Everyday Choices by Ellen Lust

"The influence of different arenas of authority over individuals depends on the strength of arenas. This is determined, in part, by the nature of the arena: the level of solidarity among its members, the range of aspects within individuals’ lives that the arena touches, and the extent to which the community and its leadership can monitor and sanction members. Other factors are specific to individual members: the extent to which they are beholden to the community and the exit options they enjoy."

Full Chapter via Cambridge Core: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/everyday-choices/41C482AE689FE13A4A4A4EFA480032D3

This audiobook is produced by Mediateknik at the University of Gothenburg.

© Lust, E. (2022). Everyday Choices: The Role of Competing Authorities and Social Institutions in Politics and Development (Elements in the Politics of Development). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781009306164 

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"The first challenge is to determine which arenas of authority are associated with the issues in question. Two factors come into play. First is the extent to which the issue is salient to fundamental tenants of the community and thus salient to the community’s imperative to maintain itself. Second is the extent to which elites within an arena use the issue to extend their power vis-à-vis competing elites from other arenas."

Full Chapter via Cambridge Core: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/everyday-choices/41C482AE689FE13A4A4A4EFA480032D3

This audiobook is produced by Mediateknik at the University of Gothenburg.

© Lust, E. (2022). Everyday Choices: The Role of Competing Authorities and Social Institutions in Politics and Development (Elements in the Politics of Development). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781009306164 

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"To move away from a perspective that either routinely privileges the state or presumes ex-ante that an ethnic, religious, or other arena drives individuals’ decisions, analysts and practitioners need criteria by which to determine which arenas guide actions. When a working-class Catholic chooses between a pro-union, abortion rights candidate and a pro-business, anti-abortion one, how do they respond to the expectations of and pressures within their religious community and union? So, too, as a parliamentarian decides whether to place a new clinic in their home village or a more populated town where votes are more plentiful, how do they weigh obligations to their local community, which expects priority from ‘their’ MP, and their political party, which seeks future votes? In this section, I argue that we gain traction on these questions by considering the salience of the issue at hand for the community within each arena, the strength of the relevant arenas over the individual, and their shape – or, whether or not the social institutions in salient arenas of authority are congruent."

Full Chapter via Cambridge Core: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/everyday-choices/41C482AE689FE13A4A4A4EFA480032D3

This audiobook is produced by Mediateknik at the University of Gothenburg.

© Lust, E. (2022). Everyday Choices: The Role of Competing Authorities and Social Institutions in Politics and Development (Elements in the Politics of Development). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781009306164 

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"Arenas of authority and social institutions within them need to be relatively stable and not simply reflect other underlying factors if they are to form the basis of a useful approach to understanding political behaviour and development outcomes. Communities develop social institutions as they seek to govern themselves, and they do so in response to specific challenges their context raises. Consequently, one of the thorniest issues in the study of authority and institutions is separating their effects from the factors that give rise to them. If social institutions simply reflect existing conditions, then one cannot assess their impact independently from these conditions (e.g., address endogeneity issues). However, there is good reason to believe that although arenas and social institutions are neither exogenously determined nor static, they are relatively stable and, over time, may become divorced from their initial purpose. They thus provide useful leverage for research and programming."

Full Chapter via Cambridge Core: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/everyday-choices/41C482AE689FE13A4A4A4EFA480032D3

This audiobook is produced by Mediateknik at the University of Gothenburg.

© Lust, E. (2022). Everyday Choices: The Role of Competing Authorities and Social Institutions in Politics and Development (Elements in the Politics of Development). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781009306164 

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"Social institutions structure engagement within arenas of authority. Sociologists debate the definition of social institutions perhaps as much as political scientists tangle over how to conceptualize the state (Reference Miller Miller, 2019). Some scholars define social institutions narrowly, such that they refer to the rules that govern actions and the rewards or punishments associated with compliance – a view of institutions in accordance with that of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Reference North Douglas North (1990), among others. Yet, rules invoked are often role-dependent, varying according to the position that one holds in the community. Moreover, even when enforced, the impact of various rules depends on the magnitude of costs or benefits associated with compliance. To highlight this, I define social institutions as the roles, rules, and rewards that structure activities within a community as it attempts to govern and ensure its survival. Social institutions determine individuals’ positions within a community, the actions available to them and others, and the consequences thereof. In doing so, they affect the distribution of power in the community, members’ expectations of the others’ responses, and consequently, individuals’ decisions."

Full Chapter via Cambridge Core: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/everyday-choices/41C482AE689FE13A4A4A4EFA480032D3

This audiobook is produced by Mediateknik at the University of Gothenburg.

