Suchergebnisse

Following the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, the long repressed Spanish labor movement faced two challenges: to contribute to the transformation of the national political system, and to use newly achieved freedoms to build its own organizational presence. Focusing on areas of potential conflict between these two broad objectives, Robert Fishman here traces the development of the complex political role and organizational development of the Spanish workers' movement in the transition from dictatorship to democracy.Drawing on rich empirical data including interviews with 324 plant-level labor leaders, Fishman examines the interplay between various unions' efforts to organize labor and to deal with national politics. He shows how the workers' movement, long an advocate of a ruptura or clear break with the Francoist past, came to support a process of negotiated reform and mobilizational restraint. Labor leaders' belief in the legitimacy of the democratic state, Fishman demonstrates, can serve as a key predictor of their willingness to support negotiated wage restraint.In emphasizing the crucial role of plant-level labor leaders in national political processes, Fishman offers an innovative methodological approach to the analysis of the collective efforts of labor. Political scientists, sociologists, historians of labor movements, and observers of contemporary Western Europe and Latin America will read it with interest

How democratic practice varies by country : legacies of historical pathways to democracy -- Messages of transition : fundamental contrasts between Portugal and Spain -- Democratic practice in action -- How democratic practice matters -- How the cultural frameworks underpinning democratic practice shaped the politics of crisis : testing the argument in the age of austerity -- Does national conflict within Spain undermine or reinforce the argument? : the Catalan crisis and its antecedents -- Change or continuity in cultures? : theorizing the Iberian Peninsula experience -- Conclusions : on the global significance of the Iberian divide in political inclusion

Cover -- Democracy's Voices -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1 The Quality of Democracy: Searching for Social Foundations -- 2 Exploring Social Ties: Bonds between Intellectuals and Workers -- 3 Social Ties and Discursive Horizons -- 4 Social Capital or Social Ties? -- 5 Pursuing Alternative Explanations -- 6 The Specific and the General for the Social Scientist: The Interpretive Reach of Our Analysis -- 7 Beyond These Towns and Valleys: The Larger Significance of Democracy's Voices -- Notes -- Index

En los últimos años, el movimiento obrero en España se ha enfrentado a la doble tarea de contribuir a la transición política a la democracia y de seguir sus propios objetivos organizacionales, como su extensión y mayor implantación entre los trabajadores. A pesar de las dificultades sindicales experimentadas durante la transición y la crisis económica, hoy en día los sindicatos ya extienden su ámbito de influencia en muchas empresas. Sin embargo, dicha implantación no está tan organizada ni es tan importante todavía como en otros países occidentales europeos. Para medir la opinión de los líderes sindicales acerca de la labor sindical, se utilizaron los datos de una encuesta realizada en 1981. Los principales temas abordados son : el papel del gestor, las tendencias históricas en las relaciones sindicatos-empresarios, la diferencia entre los sindicatos democráticos actuales y el sindicalismo de la era franquista, y el liderazgo sindical y la capacidad de movilización de los trabajadores.

Do demonstrations tend to deepen or endanger democracy? I examine this theme of major debate between scholars and among political actors, analyzing how the United States and other democracies have dealt with—and been shaped by—popular pressure on representative institutions. Cases that are discussed include Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington and the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol, as well as examples drawn from Spain, Portugal, and Italy. I offer clear principles to differentiate between types of protest that deepen democracy, advance the goal of inclusion, and others that endanger democratic principles. Among the issues I take up is whether the location of protest—for example, adjacent to or even inside legislative chambers—is decisive. Rejecting that approach, my argument instead emphasizes the difference between protests intended to influence policy-making or the political agenda and those that use intimidation or violence to replace the primacy of elections in selecting office holders. The discussion argues that conceptualizing demonstrations as complementary to the work of representative institutions can help to promote the difficult to obtain objective of political equality between citizens. The article also asks whether consensus on this matter can be attained and if so how.

This article analyzes the scholarship on variation among democracies and offers a proposal intended to address the relative lack of consensus over the fundamental conceptual infrastructure underpinning this literature. The framework introduced here differentiates between four dimensions of democracy: authenticity, quality, depth and consolidation—arguing that they may vary with some independence from one another. This approach simultaneously addresses concerns of normative and empirical democratic theory, rooting the conceptualization of democracy's dimensions in central aspirations that motivate normative theorists and political actors. The distinction between authenticity and quality as formulated here centers on the difference between standards understood to be required for membership in the democratic genus and normatively valued goals that surpass such standards. Work on democratic depth, as formulated here, addresses concerns over the possible tension between "minimalist" operational definitions and the underlying idea of democracy with its emphasis on political equality and rule by the people.

This article examines democratic practice after the revolution that brought an end to authoritarian dictatorship in Portugal in April 1974, taking the Portuguese case as an opportunity to theorize democratic practice and historical processes that shape its emergence. The argument stresses the distinctive features of democracy born in social revolution and the explanatory role of the partial inversion of social hierarchies and remaking of cultural repertoires in social revolutionary settings. The Portuguese case is compared to its larger neighbor, Spain, which moved from authoritarianism to democracy at roughly the same time following a process of change thoroughly unlike that of Portugal. Comparisons with other instances of postrevolutionary democracy and implications for more conventional democratic systems are also introduced. A central theme concerns the extent to which democracies attain the ideal of full political equality among citizens. This article asserts that democracies born in social revolution may approximate that ideal for reasons rooted in their historical pathways to representative government.