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This chapter presents a historical overview of political consumerism in the United States and Canada, highlighting how societal and cultural shifts have influenced participation over time. The chapter begins by discussing the debatable origins of political consumerism in the Boston Tea Party to present-day examples, including fair trade and ecoconsumption. Throughout the chapter, there is an emphasis on the heterogeneity of political consumers, with particular attention to how marginalized groups, particularly women and African Americans, have used political consumerism to bring about social change. The chapter also argues that producer-consumer solidarity campaigns, including the antisweatshop movement and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Campaign for Fair Food, are preferable to consumer-led campaigns. Finally, this chapter concludes with methodological considerations for studying political consumerism in North America and suggestions for future research.

This chapter provides an overview and recapitulation on the causes and consequences of terrorism in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). While terrorism is a global phenomenon, counterterrorism policy could constitute a challenge in SSA. As an economic good, terrorism can be explained within a standard rational choice model of optimizing agents, or an existential good explained by individuals who are present-aim oriented. Such a consideration is important for enabling security measures that are likely to be effective against terrorism in SSA. As many countries in SSA are in a geography subject to climate change, the chapter also considers the extent to which climate change can enable terrorism in SSA.

This chapter provides an overview of the main correlates of voting behaviour in Spain. Through a review of existing studies we first offer an outline of the most relevant factors associated with Spaniards’ voting choices. Next, we present a comprehensive and up-to-date account of the importance of these correlates of voting behaviour, drawing on the four available pre- post- electoral panel studies from the Spanish Centro de Investigaciones Socioló gicas (CIS). Through this data we analyse the association of these features with individuals’ voting choices in the 2000, 2008, 2011, and 2015 general elections. Findings illustrate the relevance and evolution of key factors related to the sociological, the social-psychological, and the performance-based models of voting behaviour in Spain. Class voting, economic voting, and ideological voting contribute to explaining Spaniards’ behaviour at the polls.

This chapter reviews, analyzes, and explains general patterns of electoral behavior in national elections in Israel from 1949 to 2019. It examines both patterns of voter turnout and the choice of a specific party. While it looks at historical trends, it focuses mainly on more recent developments. The types of factors that explain variance and trends in these behavioral patterns are not unique to Israel. Yet the specific relative weight of each factor clearly tells much of the story of Israeli politics. These factors include, especially, the influence of religiosity on Jewish voting patterns and the separate development in voting patterns (turnout and party choice) of the minority population of Israeli Arab citizens.

This chapter focuses on the protest political music works produced between Nigeria’s independence and her redemocratization in 1999. It is an intervention on the unconsciously held view that Fela was the only popular musician who confronted the military and tyrannous leaders of Nigeria between 1960 and his passing in 1997. Whereas Fela’s Afrobeat gained renown as a strong protest category, other forms such as reggae and highlife also provided avenues for popular music protest in the time Fela held the reins. In demonstrating that Fela provides only one piece of the cultural tapestry, the chapter discusses protest political music material outside of Fela’s repertoire, which enriched the sociopolitical space of pre-1999 postcolonial Nigeria.

Islamic movements have emerged nationally and globally with diverse ideologies and strategies but with the seemingly common goal of purifying, promoting, defending, or entrenching the cause of Islam. While some appear to have taken root locally, others were inspired by foreign influence. However, the global nature of the movement and its pervasive influence have ensured that doctrinal teachings, cross-border movements, desire for religious affiliation have played a major role in their growth and impacts. This chapter explores the emergence, growth, and dynamics of Islamic social movement in Nigeria. A major thesis running through the chapter is the impact of earlier movements on latter ones with latter movements attaining higher levels of extremism depending on the available space within which they could operate. The impact of the movements are better seen in the general unrest accompanying their activities and the legacy of recurrent fundamentalism that they left behind.

The history of Israel is framed by wars. However, the nature of Israel’s wars has changed over time, from mainly infantry-based warfare to modern armor warfare, and from conventional warfare to regular armies clashing with nonstate combatants, known in the professional literature as low intensity conflict (LIC). Conventional warfare took place within a clear and well-defined territory, with relative separation between civilians and soldiers. Low intensity conflict has blurred the battlefield boundaries, and armed operations take place in civilian areas. With these changes, the meaning of victory has changed as well. The decisive military victory that marked the military campaigns of 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 is no longer relevant in the LIC battlefield. Conquest of territory and destruction of the enemy’s military forces, the hallmark of victory during the days of the conventional wars, are much less important in a mode of fighting in which the image of being able to continue to inflict damage is much more important.

