Political Sociology (graduate seminar)
POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY
Sociology 811, Fall 2023
Professor Charles Kurzman
Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Updated September 29, 2023.
Class meetings: 151 Pauli Murray Hall (formerly known as Hamilton Hall), Wednesday, 1:00-3:30 p.m., Aug. 21-Dec. 4, 2023.
Office Hours: By appointment (kurzman@unc.edu).
COURSE GOALS:
1) To acquaint students with the field of political sociology.
2) To introduce students to selected major works and big questions in the field.
3) To prepare students to contribute to the field through original research.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
1) Attendance and Participation (15 percent of final grade)
Attendance means on-time arrival (at the scheduled hour); participation means the contribution of insightful comments on the basis of the assigned readings. When you cannot make it to class, please let me know in advance, if possible. You are allowed to miss one class during the semester; after that, absences deduct 1 percentage point each from your final grade. You are responsible for material covered and due in classes that you miss.
2) Weekly Reading Notes (45 percent of final grade)
Reading notes on the week’s readings, approximately 2-3 pages per book (single-spaced) and approximately half-to-one page per article, are due at the beginning of each class. Please see the Assignment Guidelines on Canvas for more details. A sample of my reading notes is also available on Canvas.
3) Final Essay, due before the last class session (40% of final grade)
The final essay, approximately 5,000 words in length, will review the literature on a topic within the field of political sociology and propose a research study to make an original contribution to the study of this topic. Topics and approaches need to be approved by the instructor at least one month in advance of the deadline.
SCHEDULE: (Themes and readings selected collectively by class participants.)
Week 1: What is political sociology?
Readings:
Elisabeth S. Clemens, What Is Political Sociology? (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2016).
Jeff Manza, “Political Sociology,” Oxford Bibliographies, 2011.
Thomas Janoski et al., eds., The New Handbook of Political Sociology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020), table of contents, introductory essay, and one chapter of your choice.
Optional readings:
Reinhard Bendix and Seymour M. Lipset, “Political Sociology: An Essay with Special Reference to the Development of Research in the United States of America and Western Europe,” Current Sociology 6(2):79-99, 1957.
Didier Bigo and R.B.J. Walker, “International. Political. Sociology,” International Political Sociology 1(1):1-5.
Reading questions:
1. How do these overviews of the field approach the definition of the field of political sociology?
2. How has the field changed over the generations, according to these authors?
Week 2: Theories of the state
Readings:
Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York, NY: Free Press, 1964), Part III, Types of Authority.
Fred Block, “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule,” Socialist Review 7(3):6-28, 1977.
William Domhoff, “Who Rules America? Through Seven Editions and Fifty Years: Still More Accurate Than Alternative Power Theories,” pp. 11-56 in G. William Domhoff et al., Studying the Power Elite: 50 Years of Who Rules America? (New York: Routledge, 2018).
Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1985), Introduction and Conclusion.
Wendy Brown, “Finding the Man in the State,” Feminist Studies 18:7-34, 1995.
Optional readings:
William Domhoff, Who Rules America?, 8th ed. (London: Routledge, 2021), introduction and chapter on the policy planning network.
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
Mara Loveman, “The Modern State and the Primitive Accumulation of Symbolic Power,” American Journal of Sociology 110(6):1651-1683, 2005.
Reading questions:
1. How do late 20th century theories of the state (institutionalist, feminist, leftist, etc.) differ from Weber’s early 20th century theory of the state?
2. What role might a theory of the state play in research on the state?
Week 3: State formation
Readings:
Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990-1990 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), Chaps. 1 and 3.
Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 2, Global Empires and Revolution, 1890-1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 44-91, “A Theory of the Modern State.”
Erin Metz McDonnell, “Patchwork Leviathan: How Pockets of Bureaucratic Governance Flourish within Institutionally Diverse Developing States,” American Sociological Review 82(3):476-510, 2017.
Richard Lachmann, “Nation-State Formation,” pp. 458-483 in Thomas Janoski et al., eds., The New Handbook of Political Sociology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Optional readings:
Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: NLB, 1974).
