Recent comparative studies in Western industrialization have discovered a variety of economic “governance structures” between competitive markets and corporate hierarchies. Such “associative” forms of enterprise pose both a descriptive and an evaluative problem to students of capitalist development. Can business cooperate, or does a single competitor who hopes to do better by cheating undermine all associative agreements? Suppose cooperation is possible: can it be accomplished to improve products and production processes, rather than merely to redistribute wealth from consumers to business?

In June 1975 and January 1978, seminary students in the shrine city of Qum, Iran, staged public protests against the regime of Shah Muhammad Riza Pahlavi. In both instances security forces forcibly suppressed the protests. Yet the first incident generated almost no public outcry, while the second incident echoed throughout Iran and quickly became a rallying point for revolutionary mobilization. What was different about Iran in mid-1975 and early 1978 that might account for these different reactions? This article examines three widely credited explanations: economic downturn, widening political opportunity, and organizational mobilization of the opposition. The examination of economic and political explanations uncovered little evidence of significant differences between the two time periods; organizational explanations, by contrast, accounted for significant shifts in 1977 among the moderate and Islamist opposition, with the Islamist opposition in particular exhibiting a sense of optimism and efficacy in the weeks before January 1978. This changed self-perception appears to be the most likely explanation for the wave of protest that followed the suppression of the Qum protest of January 1978.

Anyone who hopes to trace quantitative historical changes in populations faces the problem of incomplete and biased records. This is at least as much a problem for statistics of crime as for other kinds of statistics, and it plagues historical homicide research. As with other historical trends, those of homicide are derived from actual counts from some set of sources, including coroners’ records, indictments, arrests, and newspaper accounts. But what proportion of the original incidents were recorded and—if so—still exist? Adding sources usually increases the count, but how closely does it approach the true count? This cannot be known directly. One is caught between the facts that counting is the major means open to us to understand crime “as part of the sweep of history” (Monkkonen 1980: 53) and that there are gaping “holes in the historical record” that leave a large “dark figure” of crime (Lane 1992: 30).

This article examines a new set of historical microdata for insights on the wealth of the Irish in late-nineteenth-century Ontario. Regression analysis is used to determine whether or not the wealth of the Irish-born differed significantly from that of the Canadian-born and other birthplace groups.

The traditional view has been that the Irish in nineteenth-century North America were impoverished and economically disadvantaged. In the American literature, certainly, Irish immigrants have been viewed as penniless, technologically backward, and inclined to reject rural for urban life because of their experience of famine (Akenson 1988: 48). Recent American empirical work has supported this view. For example, Stephen Herscovici (1993: 329) finds that in nineteenth-century Boston the native-born held significantly more wealth than immigrants and that the wealth of the Irish did not substantially increase over time. Ferrie (1994: 10) finds that the Irish-born were 69% less wealthy than the British-born in 1850 and that this gap rose to 72% in 1860, if age and duration in the United States are controlled for.

Recent major works on long-term racial inequality in the labor market revolve around competing hypotheses concerning the importance of human capital factors (Smith and Welch 1989) and government policy (Donohue and Heckman 1991) in promoting black advance. There is, however, another line of thinking which emphasizes the importance of experimentation and “demand-side learning”: employers’ gaining access to accurate information about the abilities of black workers and adjusting their beliefs in accordance with this information.

Central to American identity have been public memories of events like the struggle for independence and the achievements of key figures from the past. The individual most often subject to hagiographic accounts is Abraham Lincoln, with emphasis both on his epic achievements in saving the Union and ending slavery and on his personal characteristics, such as honesty and the motivation to transcend his “backwoods” childhood and attain positions of local, state, and national leadership. However, a recent study based on extensive survey data found that Lincoln’s connection to emancipation provided the primary content of beliefs about him for most Americans today, with other beliefs mentioned much less often. Our present research supports that emphasis when presidential actions are the focus, but a randomized survey-based experiment shows that with a type of questioning that reflects the distinction between “essence” and “action”—inner character versus public achievements—beliefs about the former become at least as prominent as beliefs about the latter. Preliminary evidence to this effect is replicated decisively in a separate experiment, and the study is then extended to consider changes over time in indicators of essence versus action. Our research highlights the importance of how inquiries are framed, and they show that variations in framing, including those that are unintended, can enlarge our understanding of collective memory of Lincoln and of collective memory generally.