© Lust, E. (2022). Everyday Choices: The Role of Competing Authorities and Social Institutions in Politics and Development (Elements in the Politics of Development). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781009306164

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"An arena of authority is a sphere of activity with clear membership, goals, and institutions. Visualize an arena of authority as a physical arena. It has boundaries, which distinguish members of the community (inside the arena) from outsiders. Membership in the community may be based on such foundations as ethnicity, tribe, or religion, but regardless of the foundation, the community seeks to propagate itself beyond the current generation. This common goal does not imply equality or a lack of conflict. The community may be highly differentiated, with leaders and followers, masters and slaves. Indeed, members need not necessarily have joined the community by volition. Members may also contest the rules or compete with each other over resources. Ultimately, however, those within the arena of authority are engaged, more or less consciously, in a grand project of sustaining the group. They are thus mutually interdependent, with each member’s welfare tied to that of others within the arena."

Full Chapter via Cambridge Core: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/everyday-choices/41C482AE689FE13A4A4A4EFA480032D3

This audiobook is produced by Mediateknik at the University of Gothenburg.

© Lust, E. (2022). Everyday Choices: The Role of Competing Authorities and Social Institutions in Politics and Development (Elements in the Politics of Development). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781009306164

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"Understanding political behaviour and development requires that arenas of authorities and social institutions are defined in positive terms rather than as residual categories. Thus, in Sections 3.1 and 3.2, I define these concepts and describe their attributes. I begin by defining arenas of authority and then turn to social institutions and their constituent parts: roles, rules, and rewards. In Section 3.3, I examine the relative stability of social institutions. Social institutions evolve, and they do so at least partly in response to socio-economic conditions. Yet, they are sticky. They do not simply reflect social and economic factors, nor do they change too quickly for actors to take them into account when making decisions. Thus, they can be analytically useful in crafting theories of behaviour and development and should be taken into account in policymaking and programming."

Full Chapter via Cambridge Core: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/everyday-choices/41C482AE689FE13A4A4A4EFA480032D3

This audiobook is produced by Mediateknik at the University of Gothenburg.

© Lust, E. (2022). Everyday Choices: The Role of Competing Authorities and Social Institutions in Politics and Development (Elements in the Politics of Development). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781009306164 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"The perspective that I present in this Element – that politics and development outcomes are the result of individuals’ everyday choices, shaped by multiple, competing arenas of authority and the institutions within them – draws upon and extends decades of scholarship on politics and development. However, I make three conceptual moves that, taken together, distinguish this from previous frameworks. First, I argue that the seemingly political decisions that individuals make often have multiple meanings (Reference Falleti and Cunial Wedeen, 2002) and that individuals associate their choices with arenas of authority and attendant communities. Second, I set arenas of authority associated with different communities and the state on equal theoretical footing. Third, I emphasize the importance of institutional variation in both the state and various non-state arenas of authority. By doing so, I develop a framework that brings disparate literature into conversation, fosters knowledge accumulation, and facilitates a new approach to the study of, and programming around, politics and development."

Full Chapter via Cambridge Core: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/everyday-choices/41C482AE689FE13A4A4A4EFA480032D3

This audiobook is produced by Mediateknik at the University of Gothenburg.

© Lust, E. (2022). Everyday Choices: The Role of Competing Authorities and Social Institutions in Politics and Development (Elements in the Politics of Development). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781009306164 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"A fourth approach steps away from the state-centric, single-arena approach that underpins most work on governance and development. Both scholars working on hybridity of governance and those studying intersectionality recognize that individuals act within various, competing arenas of authority, and they pay great attention to how these arenas affect the distribution of power across actors. These scholars thus provide an important critique of the dominant approaches and a basis for advocacy. However, they do not offer guidance on how competing arenas of authority or the institutions within them affect the choices individuals make and the outcomes that ensue."

Full Chapter via Cambridge Core: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/everyday-choices/41C482AE689FE13A4A4A4EFA480032D3

This audiobook is produced by Mediateknik at the University of Gothenburg.

© Lust, E. (2022). Everyday Choices: The Role of Competing Authorities and Social Institutions in Politics and Development (Elements in the Politics of Development). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781009306164 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"A third strand of literature highlights the importance of social institutions and increasingly recognizes variations across them. Scholars taking this approach have uncovered a number of important findings that I build on in the pages that follow. Yet, a review of this literature finds that these scholars, too, generally privilege the state and fail to consider competing, non-state arenas of authority. Moreover, they lack an overarching schema that allows them to be fully in conversation with each other and to make sense of the increasingly vast literature."

Full Chapter via Cambridge Core: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/everyday-choices/41C482AE689FE13A4A4A4EFA480032D3

This audiobook is produced by Mediateknik at the University of Gothenburg.

© Lust, E. (2022). Everyday Choices: The Role of Competing Authorities and Social Institutions in Politics and Development (Elements in the Politics of Development). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781009306164 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.