College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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Item Civil Society, Popular Protest, and Democracy in Latin America(2006-10-21) Frajman, Eduardo Ohav; Alford, C. Fred; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation addresses the relationship between mobilized coalitions of movements and organizations emerging from civil society and the promotion of democracy. It offers a critique of major works in political theory that see in civil society the potential to transform democratic politics, primarily through the protection of civil society from the state in order to allow for the development of new identities and forms of sociability. The three main theoretical objections to these works involve their focus on state-civil society relations at the expense of economic factors, the presupposition that consensus is present in civil society, and the assumption that mobilized civil societies are fueled from the grassroots. Four recent cases of civil society mobilizations from Latin America, in Argentina, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Bolivia, are presented to illustrate the deficiencies of current theoretical approaches to civil society. The case studies show the importance of material conditions and the framing of specific grievances in the formation of popular movements grounded in civil society.Item The Politics of Labor Unions Laws Policy Making in Argentina(2006-07-12) Gonzalez, Marcela Fabiana; Kestnbaum, Meyer; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The question addressed in the Thesis seek to elucidate how and why did organized labor recover its strength vis-à-vis the state and create for itself a significant political place in the process of labor unions laws policy making in the eighties in Argentina? Drawing inspiration upon the historical institutionalist literature on policy outcomes and Bourdieu's concepts of field and practice sense, we propossed to answer the question by placing our attention on the conditional and contingent political factors as well as the historical and institutional patterns of overlapped and interwoven relationships that shaped labor politics: the trilogy state, labor, and peronist party. Specifically, we focused on organized labor relationally constituted capacities, coherence as a collective actor and capacity to fit its demands toward the state, the two critical dimensions of labor as a political actor to making sense of labor action vis-à-vis the state in the politics of labor unions laws reform.