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Chapter 7 offers a summary of findings and a series of concluding observations regarding the role of technology in American political advocacy. It offers a broader perspective on the intermediary role that the organizational layer of politics plays between elite political institutions and mass political behavior. The concluding observations discuss topics such as the mechanisms that facilitate continual change within the political system (innovation edges and advocacy inflation), the role of new media tools in facilitating new forms of “activated public opinion,” the disruptive challenges posed by the loss of “beneficial inefficiencies,” and the participatory benefits of the sedimentary character of netroots organizations.

This chapter recounts how over the course of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s a series of small legal and political innovations began to allow private investors to use international tribunals to sue foreign governments and then use American and European courts to enforce the decisions. Before 1945, the doctrine of absolute sovereign immunity held that no state could be held accountable for its actions in the courts of another state. After 1945, reforms began to chip away at sovereign immunity. Reforms arose from efforts to depoliticize investment disputes: first by giving private investors the right to take foreign governments to arbitration without the need to have their home government “espouse” the claim; then by giving national courts the right to enforce arbitration judgments against foreign governments.

This introductory chapter opens with a brief description of the novel populist mobilization practices that Peruvian political actors elaborated over the course of their 1931 presidential campaigns—the book’s central outcome of interest. It then endeavors to accomplish four things. First, it establishes the significance of, and outlines what is puzzling about, this outcome from a historical perspective. Second, it translates the historical puzzle into more theoretical terms, framing the outcome as a case of change in repertoires of political practice. Third, it assesses existing ways of explaining repertoire change that can be found in the literatures on social movements and contentious politics, highlighting strengths and deficiencies. Finally, it develops a framework for explaining political innovation that is based in part on pragmatist theories of action and specifies how the book’s substantive argument will be developed in the remaining chapters.

This chapter excavates the sources of political innovation in the first few months of electoral campaigning in Peru’s 1931 election. At this critical moment, collective actors from across the political spectrum faced new challenges and opportunities, but they responded to these differently. Some continued to act in routine ways, while others began to cobble together novel packages of political practices. Through comparison of the initial actions of all major contenders, this chapter explains this variation. The explanation centers around an understanding of how these actors’ perceptions of the situation and of their practical strategic options were shaped by their previous experiences, worldviews, and habits of thought. Only the leadership of Luis M. Sánchez Cerro’s and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre’s embryonic parties (Unión Revolucionaria and APRA) experienced the moment as constituting a critical problem situation that required a break with previous routines and a creative turn toward new forms of action. As these leaders began to experiment with new practices, it was their previous experiences—filtered through deliberative environments that facilitated radical departures from the norm—that led their practices to take on the characteristics of what would become a distinctly Latin American style of populist mobilization.

This epilogue discusses how, some four hundred years after its fall, the world was reminded of imperial Songhay's former glory when, in early January of 2012, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawād—or the MNLA—attacked the towns of Menaka and Aguelhok, leading to the collapse of the national army in northern Mali. However, the twenty-first century was not the first instance in which the modern world reflected on West African anterior history, though prior occasions were largely artistic in nature. In any case, through both real-world events and artistic creativity, enactments of West Africa's medieval past have filtered into contemporary consciousness. Even so, in turning from the popular to the academic, histories purporting to convey a sense of global development since antiquity continue to ignore Africa's contributions, not merely as the presumed site of human origins, but as a full participant in its cultural, technological, and political innovations. The epilogue then summarizes the full trajectory of West African history examined in the previous chapters.

This chapter, which focuses on the political context of action, explains how two collectivities of previously marginalized political actors, with personal and organizational characteristics that would dispose them to creative political action, crystallized and then came to find themselves in unlikely positions of viability on the national stage in Peru by May 1931. It argues that this was not an automatic byproduct of the changing social-structural conditions, but rather the result of contingent events and interactions unfolding within a dynamically changing field of political contention. Empirically, the chapter traces shifts in political relationships (both cooperative and antagonistic), as well as the formation and dissolution of collective actors, across four significant periods of reconfiguration of the political field that took place between 1918 and 1931. The ultimate state of the political field, and the resulting composition and characteristics of the collective actors, set the stage for the forces of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre and Luis M. Sánchez Cerro—as contingently empowered political outsiders—to take their first steps toward political innovation in May of 1931.