Vivek Chibber, Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1979), Part 3, Chap. 3 (Panopticism).
Michel Foucault, “Governmentality.” Pp. 87-104 in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (London, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991).
Philip S. Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Reading questions:
1) The literature on state formation seems divided between studies that examine the emergence of state institutions and studies that examine the form that these institutions take – are there connections between these approaches?
2) Much of this literature focuses on Western Europe – what aspects would need to be revised if we look at state formation outside of Western Europe as well?
Week 4: Political economy
Readings:
Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalism System: Concepts for a Comparative Analysis,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 16(4):387-415, 1974.
Walter L. Goldfrank, “Wallerstein’s World-System: Roots and Contributions,” pp. 97-103 in Salvatore Babones and Christopher Chase-Dunn, eds., Routledge Handbook of World-Systems Analysis: Theory and Research (London: Taylor & Francis, 2012).
Monica Prasad, The Land of Too Much (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), “A Demand- Side Theory of Comparative Political Economy,” pp. 46-95.
Tali Kristal, “Good Times, Bad Times: Postwar Labor’s Share of National Income in Capitalist Democracies,” American Sociological Review 75(5):729-763, 2010.
Josh Pacewicz, “The Political Economy of the Capitalist State,” pp. 409-434 in Thomas Janoski et al., eds., The New Handbook of Political Sociology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Optional reading:
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vols. 1-4 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
Reading questions:
1. How do economic systems interact with political systems?
2. What is unique, if anything, about this interaction in the early 21st century?
Week 5: Imperialism and its aftermath
Readings:
V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism [1917] (New York: International Publishers, 1933).
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth [1961] (New York: Grove Press, 2021), Ch. 1.
Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa [1972] (New York: Black Classic Press, 2012), Ch. 6.
Julian Go, Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), Chap. 6.
Julian Go, “Political Sociology and the Postcolonial Perspective,” pp. 132-152 in Thomas Janoski et al., eds., The New Handbook of Political Sociology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Optional reading:
Franklin Henry Giddings, Democracy and Empire (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1900).
Reading questions:
1. How does a focus on imperialism, and related phenomena alter our view of big questions in political sociology?
2. Are there distinct types of imperialism, or are the shared characteristics more salient for the sorts of questions that political sociology is most interested in?
Week 6: Nationalism, ethnonationalism, populism, and related phenomena
Readings:
Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London, UK: Verso, 1991), first and last chapters.
Andreas Wimmer, “Nation Building: A Long-Term Perspective and Global Analysis,” European Sociological Review 31(1):30-47, 2015.
Bart Bonikowski and Paul DiMaggio, “Varieties of American Popular Nationalism,” American Sociological Review 81(5):949-980, 2016.
Thomas Soehl and Sakeef M. Karim, “How Legacies of Geopolitical Trauma Shape Popular Nationalism Today,” American Sociological Review 86(3):406-429, 2021.
Liah Greenfeld and Zeying Wu, “Nationalism: The Modern Motive-Force,” pp. 761-784 in Thomas Janoski et al., eds., The New Handbook of Political Sociology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Reading questions:
1. Is the wave of nationalism and related phenomena today different from the wave in the 19th and early 20th centuries?
2. Why do some places seem to experience more of these phenomena than others?
3. Are there forms of collective pride that do not involve reactionary exclusion?
Week 7: Social movements and revolutions
Readings:
Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), Chapters 1 and 2.
Charles Kurzman, The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), Ch. 1, 7-8, and additional chapter of your choice.
Frances Fox Piven, “Can Power from Below Change the World?” American Sociological Review 73(1):1-14, 2008.
Colin J. Beck, “Revolutions against the State,” pp. 564-592 in Thomas Janoski et al., eds., The New Handbook of Political Sociology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Peter Evans, “Transnational Social Movements,” pp. 1053-1077 in Thomas Janoski et al., eds., The New Handbook of Political Sociology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
James M. Jasper, “Social Movements,” pp. 627-645 in Thomas Janoski et al., eds., The New Handbook of Political Sociology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Optional reading:
Jack Goldstone, Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Reading questions:
1. How does the study of protest movements fit with political sociology?
2. What might we learn from the combination of the study of political systems, challenges within those systems (typically called “social movements”), and challenges to those systems (typically called “revolutions”)?
