway Brotherhoods persisted along voluntarist lines, resisting social insurance in favor of exclusive schemes for their white male membership. What accounts for these diverging orientations? I highlight the importance of organizational forms as a lens for understanding comparative trade union strategy, emphasizing the role of law in designating legitimate forms of working-class association. I demonstrate that governing elites in both countries promoted voluntarism as a benign form of working-class organization throughout much of the nineteenth century. Consequently, I argue, early American and British trade unions adopted benefits in part because they enabled them to mimic the far more respected and legitimate friendly and fraternal mutual benefit societies. Toward the end of the century, the context had changed: while alternative organizational avenues were opened for trade unions in the UK, benefits presented an ongoing organizational lifeline for American unions. In defining and redefining the boundaries of legitimate forms of workers’ associations, legal decisions in both countries shaped not only trade union organizing strategies in the short run but also their positioning in broader social struggles.

Comparative historical analyses have emphasized the role played by conservative parties in the consolidation of democratic regimes in Europe. They have also identified the main factors shaping the political and electoral strength of the right in democratization processes. On the basis of these analyses, the Spanish Second Republic (1931–36) has been characterized as a very inauspicious ground for the development of a strong conservative party. However, the right managed to build a successful electoral force in a short period of time. This paper explores the factors affecting the electoral strength of the Spanish right by conducting ecological statistical analyses in the three republican legislative elections. Empirical results show that the right managed to build strong links with national voters on the basis of sociopolitical cleavages and underlying social and institutional characteristics. In particular, they reveal the key importance of the religious cleavage in the party system of the 1930s and the crucial role played by Catholic lay organizations in the success of the right. Ultimately, this finding shows that, contrary to previous theoretical expectations, initial organizational precariousness was not an unsurmountable obstacle for the electoral success of the Spanish right.

We combine unsupervised machine learning and econometric methods to study England’s print culture in the pivotal sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Machine learning synthesizes the content of 57,863 texts comprising 83 million words into 110 topics. Topics include the expected, such as Natural Philosophy, and the unexpected, such as Baconian Theology. Timelines suggest that religious and political discourse gradually became less antagonistic and economic topics more prominent. The epistemology associated with Bacon was present in theological debates already before Bacon’s epistemological contributions. Vector autoregression estimates provide insight into the coevolution of ideas on religion, science, and institutions. Innovations in religious ideas stimulated focus on science, especially at times when Puritanism was prominent in religious discourse. Neither science nor institutional thought evidence secularization. The Glorious Revolution and the Civil War did not spur debates on institutions nor did the founding of the Royal Society markedly elevate attention to science.

Richard Nixon was the first president who examined the possibility of introducing a value-added tax (VAT) at the federal level in the late twentieth century. By 1970, his administration had considered recommending it alongside other domestic programs to overcome the criticism against the VAT’s regressivity, potential conflict in the federal–state tax authority, and the fragmented decision-making authority between the executive and legislative branches of the government. However, in 1971, the Nixon administration shifted their policy priority toward gaining the middle-class political support by linking local property tax relief to a federal VAT. Although they combined the two measures with a rebate to obtain consent to and confidence in them from the “opponents” among the “internalists” of policymaking and societal actors, their attempt failed to accomplish it. As a result, Nixon abandoned the federal VAT. This abandonment was a missed opportunity to introduce a federal VAT, leading the United States to become a fiscal outlier among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries: it has not yet implemented a national/federal VAT. Furthermore, this outcome marked the origin of certain historical characteristics of the American fiscal state: the use of tax expenditures, “fend-for-yourself federalism,” weak extractive capacity, and fiscal inflexibility.

While a value-added tax (VAT), which supports a welfare state, was officially introduced in Japan in 1989, earlier attempts to implement this tax system failed. This study looks in-depth at why Japan was slower than other countries to implement a VAT. The tax authorities’ debates during the 1960s and 1970s are reviewed to understand why other attempts to introduce a VAT failed. Implementing the VAT would require a shift from the ideology centering on a direct tax to acceptance of indirect taxes and justification for a general consumption tax’s superiority over specific consumption taxes. Four influential factors are identified. First, in 1960, the ideology centering on a direct tax made a VAT inherently inferior. Second, in the 1968, “Break Fiscal Rigidification Campaign” created a revenue-neutral path for indirect tax increases but favored specific consumption taxes. Third, the Fundamental Issues Subcommittee conceptualized “high benefit/high cost” in the early 1970s and established the VAT’s superiority over specific consumption taxes based on a study of overseas travel to European Commission countries. However, the VAT was abandoned due to external shocks. Fourth, the attempts to link the VAT with fiscal reconstruction in the late 1970s faced strong opposition from consumers, small businesses, and the ruling party. Failure to introduce the VAT in the 1970s eliminated the possibility of using it to raise taxes in the early 1980s. The findings reveal that Japan’s failure to introduce the VAT closed a door to a “high benefit/high cost” type of Western-style welfare state.