Since the emergence of the Weberian notion of “kadijustiz” scholars have debated the ability of Islamic courts to resolve disputes fairly and predictably. For a quantitative analysis of how these courts resolved disputes, we use data from the court records (sicils) of the Ottoman town of Kastamonu and examine whether the judges’ decision followed systematic patterns and whether the patterns were logical. The results show that the trial outcome was influenced by the gender, elite status, religion, and religious markers of litigants. Using the tools and concepts of modern scholarship on dispute resolution, we argue that in resolving disputes Kastamonu courts displayed logical patterns that are consistent with those identified by quantitative analysis of court outcomes in modern societies.

This article combines perspectives of the sociology of quantification and field theory in analyzing the emergence of a field of global evangelical missions. Drawing analogies to Werner Sombart's thesis on the relationship of double-entry bookkeeping and the genesis of capitalism, it shows how the introduction of statistical methods and accounting techniques into the realm of missions in the nineteenth century constructed a visibility of a global distribution of religious adherents that spurred, oriented, and perpetuated an interorganizational sphere geared toward the conversion of the world to Christianity. The article identifies the soteriological and eschatological prerequisites that led to the coalescence of demographic notions and missionary perspectives and draws attention to the extensive reporting system of missionary societies that further consolidated logics of “bookkeeping” in missions. It argues that this ongoing evangelical missionary enterprise is an instance of a more general mechanism of quantification spawning a social field dedicated to the maintenance or alteration of particular “quantities.”

The Great Migration of African Americans from the South at the beginning of the twentieth century had an enormous impact on cities in the Midwest and North including Hartford, Connecticut. This study examines the movement of African Americans to Hartford at the neighborhood and street level. The new arrivals, many from Georgia recruited to work in the Connecticut River valley tobacco farms, joined long-established African American residents of Hartford. A geographic information system (GIS) analysis at the street level illustrates residential differences within the African American community based on place of birth, socioeconomic status, and voting. In the north end of Hartford migrants from Georgia and Eastern European immigrants, for a moment in historical time, shared residential space at the street level. However the Eastern European immigrants had higher occupation status and moved out of the North End neighborhoods, which became increasingly racially segregated as the Great Migration continued.

The Whig and Tory parties played an important role in British politics in the decades following the Glorious Revolution. This article introduces new data on the political affiliation of all Members of Parliament in England and Wales between 1690 and 1747. The data have numerous applications for research. The focus here is on majority party representation and the electoral politics of constituencies. I show that the Whigs had stronger representation in municipal boroughs with small and narrow electorates, whereas the Tories were stronger in county constituencies and in boroughs with large and more democratic electorates. The Whigs were stronger in the Southeast region and the Tories in Wales and the West Midlands. After the Whig leader, Robert Walpole, became prime minister in 1721 the Whigs lost some presence in their traditional strongholds including counties where the Dissenter population was large. Finally, I incorporate data on electoral contests and show that the majority party generally lost strength in constituencies following contests.

Using a socioecological metabolism approach to analyze data from the Census of Agriculture, this article examines the underlying soil fertility of two case study areas in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan through the calculation of soil nitrogen balances. The Rural Municipalities of Wise Creek and Livingston are 300 miles apart and therefore have different topography, soil types, and rainfall levels, even though both are within the northern Great Plains. Over 85 years, from first settlement in the 1910s until the beginning of the twenty-first century, Wise Creek agriculture focused increasingly on livestock production while in Livingston farmers began to grow a greater variety of crops, most notably incorporating canola into rotations. Despite the differences between the two case studies, the pattern of soil nitrogen losses was remarkably similar, with biomass yields declining along with soil nitrogen. The addition of chemical nitrogen fertilizers since the 1960s did not produce yields matching historic highs, nor did a renewed focus on livestock. Wise Creek and Livingston showed two different responses to declining yields, but neither one ultimately provided a long-term solution to the problem of soil nutrient depletion and consequent productivity declines.