This chapter presents a critical discussion of the symbiosis between media and politics in Israel. Theoretically, the Israeli media operate in a pluralistic, democratic, and advanced sociopolitical climate, but in fact most of the media suffer from fragmentation, economic instability, and heavy political pressures. These elements are reflected, for example, in homogeneous news supply, massive cross-ownership, and recently by increasing governmental intervention. These elements have rapidly invaded social and online media as well. The first section of this chapter offers an overview of the structural, political, and economic characteristics of the Israeli news media. The second part outlines characteristics of the Israeli media coverage of political news, election campaigns, and political satire, such as framing, mediatization, negativity, personalization, and political bias.

This chapter provides a broad overview of the political culture in Israel. It begins by discussing whether a single Israeli political culture can indeed be identified. It then surveys the principal factors that shape political culture and the key changes from the early days of nation-building attempts to Israel’s current, more multicultural character. Making use of a cultural-value map, the chapter then addresses the question of whether Israel’s political culture is indeed “Western” and compares the principal Israeli political orientations with those of other societies. Finally, it analyzes aspects of system support and democratic norms via the use of national and cross-national survey data. The analysis presented concludes that Israeli political culture is dominated by countervailing forces that create a combination of assertive and allegiant forms of citizenship.

The chapter examines the political struggles of Nigerian trade unions during the diverse labor regimes since independence. Labor regimes are the complex of laws, institutions, and practices through which the relations between the state, labor, and capital are regulated and contested. Major changes in political regimes and in the economy led to almost continuous trade union challenges to government and company practices from the late 1970s to the present, expressed in numerous general strikes and strike threats against governments. Attempts by a military regime to incorporate/subordinate the union movement within the state’s embrace in 1978 created a new labor regime but had the contradictory effect of strengthening union membership and capabilities. The Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) and member unions have been banned on two occasions, but union organization, generations of leadership, and combative traditions have enabled the union movement to persist in resisting state policies and employer obstructions. Union resistance often elicited widespread popular support. Democrat governments since 1999 have eliminated statist laws which supported unions, changing the labor regime to favor government and capital, part of overall market liberalization that works to weaken unions. Still, unions retain significant leverage.

Latin America is not only a region where labelled goods are produced for the Northern hemisphere. It is also a region where consumption has been politicized. Political consumerism takes a different trajectory in Latin America when compared with the northern hemisphere. Reasons include its different countries’ political culture and how corporations, governments, and social movements are driving forces for sustainable consumption. The region has a strong tradition of social movements, and these movements have incorporated political consumerism into their action repertoire. Political consumer tools are now becoming part of Latin American social movements’ strategies, though more emphasis is still put on working through the parliamentary arena rather than using the market as an arena for politics. The chapter covers some limitations and opportunities for the expansion of political consumerism throughout the continent. It also addresses weaknesses in the northern hemisphere’s theoretical framing of the phenomenon.

The Web today offers a tremendous number of sites and services that can provide useful data for researchers. Websites ranging from online social networks (e.g., Facebook, Twitter), to online marketplaces (e.g., eBay, Craigslist), to recommendation services (e.g., Yelp, TripAdvisor) can be used to examine human behavior at scale. However, collecting data from these services brings up a host of technical, legal, and ethical issues for researchers, and many research communities are still grappling with the challenges that obtaining data from these services presents. This chapter provides an overview of many such issues, aiming to provide practitioners with specific examples of how various services can be accessed and how different communities have dealt with the ethical and legal challenges that they present.

In Israel, as in many other countries, the impact of public opinion on national policymaking has increased dramatically over the last few decades. In fact, public opinion has practically developed into one of the prime political inputs in Israel. This chapter argues that this increased impact, which could have contributed to improving the Israeli democracy, is in fact often undermined by the increasing overlapping of the main cleavages within Israel: between the political Right and Left, between Jews and Arabs, and between religious and secular Israelis. This extreme overlapping has severely eroded the national consensus and accelerated the emergence of deep disagreements in public opinion over strategic issues, such as the nature of the state (Jewish? Democratic?), the main challenges facing the nation (including the best way of dealing with the protracted Israeli–Palestinian conflict), and the desired collective future.

