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Institutions and the adoption of rights: political and property rights in Colombia

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Contention and Trust in Cities and States

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Abstract

Citizenship rights are the result of specific political bargains between different collective actors and state authorities (Tilly Theory and Society 26(34):599–602, 1997). The political bargains for rights are encoded in institutions, and these institutions develop independently from each other and take organizational characteristics that make certain rights easier to adopt than others. I argue that these institutions vary along two dimensions that affect the extent to which states can adopt rights successfully: one dimension is distributional and the second is the depth or extension of the rules that frame a given right. This article focuses on the institutional differences between property rights, especially land property, and political rights, and on the consequences of those differences on their adoption. I then illustrate my argument with examples from Colombia since 1980.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by a grant from the City University of New York CUNY Research Award Program. Previous versions of this article were presented at the Andean Forum on Broadening Citizenship, sponsored by Social Revolutions without Citizenship, SHRC of Canada; at the Bildner Center, The Graduate Center, CUNY; and at the Workshop on Contentious Politics, Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences, Columbia University. Thanks to all participants in those seminars and to Zehra Arat, Daniela Bailey, Chares Demetriou, Susan Eckstein, Eric Hirschberg, Paul Ingram, Adrienne LeBas, Roy Licklider, Behrooz Moazami, Camilo Plata, Graeme Robertson, and Cathy Schneider. Thanks also to Chuck Tilly for his comments at the Workshop, and for his teaching and generosity throughout many years. Chris Tilly gave me substantive and editorial comments that greatly improved this article. And Wendy Schwartz helped with editorial changes.

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  1. Department of Sociology, Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

    Carmenza Gallo

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  1. Carmenza Gallo
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Correspondence to Carmenza Gallo .

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  1. Vassar College, 124 Raymond Avenue, Box 238, Poughkeepsie, 12604-0238, USA

    Michael Hanagan

  2. IRLE / UCLA, 10945 Le Conte Ave., Suite 2107, Los Angeles, 90095-1478, USA

    Chris Tilly

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Gallo, C. (2011). Institutions and the adoption of rights: political and property rights in Colombia. In: Hanagan, M., Tilly, C. (eds) Contention and Trust in Cities and States. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_20

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