Solinger 2009

Solinger, Dorothy J. States' Gains, Labor's Losses: China, France, and Mexico Choose Global Liaisons, 1980-2000. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.


Compares China, France, Mexico response to globalization and changes in labor-state partnership

• "This book is about how an enduring legacy of revolution in these apparently dissimilar places structures state-labor relations in a time of crisis. In all of them, revolutionary-era outcomes left their mark on the roles and functions of unions, vis-á-vis their own states' moves after 1980; repercussions from workers them set the style for subsequent state welfare replies." (4)
• China started internally liberalizing in the 1980s, ans seemingly abandoned labor, but then "Though the old communist, state-labor alliance at first appeard to be wholly abandoned, public militancy reawakened the bond, if in starkly altered form (5)
• France hit some trouble in the 1980s, but 1997 total job losses affected a "stunning" 41.6% of the original labor force; the labor movement didn't do much to protest, and the state didn't do much to help
• similarly Mexican Labor movement didn't fight much, and the state subsequently didn't offer them much for their losses
• Conclusion
• Mexico, France, and China all jettisoned labor allies at the behest/to join Supranational Economic Organizations (208), a proxy for joining global economy
• How labor unions were joined to politics after the revolution was important -- Chinese unions were SUPER weak, meaning workers had a freer hand in starting their own protests! (209)
• "In short, it was the nature of the job that the states permitted--or coerced--their unions to perform that liberated the worker (in China), left them relatively passive (in France), or clamped down on them (in Mexico), once the eliminitation of formerly protective regulations meant removing workers from their positions and once the restrictiveness imposed by austerity rewrote the terms of old welfare contracts." (209-210)

Torre 1998

Juan Carlos Torre 1998 "The Amibivalent Giant: The Peronist Labor Movement, 1945-1995" 125-137

in

Brennan, James P., Peronism and Argentina. Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 1998.

• from 1955 to 1973 the peronist working class was in a curious position. "on the one hand, the unions needed to represent the workers in collective bargaining negotiations and service their needs--through social welfare programs, retirement plans, and vacation colonies--in a country in which the state had abandoned any pretensions to such concerns. On the other hand, organized labor was effectively the political representative of the Peronist movement in these years, with Perón as its recognized leader. So the working class played a rather conventional role in the country's economy, as well as socially, but an adversarial, destabilizing role within the political system." (130)
• after the Resistance subsided uniosn became pragmatic, but co-optation by the state and acceptance as an independent actor were prevented by the political dimension of peronism (131)
• "If the Radical government was a godsend for perpetuating these patterns of behavior, the election of a Peronist government in 1989 and its recent reelection in 1995 may well constitue a fatal misfortune. As in 1973-1976 the Peronist trade union leadership has been forced to accept policies, in teh name of solidarity with a Peronist government, that threaten their very existence." (134)
• "The decline in the unions' importance in the country's economic structure has had its counterpart in new developments in the political realm. Since the restoration of democracy, the Peronist trade union leaders have experienced repeated reversals in their pretensions of influencing developments within the Peronist movement as a whole." (135)
• 
  

McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001

McAdam, D., Tarrow, S. G, & Tilly, C. 2001. Dynamics of contention. New York: Cambridge University Press.


Chapter 1:

• contentious politics: episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claims and their objects when (a) at least one government is a claimant, and object of claims, or a party to the claims, and (b) the claims would, if resolved, affect the interests of as least one of the claimants  (5)
• episodic is key to this being contentious politics, and not just "normal" politics
• this definition is broad to combat the fact that the study of institutional/non-institutional politics has gotten too narrow, and often politics (contentious or otherwise) can go in and out of institutional realm (6)
• contained versus transgressive contention: (govt is involved in both in some way)
• contained contention
• cases of contention in which all parties are previously established actors employing established means of claim making (7)
• transgressive contention:
• at least some of the actors involved are newly self-identified political actors AND/OR at least some parties employ innovative collective action (7-8)
• "many instances of transgressive contention grow out of episodes of contained contention" (8)
• "substantial short-term political and social change more often emerges from transgressive contention than from contained contention", contained contention often just reifies existing regimes (8)
• "insted of seeking to identify necessary and sufficient conditions for mobilization, action, or certain trajectories, we search out recurrent causal mechanisms and regularities in their concatenation (13)
• seem to be looking for similarities across different cases
• pursuing "partial parallels" (13-14)
• four overlapping and competing lines fof explanation of contention (20)
• (21) structural analysis -- interests + capacities = action or not
• rationalist analysis -- individuals are rational and decide
• phenomenological analysis -- plumbing states of awareness for explanations of involvement in contentious politics
• cultural approaches -- norms, beliefs, and symbols that affect/create contention
• mechanism: a delimited class of events that alter relations among specifified sets of elements in identical or closely similar ways over a variety of situations (24)
• types:
• environmental mechanisms (25): extnerally generated changes to social conditions, ie resource depletion
• cognitive mechanisms (26): alterations of individual and collective perceptions
•  relational mechanisms (26): alter connections among people, groups, and interpersonal networks
• processes: regular sequences of mechanisms that produce similar transformations (24)
• families of processes:
• mobilizations
• political identity formation
• the family of repression, diffusion, and radicalization (28)
• episodes: continuous streams of contention including collective claims-making (24)
• combine all these things above
• 
  