According to cross-national surveys, Spaniards are among the Europeans who participate the most in street protests. At the same time, Spanish social movements have been generally understood as deploying a less radical protest repertoire and a relatively weak organizational model. Building upon central concepts in social movement studies, this chapter analyses these and other features of the Spanish activist tradition as compared to other Western countries. An especial attention is paid to the strongest protest cycles in Spanish recent history: the years of the democratic transition and the Great Recession. In doing so, this chapter aims to address the long-term effects of regime transition on domestic collective action and organized protest.

This chapter sketches the evolution of the cleavages perspective in Israel and offers a sociohistorical overview of four major cleavages in Israeli society: the national one between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, the cultural one between secular and religious Jews, the socioeconomic (or class) one between rich and poor, and the ethnic one between Ashkenazi Jews and Mizrahi Jews (or “Westerners” versus “Orientals”). The discussion highlights the measure of coalescence among the cleavages and their compound political impact. It underscores the role played by the cleavages in the “upheaval” transition of governmental power in 1977, from Left (Labor) to Right (Likud), and in the consolidation of a neoliberal and a neocolonial political culture in Israel since that time.

This chapter portrays the political and legal regime of Israel in its early years as the product of three factors: the conscious political effort of the Zionist movement; a nation-building process, which was a vast cultural endeavour aimed at constructing a new sovereign Jew; and decolonization in a territory where the British legacy still had significant political and legal influence. The chapter argues that notwithstanding its dependence on great powers and the Jewish Diaspora, and despite its weakness on the international stage, Israel displayed a not insignificant measure of political independence. On the level of intra-Jewish consciousness, the achievement was even greater. Diaspora Jews saw the establishment of the state as a transformative moment in Jewish history; its Jewish citizens felt that they were achieving political liberty.

Populist radical right parties have long been considered to mobilize their voters on specific issues, which they are deemed to “own.” Voters support these parties largely because of their “nativist” agenda, and more precisely because of their stance against immigration. In fact, research had established a “winning formula” of electoral persuasion for radical right parties, referring to a combination of “economically neoliberal” and “authoritarian” appeals that would jointly explain the strong electoral support. However, populist radical right parties have transformed their positions, through “second order messages,” by investing in a socioeconomic issue agenda. These parties can increase their electoral support by siding with their working class voters on redistributive issues, particularly through a welfare chauvinist frame. This chapter argues that populist radical right parties have strategically shifted on this latter dimension in order to adapt to their voters’ preferences. It shows that, in view of increased electoral persuasion, populist radical right parties modify some of their positions to tailor them to their working-class core electoral clientele.

Digital infrastructure has been rapidly embraced in the Arab Middle East and North Africa in the last decade, opening a unique window for computational social science and network data science scholars. However, there are currently two coexisting social and economic realities in the region, which result in very different usages and dynamics of networked communication: countries with chronic civil unrest in which digital media have largely served as mobilization tools (e.g., Tunisia, Egypt), and relatively stable and wealthy societies that face social change and economic hyper-development (e.g., Qatar, Kuwait). Given such diversity across the region, how and why should social scientists study digital networks in the Middle East? What can digital networks teach us about the social and political aspects of the modern Middle East? In sum, while claims about digital technologies’ impacts across the region have been critiqued for being speculative and overblown, we suggest that digital technologies have instead broadened our ability to understand ongoing transformations among Arab states and societies.

Asia, where the vast majority of the world’s Muslims live, is the world’s most terrorism-torn region. The terrorism problem, however, is not new for Asia: The region has been wracked by insurgencies, militant movements, and terrorist attacks for decades. The factors that have spurred terrorism in Asia range from arbitrary, colonially drawn borders or post-colonial change of frontiers by military or other means to the spread of militant ideologies and increasing socio-economic disparities linked to a governance deficit. The role of petrodollars from the oil sheikhdoms has been a critical factor in the spread of the jihadist ideology. State repression against an ethnic or religious minority has also triggered a terrorist backlash. Today, Asia confronts a serious and growing terrorism-related challenge. The fight against terrorism in Asia promises to prove a long and difficult one.

Although the study of terrorism in general is rife with definitional disagreements and overlap of different types of violence, the study of terrorism in Latin America is especially challenged by these issues. There are few sources of cross-nationally comparable violence data and it is difficult to differentiate terrorism from other types of violence. Violent actors are frequently categorized in multiple categories, ranging from gangs to guerrilla. A subnational analysis is recommended to take into account divergent levels of development, violence, and state presence within countries. This approach is necessary to understand violent groups in Latin America that not only differ by front or faction, but also to examine groups that either straddle multiple categories of violence or fall in the gaps between them.