odization of the racial project in the Obama era. Given the volume’s focus on the United States, it is striking that so little attention (with the exception of Singh’s essay) is given to the mass incarceration and policing of the last thirty years; here surely is one of those elusive social processes by which race is forged and institutionalized. Undergirding the most trenchant chapters, however, is a common grounding in the transnational racial project of a declining U.S. hegemon. Whether this remakes the liberal imperial project or marks the failure of the neo-liberal/neo-conservative project remains very much an open question here. These ambiguities are revealed in Omi and Winant’s concluding chapter, where readers remain curiously tethered to a consideration—and in many ways, a defense— of the gains of the 1960s and 1970s social movements. This is at times difficult to grasp given the fierce abandonment by the left and right, Democrats and Republicans alike, of the postwar liberal and social democratic racial project. Still, as the authors in this collection repeatedly emphasize, uncertainty and fluidity in racial conceptions, identities, and movements for justice mark the present and near future—and this is a remarkable advance from the scholarship of a generation ago. Confronting the inability of past structural formations and discourses to explicate racial meanings and hierarchies as they are being remade by today’s movements, migrations, and states is still a bracing tonic. Even more problematic, and yet to be unearthed here, is the ongoing impact of the replacement of the Third World/U.S. racial binaries of the mid-twentieth century by the rise of Asian/ Global South relations in the decades to come. These observations only serve to underline the importance and value of this anthology to students and scholars of race in the twentyfirst century. Written in accessible language for undergraduate as well as graduate classes on race, ethnicity, and stratification, it marks the summation of almost a generation of engaged work undertaken during the collapse of liberal hopes and dreams for racial reconciliation. Living as we do in an unstable interregnum as a new, global racial regime is being forged, this collection and the questions its authors grapple with are all the more pressing.

Democracy and the Left: Social Policy and Inequality in Latin America:

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Why Welfare States Persist The Importance Of Public Opinion In Democracies

Neither well-functioning institutions nor a well-organized economy can be taken for granted when studying social policy preferences in the Global South. On the contrary, in many low and middle-income countries fiscal capacity is low, the informal sector is considerable, and the quality of institutions lacks far behind, so that reliable provision of public welfare goods is at question. The paper argues that a weak state discourages expectations of the public welfare system so that welfare demand rises only with growing institutional performance and compelling fiscal capacity. Using multilevel analysis of public opinion data for both low and middle-income democracies and advanced industrial states, the article shows that the level of fiscal capacity and the quality of institutions is particularly relevant for individual welfare demand and preferences for redistribution in low- and middle-income democracies. Well-performing distributive and extractive capacities of the state raise social policy preferences. In contrast, institutional dysfunctionalities such as a rising informal sector and corruption exert a detrimental effect. The results reveal the need for explicit analysis of the characteristics of developing countries in order to understand social policy preferences in less affluent democracies.

https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:370076/UQ37076_OA.pdf

Sarah Berens

Papers

Social policy preferences from a comparative perspective