This prologue provides an overview of the history of early and medieval West Africa. During this period, the rise of Islam, the relationship of women to political power, the growth and influence of the domestically enslaved, and the invention and evolution of empire were all unfolding. In contrast to notions of an early Africa timeless and unchanging in its social and cultural categories and conventions, here was a western Savannah and Sahel that from the third/ninth through the tenth/sixteenth centuries witnessed political innovation as well as the evolution of such mutually constitutive categories as race, slavery, ethnicity, caste, and gendered notions of power. By the period's end, these categories assume significations not unlike their more contemporary connotations. All of these transformations were engaged with the apparatus of the state and its progression from the city-state to the empire. The transition consistently featured minimalist notions of governance replicated by successive dynasties, providing a continuity of structure as a mechanism of legitimization. Replication had its limits, however, and would ultimately prove inadequate in addressing unforeseen challenges.

This chapter summarizes the main arguments and findings of the book by defining two key principles that guide political change in Europe. These two principles are the principle of contestability and the principle of appropriability. The principle of contestability focuses on the likelihood that a party can gain a larger share of the political market if it offers a product of greater value to voters. The principle of appropriability concerns the extent to which a successful innovator can capture the benefits resulting from its innovation. The chapter then outlines three different scenarios for the future of European politics. It also highlights topics which were not addressed in this book, but are nonetheless important areas for future research. Finally, the chapter discusses important normative considerations about the stability and resilience of democratic institutions.

What does it mean to speak of politics on the edges of liberalism, and why should this matter for political thought? What these essays try to do is to look at a grey zone of phenomena where one is tempted to suspend the qualifier ‘liberal’ when describing politics, or at least where it is difficult to assert unambiguously that what happens within it is governed by a liberal code alone. It is also a zone where experimentation with political innovation questions the liberal consensus. The ‘edges’ of the title thus refer to phenomena that either push the envelope of liberalism or seek to go against and beyond it.

Political innovation is a process that unfolds over time. New practices have to be tested on the ground, in specific situations in which others are also acting. Accordingly, this chapter follows the development of populist mobilization practices over the course of the last few months of electoral campaigning in Peru’s 1931 election, paying particular attention to how the political actors adapted their innovative practices to the context at hand, as well as to how these practices were refined over time as the actors assessed their own actions and responded to the actions of their competitors. It argues that the dynamic of competition between the two political parties, and their assessments of their own strategic successes—that is, their experiential learning from themselves and from one another—led to a ratcheting up of the practices that they had been enacting since May. Focusing in particular on the Unión Revolucionaria and APRA parties’ grassroots organizing efforts, their practices at mass rallies, and their political rhetoric, it shows how populist mobilization crystallized and gained in coherence between July and October of 1931.

This chapter evaluates issue entrepreneurship, an innovation strategy through which political parties mobilize a new or previously ignored issue. Political parties will engage in issue entrepreneurship when the electoral gains of doing so outweigh the costs. Challenger parties are more likely to act as issue entrepreneurs than dominant parties because the potential costs relating to possible bad reactions of the voter base or coalition partners are likely to be lower for the former. At the same time, the potential electoral gains are more uncertain for dominant parties than for challenger parties. Parties that wish to politically innovate by mobilizing new or previously ignored policy issues are likely to choose issues with a high degree of appropriability—that is to say, issues that are not easily subsumed in the dominant left-right dimension. These issues may drive a wedge in the constituencies of dominant parties and lead to internal rifts.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the black politics in Newark, New Jersey, at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Its politics is mostly defined by generational clash on the electoral front, the clash of political styles (deracialized versus racialized), the relationship between political brand development and electoral viability, as well as the evolution of middle-class black representation of poor black constituents. Given the Newark's history of being in the vanguard with respect to black politics, the chapter notes that the place is on the front lines of further political innovation pioneering this movement was Cory Booker, Newark's third black mayor. Moreover, by showing the rise of young “post-racial” politicians, the chapter claims that the failures of previous generations of black elected officials to address entrenched inequality and poverty created opportunities for new politicians to emerge and critique their elders' approach.

The conclusion considers the legacy and lessons of the Populist moment, with an eye toward contemporary movements on both the left and right. While the Populist movement collapsed in 1896, the experience had a clear impact on economic and political institutions in the United States. In particular, the potential for third-party mobilization has been limited by the introduction anti-fusion laws designed to combat the People’s Party, restricting the organizational vehicles available to would-be reformers. Examining the rise of Populist mobilization provides important theoretical insights into the nature of populism today. By way of comparison, this chapter revisits the argument that populism is a form of political practice bound up with the configuration of competing elites within the political field. To the extent that political identities are anchored in the physical environment, the resulting patterns of contention tend to persist over long periods of time.