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CHARLES TILLY, Regimes and Repertoires. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006, ix + 256 p., Index.
Readers of even a small sample of Charles Tilly's recent prodigious output will know the script. Start with a handful of well-honed concepts developed over the three decades since the book From Mobilization to Revolution; refine them further; then develop a carefully circumscribed model and show its fecundity for the analysis of political contention past and present, near and far, using systematic data and rich historical illustration. Many concepts, such as repertoire of contention and political opportunity will be familiar; others, such as regime and the "mechanisms and processes" approach to explanation, perhaps less so. For readers new to Tilly's work, Regimes and Repertoires is an excellent introduction.
Regimes and Repertoires is organized around three questions (with emphasis on the first two): How do regimes affect contentious politics? Why? How do contentious politics affect regimes? The terms of the first question are addressed by mapping variations in political regimes on the one hand, and repertoires of contention on the other. Political regimes vary on two dimensions: state capacity (control over resources, activities, and people) and degree of democratization (combining civil liberties and political rights). The resulting typology of high-capacity democratic, high-capacity nondemocratic, low-capacity democratic, and low-capacity nondemocratic regimes is used in comparative analyses to show that repertoires vary by regime type. The two-dimensional framework is also used to show variations over time, as in chapter 5's analysis of South Africa from the establishment of apartheid in 1948 to the end of the century: regime changes (on the axes of state capacity and democracy) and consequent changes in political opportunities combined with preexisting institutions, social relations, and culture to shape...