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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 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.

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 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.