Scholarship demonstrated the major role of inheritance and kinship for elite’s power reproduction, particularly among noble families. In the absence of monarchic and court structures, ruling classes that enjoyed privileges and engaged in social closure could become the functional equivalent of a nobility. In this paper, we examine the evolution of the power of Swiss patrician families in the three major Swiss cities (Basel, Geneva, and Zurich) since the end of the nineteenth century and assess whether urban oligarchies endure in the twentieth century and what role kinship ties play in the reproduction of power structures. Building on a systematic database of 5,199 urban elites who hold power positions in the main economic, political, academic, and cultural institutions, we describe the evolution of Swiss patrician families between 1890 and 1957. Using social network, kinship, and sequence analysis, we provide a comprehensive investigation of the Swiss patrician elite’s evolution at both the individual and the family level. Our analyses show a general decline of patrician families’ presence in urban positions of power, however with significant variations according to both the cities and the spheres of activity. Furthermore, we identify distinct trajectories of families who have either lost their access to power positions, managed to access again or have remained in urban power positions according to different survival strategies. Beyond the Swiss case, we contribute to the literature on power and kinship through an interdisciplinary approach combining historical and sociological perspectives.

It is axiomatic that high-risk activism requires solidarity if social movements are to have success in struggles against powerful adversaries. However, there is little research that attempts to gauge the impact of various types, limits, or breakdown of solidarity directly and systematically. Drawing from historical political economy, cultures of class formation, and social movement outcome literatures, we address the question of solidarity’s impact across dimensions and at various levels of scale (i.e., at the point of production or firm level, local community, and wider society) by analyzing the outcomes of more than 4,500 strikes during the late-nineteenth-century rise of US industrial capitalism. We find that while strike solidarity at the point of production is necessary, it is not sufficient for success. Disruption costs that strikers seek to impose to gain leverage can be significantly reduced by the countertactic of hiring strikebreaking replacement workers recruited from the local community or imported from beyond. We also find that the urban regime of strike policing matters by moderating the impact of strikebreakers. The most powerful predictor of strike outcomes is employer use of replacement workers, signaling the key to undermining working-class strike solidarity directly pits the working class against itself. Intraclass solidarity is necessary for the success in interclass struggle but needs to extend beyond the struck firm implicating the importance of solidarity of the surrounding community and wider social factory. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding the historic formation of the US labor movement and its present predicament.

When one is asked to speak on the past, present, and future of social science history, one is less overwhelmed by the size of the task than confused by its indexicality. Whose definition of social science history? Which past? Or, put another way, whose past? Indeed, which and whose present? Moreover, should the task be taken as one of description, prescription, or analysis? Many of us might agree on, say, a descriptive analysis of the past of the Social Science History Association. But about the past of social science history as a general rather than purely associational phenomenon, we might differ considerably. The problem of description versus prescription only increases this obscurity.

This article examines the relationship between a strong nineteenth-century welfarist expansion between the 1860s and early 1940s, in Kerala, India, under indirect British rule, and the “exceptional” antipoverty regime that democratically elected Communists implemented during the postcolonial (post 1947) era in the state. While much attention has focused on Kerala as a model of social development and on postindependence state policies in creating it, no single work has attempted to understand the significance of its prior legacy of welfare. This article uses methods of comparative historical sociology to trace the historical making of Kerala's “exceptionalism.” It argues that the early welfare policies in Kerala were implemented in a dependent colonial context and aimed at warding off annexation by the British, but their unintended consequences were to stimulate what they were precisely designed to avoid—radical caste and class movements. The analysis suggests that the form and content of welfare policies are shaped by the exigencies of state formation, as state autonomy theorists would argue; however, it shows that political struggles are the decisive determining factors of the former.

In this article I ask (1) whether the ways in which the early bourgeois public sphere was structured—precisely by exclusion—are instructive for considering its later development, (2) how a consideration of the social foundations of public life calls into question abstract formulations of it as an escape from social determination into a realm of discursive reason, (3) to what extent “counterpublics” may offer useful accommodations to failures of larger public spheres without necessarily becoming completely attractive alternatives, and (4) to what extent considering the organization of the public sphere as a field might prove helpful in analyzing differentiated publics, rather than thinking of them simply as parallel but each based on discrete conditions. These considerations are informed by an account of the way that the public sphere developed as a concrete ideal and an object of struggle in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britain.