Levitsky 2003b

Levitsky, Steven. 2003. Transforming Labor-Based Parties In Latin America: Argentine Peronism In Comparative Perspective. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

• Chapter 1: 
• The PJ's flexibility contributed to its adaptation and survival in teh neoliberal era (3)
• the weakly institutionalized labor-party link permitted the traditional mechanisms f labor participation in the party to be quickly dismantled
• the absence of stable career paths and secure tenure patterns meant it was easy to get rid of old-guard leaders
• the absence of stable norms of accountability in the party allowed Menem the freedom to design and implement a radical economic program (3-4)
• the decline of postwar ISI brought on a programmatic and a coalitional challenge to labor based parties (5)
• programmatic: slowdown of economic growth, globalized trade, and debt-crisis helpers (IMF, World Bank) made it very difficult for parties to enact policy that wasn't orthodox neoliberal (5-6)
• coalitional: economic changes hanged class, labor had fewer votes to trade (6)
• Look at party change (organizational change) in terms of a two-level, nested game, in which party leaders are located at the intersection of environmental and intraorganizational dynamics (12)
• leaders who seek to increase their power must respond to changes in the external environment, but their strategies to do so are mediated by the power game within the party and the party's strucutre
• "Yet the flexibility-stability tradeoff may not be as steep as the literature suggests.  ... Although the Pj is unquestionably a mass party, its mass organization is informal rather than bureaucratic, and the rules and procedures that govern the internal life of the party are fluid, contested, widely manipulated, and often ignored." (14)
• "A central claim of this book is that routinization limits the capacity of organizations to respond quickly to environmental challenges, and that weakly routinized organizations may be better equipped to adapt to rapid environmental change than highly routinized organizations." (18)
• routinization affects strategic flexibility in three ways: (19)
• leadership renovation (ease of changing old-guard)
• leadership autonomy
• structural pliability, or ease of changing a party's structure
• Chapter 2
• This chapter sets up the book's central argument,, which is that the PJ's fluid internal structure can be traced to its formative phase (36)
• but also, it's proscription after the first coup meant that it was highly decentralized, had a "movement" structure, which continues to this day (36-37)
• decentralization during proscription period meant peronist movement essentailly in anarchy, allowed for many autonomous units to self-direct, also allowed for groups to seek very divergent goals, from leftist to conservative, all under name of peronism (41-43)
• "partyization" occurred during teh 1980s, where the movement focused mainly on winning elections (minus a few revolutionary groups and the Ubaldinist labor unions), but it did not result in routinization (49-57)
• chapter 3;
• the PJ is an "informal mass party" (59-60)
• mass because: it maintains an extensive membership (60)
• it has a dense organizational strucutre, partucularly in working class neighborhoods (61)
• it has lots of informal structures that help it embed deeply into working-and lower-class neighborhoods (62)
• the party is informal (doesn't rely on bureaucracy), segemented (few insitutionalized horizontal ties between groups) and decentralized (65-76)
• chapter4: populism in crisis: environmental change and party failure, 1983-1985
• chapter5: union-party links: see levitsky 2003a
• in peripheral provinces where hte uniosn were weak, union leaders had only gotten their tercio thanks to the good will of hte party bsoses, so in the provinces it was much easier to dismantle this (114)
• the 25 organizations, which was allied with the Renovators, didn't demand any institutional linkages to the party, just assumed the renovadores would reward them. in the end, they didn't and the 1987 Congress did not establish any body/org to represent labor inside the party. party leaders ended up choosing who the few remaining labor representatives would be  (116-118)
• int eh face of union politics, some uniosn set up their own territorial based agrupaciones, but these end up being fixed investments which helps entrench teh system of union political fragmentation (131)
• chapter 6: Menemism and Neoliberalism: Programmatic adaptation in teh 1990s
•  chapter 7: the view from below, party activists and the transformation of base-level peronism
• argument: two factors that allowed teh PJ to maintain its activists base even as it programmatically changed (and experience litlte intra-party dissent for this change) (186)
• increase access to state resources
• decentralized party structures
• the combo of sate resources and local autonomy allowed some local groups to engage in traditional peronist practices even as the national aprty abandonded them
• but by relying on state resources the personal, ideological, and union-based ties that had sustained local peronist organizations began to erode
• this left he party more reliant on state resources than it ever had been before
• chapter 8: the paradox of menemism: party adaptation and regime stability in the 1990s
• chapter 9: crisis, party adaptation, and democracy: argentina in comparative perspective