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This chapter describes the evolution of African-American political participation. Beginning with early findings in Black political participation, it discusses the major paradigm shifts in this research and their catalysts. The chapter concludes by providing a roadmap for future research in the field.

The United States is more racially/ethnically diverse than at any point in the country’s history as a result of immigration, intermarriage, and multiracial identification. The Latino and Asian populations have more than tripled in size since 1970; Latinos are now the largest racial/ethnic minority group, and Asians, the fastest growing group in the country. Also contributing to America’s new diversity is increasing intermarriage and a growing multiracial population. Intermarriage soared more than twenty-fold between 1960 and 2000, and the multiracial population is poised to account for one in five Americans by 2050, and one in three by 2100. However, this new diversity is not evenly apparent across the country. Some states—like California—reflect the new diversity, which is also evident at the metropolitan level. In other states, the new diversity is nearly invisible. The pattern of high and low diversity in the United States reflects the country’s vast heterogeneity.

The most important scholarly finding about the American state is how the politics of race and racial inequality have shaped all aspects of the state’s structure and policy outcomes. The American state performs and combines the standard functions of maintaining order, delivering public policy, monopolizing the legitimate use of violence and maintaining revenues, but always with effect on the politics of race. The American state’s embrace of the politics of racial inequality mark it out as a key case in comparative studies for researchers developing and testing arguments about democratic states with complex histories and fragmentary institutional arrangements.

Contrary to a view that sees racism as an aberration within American liberalism or largely outside the broader dynamics of American politics, historical institutional scholars often emphasize the central place of racial conflict in American politics and especially in the development of the American state. Although racial conflict has been an obstacle to state-building, struggles over race also enhanced state authority in ways that defy conceptions of a weak American state. Approaching American politics through an historical institutional lens helps underscore the way efforts to confront long standing racial divisions and conflict helped to institutionalize key political and social rights.

This chapter offers a critical survey of extant scholarship on the civil rights movement. It highlights topics, organizations, and specific figures and campaigns that have been extensively studied, while also calling attention to other aspects of, or persons or groups in, the movement that have received much less scholarly attention. The piece ends with an extended section on what the author terms “silences, holes, and biases” in the literature on this most important of American social movements. More specifically the author calls for a temporal and geographic broadening of research on the African American freedom struggle, more attention to black activism within a host of institutions (e.g. schools, workplaces, cultural institutions), and increased research on the dynamics of white resistance to collective political action by African Americans.

This article examines the ways in which scholars of American political development (APD) have encountered the color line through their research, and the strides they have made in bringing race back into the field of political science in general and the study of the state in particular. Three core questions about race and APD are considered: How is race defined? When does race matter? In what direction does race matter? Two approaches relating to race and American politics are discussed: the race relations approach and the racial politics (or minority politics) approach. It then explores five challenges that must be addressed in order to overcome the persistent connections between APD and the discipline’s racial anomalism. It also analyzes the role of race in the establishment of the early American welfare state and concludes by reflecting on the persistence of racial inequality and prospects for APD in the twenty-first century.

Despite a long history of colonialism, slavery, immigration, and ethnic conflict in Europe, issues of racism and discrimination have only recently gained the attention of policy makers in many European countries. In this chapter, I will examine how the issue of race has been dealt with in the literature related to European politics and discuss the development of “race relations” or antidiscrimination policy, particularly the situation in France, Britain, and Germany. I will focus on the development of antidiscrimination prior to harmonization under the EU’s racial equality directive (RED) as an example of the public policy implications of immigration and race in Europe.

Deliberative democracy is widely associated with a public sphere that is more inclusive of cultural and religious minority groups than that established by a model of politics as interest aggregation. But it has also been criticized for stipulating unjust terms for this political inclusion, and for being insufficiently responsive to identity group-based claims. Such challenges have prompted much internal debate about the validity and the practical consequences of different norms and mechanisms of deliberative democracy. This chapter argues that models of public deliberation less beholden to Habermasian discourse ethics are able to offer a more promising response to these multicultural challenges.

In the scheme of history, most political deliberation has taken place outside the modern West. But the study of deliberation, however extensive it has become, has largely ignored this wider world. Examining how deliberation manifests across different societies has considerable promise for both explanatory and normative political theory. To explain why people deliberate—which should be among the first questions deliberative democrats ponder—it is first necessary to examine how people deliberate, and why this varies. Doing so with a comparative and historical perspective, even in the preliminary fashion presented here, reveals how social and political ideals can motivate and shape deliberative practice. And there are normative stakes in this agenda. If collective deliberation is to prevail in global governance, we must fashion political ideals which motivate diverse peoples to come together in discourse, rather than confront their problems, or compound them, by less desirable means.

Every democratic process short of unanimity produces opinion minorities. Political divisions along anchored demographic characteristics like language, religion, race, or ethnicity challenge pluralist models of governance by threatening to entrench the exclusion of minority groups from political power. Especially when attuned to ethnic geography, electoral engineering through manipulation of the electoral system and other rules governing the electoral process, such as boundary delimitation, reserved seats, ballot-access requirements, and ethnic party bans, can help promote either inclusion or exclusion of minorities. Ensuring long-term interethnic peace has proved more difficult. Scholars continue to grapple with how to ensure minority inclusion without freezing existing divisions.

