Making Waves
Democratic Contention in Europe and Latin America since the Revolutions of 1848

This book examines three waves of contention in Europe and Latin America across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Kurt Weyland (Author)

9781107044746, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 April 2014

326 pages, 5 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.57 kg

'The idea that diffusion is an important causal process is intuitively obvious but strikingly under-theorized. Making Waves is a theoretically and empirically ambitious effort to meet this challenge. Empirically, it examines three historical waves of democratic opposition: Europe in 1848 and 1917–19 and South America in the 1970s and 1980s. Theoretically, it advances two approaches to explaining diffusion and the success or failure of democratic opposition movements. The book is an important contribution to the study of both diffusion and the major episodes of democratization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.' Ruth Collier, University of California, Berkeley

This study investigates the three main waves of political regime contention in Europe and Latin America. Surprisingly, protest against authoritarian rule spread across countries more quickly in the nineteenth century, yet achieved greater success in bringing democracy in the twentieth. To explain these divergent trends, the book draws on cognitive-psychological insights about the inferential heuristics that people commonly apply; these shortcuts shape learning from foreign precedents such as an autocrat's overthrow elsewhere. But these shortcuts had different force, depending on the political-organizational context. In the inchoate societies of the nineteenth century, common people were easily swayed by these heuristics: jumping to the conclusion that they could replicate such a foreign precedent in their own countries, they precipitously challenged powerful rulers, yet often at inopportune moments - and with low success. By the twentieth century, however, political organizations had formed. As organizational ties loosened the bounds of rationality, contentious waves came to spread less rapidly, but with greater success.

1. Introduction: puzzling trends in waves of contention
2. A new theory of political diffusion: cognitive heuristics and organizational development
3. Organizational development and changing modes of democratic contention
4. The tsunami of 1848: precipitous diffusion in inchoate societies
5. The delayed wave of 1917–19: organizational leaders as guides of targeted contention
6. The slow but potent 'third wave' in South America: the prevalence of negotiated transitions
7. Crosscurrents of the third wave: inter-organizational competition and negotiation in Chile
8. Theoretical conclusions and comparative perspectives.

Subject Areas: Comparative politics [JPB], Political science & theory [JPA], Hispanic & Latino studies [JFSL4]