Suchergebnisse

Offering the first systematic, comparative examination of the origins of teachers' unions in two countries-France and the United States-Teaching Marianne and Uncle Sam shows how teachers' unions came into existence not because of the willful efforts of particular actors, but over the course of decades of conflict over the proper role of professional educators in public politics. Nicholas Toloudis traces teacher unionism back to the first efforts of governments to centralize public education. He carefully documents how centralization created new understandings of the role of teach.

Abstract
The relationship between capitalism and democracy has been a preoccupation of political science for at least half a century. It has appeared in different forms, but the basic question remains the same: can capitalism and democracy coexist? Through an analysis of post–World War I austerity policy, Clara Mattei's Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism puts the incompatibilities between the two on stark display. Mattei demonstrates that austerity is a not a neutral policy tool for economic management, as its supporters and critics assume. Rather, it is a mechanism of class control. This interpretation helps to make sense of austerity's apparent "failures." By calling attention to the class character of economic policy in general, Capital Order suggests that political scientists revisit the notions of the structural dependence of the state on capital and class compromise. It also asks readers to take seriously the politically constructed nature of economics as a realm of action and thinking separate from politics. Through its implication of professional economists in an antidemocratic policy initiative, it also has uncomfortable implications for political science.

This article examines the Dynamics of Contention research program against the backdrop of political science's emergent concern with institutions during the 1990s. By the time Charles Tilly had developed his mechanism-based explanatory framework for understanding contentious politics, the study of institutions had come to dominate political science. Although the contentious politics framework has some similarities with historical institutionalism, I argue that the two approaches are incompatible, precisely because of the latter's focus on institutions. The contentious politics approach requires historicizing everything, including institutions, in such a way that anything analyzable becomes a process. Historical institutionalism relies on historical fixedness and some understanding of equilibrium, both of which Tilly came to reject for the study of contentious politics, in favor of open-ended political conflict and causal mechanisms as explanatory building blocks. To probe the tension between Tilly's mechanism-based approach to understanding contentious politics and historical institutionalism, I conduct a close reading of two books that Tilly wrote using the contentious politics approach to explain matters of concern to historical institutionalists: European Revolutions, 1492–1992 on revolutions and Contention & Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000 on democratization.

Abstract:While the American teachers' unions are commonly understood to be guarantors of public school teachers' job security through their backing of teacher tenure laws, the relationship between tenure and teachers' organizations is historically contingent. This article shows how in 1937 Pennsylvania teachers pushed their state legislature to pass what was at the time the most empowering teacher tenure law in existence. Using primary documents, the article examines how nonunionized teachers politicized tenure in the early 1930s, before the New Deal reshaped the political environment. Women activists from Philadelphia's AFT Local 192 successfully lobbied the legislature in Harrisburg in 1937 to pass a far-reaching tenure law that not only guaranteed due-process rights for teachers, but did so without allowing for a probationary period and without exception for married women teachers. Pennsylvania's teacher unionists fought against efforts to reform the law in the years that followed.