Week 8: Civil society and political identities
Readings:
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London, UK: Lawrence & Wishart, 2003), Part 2, Chapter 2, especially pp. 235, 245-246, 262-263.
Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), Chapters 1, 3, 7, 9, 15.
Theda Skocpol, Marshall Ganz, and Ziad Munson, “A Nation of Organizers: The Institutional Origins of Civic Voluntarism in the United States,” American Political Science Review 94(3):527-546, 2000.
Steven Klein and Cheol-Sung Lee, “Towards a Dynamic Theory of Civil Society: The Politics of Forward and Backward Infiltration,” Sociological Theory 37(1):62-88, 2019.
Sara Compion and Thomas Janoski, “The Good, the Bland, and the Ugly: Volunteering, Civic Associations, and Participation in Politics,” pp. 681-714 in Thomas Janoski et al., eds., The New Handbook of Political Sociology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Optional readings:
Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (London, UK: A. Millar & T. Caddel; Edinburgh, UK: A. Kincaid & J. Bell, 1767).
Paul Lichterman and Nina Eliasoph, “Civic Action,” American Journal of Sociology 120(3):798-863, 2014.
Optional readings on the dark side of civil society:
Amaney A. Jamal, Barriers to Democracy: The Other Side of Social Capital in Palestine and the Arab World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
Jason Kaufman, For the Common Good? American Civic Life and the Golden Age of Fraternity (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), Chapter 22.
Dylan Riley, The Civic Foundations of Fascism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).
David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 4th ed. (London: Verso, 2022).
Reading questions:
1. Enlightenment theories of civil society considered social groupings as a check on the power of the state – if we accept that observation for that period, is it still the case?
2. How do social groupings pose a challenge to the egalitarian aspects of citizenship and democracy?
Week 9: Democracy
Readings:
Barrington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1967), Preface, Chapters 7-8, and empirical chapter of your choice.
Seymour Martin Lipset, “The Social Requisites of Democracy Revisited,” American Sociological Review 59(1):1-22, 1994.
Stephen Kalberg, “Tocqueville and Weber on the Sociological Origins of Citizenship: The Political Culture of American Democracy,” Citizenship Studies 1(2):199-222, 1997.
Patrick Heller, “Democracy in the Global South,” Annual Review of Sociology 48:463-484, 2022.
Larry M. Bartels et al., “Global Challenges to Democracy? Perspectives on Democratic Backsliding,” International Studies Review 25(2):1-19, 2023.
Jessica Kim and Kathleen M. Fallon, “The Political Sociology of Democracy: From Measurement to Rights,” pp. 538-563 in Thomas Janoski et al., eds., The New Handbook of Political Sociology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Optional readings:
Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Adaner Usmani, “Democracy and the Class Struggle,” American Journal of Sociology 124(3):664-704, 2018.
Reading questions:
1) Where and why has democracy emerged?
2) Do explanations of the emergence of democracy also have implications for the study of its decay and demise?
3) Are different approaches to the study of democracy talking about the same phenomenon?
Week 10: Citizenship
Readings:
T.H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1950), Part I (“Citizenship and Social Class”).
Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “Constructing Citizenship: Exclusion, Subordination, and Resistance,” American Sociological Review 76(1):1-24, 2011.
Margaret R. Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), Chapters 1-3, 7.
Optional readings:
Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
Stephanie DeGooyer et al., The Right to Have Rights (London, UK: Verso, 2018).
Reading questions:
1. Historically, have the liberatory/egalitarian aspects of citizenship rights always been accompanied by their exclusivist/inegalitarian aspects?