Due to its wide-ranging implications for social cohesion in diversifying Western countries, the question of the potential negative consequences of ethnic diversity for social trust is arguably the most contentious question in the literature on social trust. In this chapter we critically review the empirical evidence for a negative relationship between contextual ethnic diversity (measured locally within countries) and social trust. We cautiously conclude that there are indications of a negative relationship, although with important variations across study characteristics including national setting, context unit analyzed, and conditioning on moderating influences. Building on the review, we highlight a number of paths for theoretical and methodological advances, which we argue would advance the literature on the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust.

This article studies ethnic mobilization and ethnic violence. It reviews some of the salient empirical patterns that concern cross-national and temporal variation in the politicization of ethnicity and ethnic violence. It also tries to explain the prevalence and variation of politicized ethnicity, and then arguments proposing to explain the occurrence of ethnic violence.

This article focuses on ethnic conflict and ethnic identity. It begins by differentiating these from nationalism, national identity, and civil wars. It presents a survey of the explanations provided in four traditions of enquiry, and also provides an analysis of the inadequacies or merits of arguments within each tradition. The article also reviews the evolution of arguments related to this field.

This chapter considers how ethnic diversity affects state transformations in the Global South. It focuses on the impact of ethnicity on changes in state borders, decentralization, consociationalism, the militarization of states, state capacity, and the communalization of state power. As part of the analysis, the chapter also compares the region with the core OECD. While consociationalism and decentralization are most relevant to the core OECD, and while much attention has been paid to how ethnic movements can transform state borders, all three are relatively rare in the Global South. Alternatively, ethnic mobilization and conflict have had much greater effects on the militarization of states, state capacity, and the communalization of state power.

Ethnic and nationalist movements display a wide variety of demands, activities, and goals but they all involve the state. States and governments are pressed to develop policies that stretch from cultural recognition and territorial autonomy to special rights and public goods provision for the relevant community. Mobilization centered on identity politics is often peaceful but there are also instances where the politicization of grievances may lead to violence such as riots, terrorism or civil wars. This chapter explains the repertoire of actions available to ethno-nationalist movements and concentrates on the importance of structural conditions in making salient ethnic and national cleavages. The focus is on movements operating in democratic settings and the impact of macro–social changes on indigenous movements in Latin America.

This article provides a review of the literature on fair division, which has flourished in recent years. It focuses on three different literatures in the field: the allocation of several indivisible goods, the division of a single heterogeneous good, and the division, in whole or in part, of several divisible goods. The article discusses problems that arise in allocating indivisible goods, and highlights the trade-offs that must be made when not all of the criteria of fairness can be satisfied at the same time. It also describes and provides the procedures for dividing divisible goods fairly, which is based on different criteria of fairness.

Once Muslims took over from Copts the trade to the regions around Lake Chad c.1000 ad, the process of Islamization could begin in Kanem and Borno. The state of Borno by the sixteenth century had become dominant in the Lake Chad basin, and Borno’s ruler had been given the title of Caliph. To the west of Borno, under its suzerainty were the savanna trading cities of Hausaland, where the two main merchant networks, one from Birni Ngazargamu in Borno, the other (“Wangara”) from Jenne and Gao (on the River Niger), combined trade with scholarship. By the late eighteenth century, a shaikh of the Qadiriyya brotherhood, ‘Uthman dan Fodio, demanded local rulers be strictly Islamic; this gave rise to four years of jihad and its ultimate success in 1808 led to the establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate, the largest precolonial state in Africa (much larger than today’s northern Nigeria).

A fundamental building block of the Zionist vision is the claim of a primordial link between modern-day Jews and the people and territory of ancient Israel. This claim, which has proven remarkably durable despite its changing form and its tension with understandings of Palestinian indigeneity, continues to inform conceptions of nativeness in the modern-day state of Israel. This chapter explores how constructions of Jewish nativeness in Israel have changed in relation to successive immigration processes. Taking sociocultural and political dynamics as its focus, the chapter examines the cultural and institutional practices through which the notion of Jewish nativeness, its boundaries, and its logics of inclusion and exclusion were constructed and enforced in four historical periods. In each period, an increase in ethnic and religious heterogeneity challenged established notions of Jewish nativeness and membership in new ways. Although conceptions of Jewish nativeness have changed over time, they continue to shape social boundaries by signaling, and qualifying, membership in the Israeli collective.

Indigenous peoples’ rights to self-determination and self-government are recognized by several international instances. Deliberation plays a key role in the exercise of these rights, and its forms are as diverse as the cultures and social structures of which it is part. However, efforts to understand commonalities and differences between contexts and experiences have led to discussions of what Rodolfo Stavenhagen has termed the “indigenous situation.” This chapter looks at some ways in which self-identified Indigenous peoples have maintained, repurposed, and developed practices of political deliberation within such contexts of colonialism, nation-state formation, and capitalist expansion. A particular emphasis is put on the various scales at which deliberation takes place, be it in community life, regional organizations, or national and international political movements.

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.