A quick comparison of characteristic British struggles in 1758 and 1833 will show how greatly the predominant forms of popular collective action changed during the intervening 75 years. That change sets a research problem that I have been pursuing for many years: documenting, and trying to explain, changes in the ways that people act together in pursuit of shared interests—changes in repertoires of collective action. This interim report has two complementary objectives: first, to situate the evolving concept of repertoire in my own work and in recent studies of collective action; second, to illustrate its applications to the experience of Great Britain from the 1750s to the 1830s. It will do no more than hint, however, at explanations of the changes it documents.

Contentious Repertoires in Great Britain, 1758–1834

Measuring characteristics of democracy is not an easy task, but anyone who does empirical research on democracy needs good measures. In this article, we present the Democracy Barometer, a new measure that overcomes the conceptual and methodological shortcomings of previous indices. It allows for a description and comparison of the quality of thirty established democracies in the timespan between 1995 and 2005. The article examines its descriptive purposes and demonstrates the potential of this new instrument for future comparative analyses.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Feps.2011.46.pdf

The Democracy Barometer: A New Instrument to Measure the Quality of Democracy and its Potential for Comparative Research

While some studies have revealed that social capital is shaped within civil society, the role of political institutions in forming social capital has not yet been clearly shown. This article, therefore, tries to evaluate the politico-institutional foundations of social capital mea- sured in terms of associational life in Switzerland. The purpose is to apply Putnam's method of comparing subsystems to the Swiss cantons. The empirical analyses show that govern- ment structures are strongly associated with social capital. More specifically, the availabil- ity of direct democracy promotes a lively associational life. In addition, consensus democracy and decentralized political structures contribute to social capital. In this vein, the access points of the politico-institutional structure constitute a feasible 'top-down' path to break- ing out of the vicious circle of distrust, disengagement and weak democracy.

Bowling the state back in: Political institutions and the creation of social capital

This article evaluates the foundations of a key component of social capital, namely, generalized trust in Japan and Switzerland. Although the two countries are remarkably different, they share a nu...

Social Capital in (Dis)Similar Democracies The Development of Generalized Trust in Japan and Switzerland

Research on social inequality speaks of a major change in the income distribution that has been taking place since the 1970s. At first, inequality in the income distribution mainly occurred in Anglo-saxon countries, but it has also been on the rise in Western europe over the last decades. In light of this trend, we ask how social inequality affects political participation and attitudes towards democracy. In our article, we first consider the increasing income inequality in the OeCD countries. subsequently, we analyze data from 17 Western european democracies from

J. P. Mayer

Papers

Über die Demokratie in Amerika

Der alte staat und die Revolution

Voyages en Angleterre, Irlande, Suisse et Algérie

Voyage en Sicile et aux Etats-Unis

Correspondance d'Alexis de Tocqueville et d'Arthur de Gobineau