2. Do these aspects necessarily go together?
Week 11: Law and society
Readings:
Patricia Williams, “Alchemical Notes: Reconstructing Ideals from Deconstructed Rights,” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, 22(2):401-433, 1987.
Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review, 106(8):1707-1791, 1993.
Scott Duxbury, “Who Controls Criminal Law? Racial Threat and the Adoption of State Sentencing Law, 1975 to 2012,” American Sociological Review, 86(1):123-153.
Christopher Tomlins, “How Autonomous Is Law?” Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 3:45-68, 2007.
Mathieu Deflem, “Sociology of Law,” Oxford Bibliographies, 2015, DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756384-0056.
Reading questions:
1. In what ways do Williams, Harris, and Duxbury argue that legal systems reflect and reinforce racialized inequalities?
2. How does the debate over the autonomy of law parallel (or diverge from) the debate over the relative autonomy of the state?
Week 12: Race, racialization, racism, and anti-racism
Readings:
Derrick A. Bell, “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,” Harvard Law Review, 93(3):518-533, 1980.
Justin Driver, “Rethinking the Interest-Convergence Theory,” Northwestern University Law Review 105(1):149-197, 2011.
Tianna S. Paschel, Becoming Black Political Subjects: Movements and Ethno-Racial Rights in Colombia and Brazil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), Chaps. 1 and 7 (and more if possible).
Joe R. Feagin and Sean Elias, “Theories of Race, Ethnicity, and the Racial State,” pp. 191-215 in in Thomas Janoski et al., eds., The New Handbook of Political Sociology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Moon-Kie Jung and Yaejoon Kwon, “The Racial State in the Age of Racial Formation Theory and Beyond,” pp. 1003-1026 in Thomas Janoski et al., eds., The New Handbook of Political Sociology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Optional readings:
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 3rd edition (New York: Routledge, 2015).
Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), Chapters 1 and 11.
Tom Van der Meer and Tim Reeskans, “Welfare Chauvinism in the Face of Ethnic Diversity: A Vignette Experiment across Diverse and Homogenous Neighbourhoods on the Perceived Deservingness of Native and Foreign-Born Welfare Claimants,” European Sociological Review 37(1):87-103, 2020.
Michelle Christian, Louise Seamster, and Victor Ray, “Critical Race Theory and Empirical Sociology,” American Behavioral Scientist 65(8):1019-1026, 2021.
Reading questions:
1. What theoretical issues are at stake in the debate over the interest convergence? What political issues are at state?
2. How does “racialization” of political systems/subjects differ in Latin America and the United States?
3. Are there noticeable differences in emphasis or argument in the two pieces on the “racial state” in The New Handbook of Political Sociology?
Week 13: Welfare states
Readings:
Gosta Esping-Anderson, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), Chapters 1-2.
Martin Powell, Erdem Yörük, and Ali Bargu, “Thirty Years of the Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism: A Review of Reviews,” Social Policy and Administration 54(1):60–87, 2020.
Geof Wood and Ian Gough, “A Comparative Welfare Regime Approach to Global Social Policy,” World Development 34(10):1696-1712, 2006.
Hana E. Brown, “Racialized Conflict and Policy Spillover Effects: The Role of Race in the Contemporary US Welfare State,” American Journal of Sociology 119(2):394-443, 2013.
David Brady and Amie Bostic, “Paradoxes of Social Policy: Welfare Transfers, Relative Poverty, and Redistribution Preferences,” American Sociological Review 80(2):268-298, 2015.
Joya Misra and Mary Bernstein, “Sexuality, Gender, and Social Policy,” pp. 842-879 in Thomas Janoski et al., eds., The New Handbook of Political Sociology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Optional readings:
Evelyne Huber and John D. Stephens, Development and Crisis of the Welfare State: Parties and Policies in Global Markets (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Stephan Haggard and Robert R. Kaufman, Development, Democracy and Welfare States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Reading questions:
1. Does the standard typology of welfare states in wealthy industrial countries apply to the rest of the world as well?
2. Can a single theory account for the expansion of the welfare state in the first two thirds of the 20th century and its retrenchment since then?