The collective polio literature of the mid-twentieth century developed a model centered on age at infection. In this model, known as the hygiene hypothesis, risk of severe polio increased with socioeconomic status (SES) because higher SES was associated with older age at infection. Rural residence was also linked to increased polio risk due to older age at infection. Crowding and larger family size were associated with earlier age at infection and thus reduced the risk of severe polio. In contrast, according to the intensive-exposure hypothesis proposed by Nielsen and colleagues (2001, 2002), exposure to the poliovirus within the home was linked to increased severity of infection, making larger family size and crowding important risk factors. Data for polio deaths in Wentworth and York counties, including the cities of Hamilton and Toronto, from 1900 to 1937 were gathered from a variety of archival sources and socioeconomic class was coded using the five-point composite score scale from Hauser (1982). The results provide support for the intensive-exposure hypothesis as an addition to the traditional polio model. Age at death increased with status score during the earlier 1900–1929 period, but not in the 1930–1937 period. The overall proportions of polio deaths in the various status scores were stable over both periods and disproportionately prevalent in status score three (skilled blue collar). This analysis of polio mortality provides a more nuanced picture of the disease and its relation to SES in a time of rapidly changing socioecological conditions.

As one looks back on the important developments in political science over the past two decades, there is much to be applauded. While it may be premature to say that we have come “of age” as a scientific discipline, the field is clearly in better shape today than it was in the early 1950s. One indicator is the ratio between mere speculation and observed empirical regularities reported in our journal articles. Another is the decline in the percentage (if not in absolute numbers) of our colleagues who insist that political phenomena are just not amenable to scientific examination. A third might be the dramatic increase in the number of political scientists who have been exposed to training in the techniques and rationale of data making and data analysis. The list could be extended, but we need not do so here.

On the other hand, a stance of comfortable complacency would be very premature. Not only have we fared badly in coming to grips with the knowledge-action relationship in the abstract, but we have by and large done a poor job of shaping the policies of our respective national, provincial, and local governments. Since others as well as myself have dealt—if not definitively—with these issues before, let me eschew further discussion of the knowledge application question for the moment, and go on to matters of basic research. Of the more serious flaws to date, two stand out particularly. One is the lack of balance between a concern for cumulativeness on the one hand and the need for innovation on the other. My impression is that students of national politics (at least those who work in the vineyard of empirical regularities) have been more than conscientious in staying with one set of problems, such as the relationship between political attitudes and voting behavior. But students of inter-national politics have, conversely, tended to move all too quickly from one problem to another, long before cumulative evidence has been generated and before our findings are integrated into coherent wholes.

To begin on a low-key, disarming note, I emphasize that this paper’s title has two clauses. The second is more important than the first. The first clause reads, “Changing Social Science to Change the World.” The second reads, “A Discussion Paper.” The second clause is more important than the first because it indicates the paper’s primary function. It is primarily designed to serve as a springboard for general and more elevated discussion of a set of topics that I hope interests all or most members of the Social Science History Association, despite their professional membership in different academic disciplines and their engagement in widely diverse fields of research specialization.

Most recent explanations of social welfare and development outcomes have focused on the role and impact of formal institutional arrangements, particularly the state. The institutional legacies of colonial rule and the role of democratic institutions have been common explanatory variables. This article focuses on the historical origins, persistence, and increases in inequality in Mexico and Chile during the twentieth century. It argues that despite important historical economic and political institutional differences, similar processes account for the unequal distributional outcomes that characterize the two cases. Critical conjunctures involved bitter struggle between social groups. While popularly based countermovements (along the lines predicted by Karl Polyani) arose periodically and struggled to improve social conditions, these movements were unable to alter the underlying sources of inequality. By mid-twentieth century, popular pressure had been able to exact only an unequal form of embeddedness (or social protection from the market) that contributed to inequality. Further, waves of popular mobilization linked to critical conjunctures produced reactive historical sequences involving fierce resistance from propertied elites and their middle-class allies. This resistance inevitably gave rise to new conjunctures ushering in new institutional arrangements that entrenched or increased inequality. The absence of a distributive settlement between propertied classes and popular groups was at the heart of the mobilization and countermobilization cycles in both cases; indeed, it was the depth of this disagreement, particularly the disagreement over private property, that fueled reactive sequences and their unequalizing outcomes.