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a culture of fear

Examining how dictatorships maintain such power for so long can teach us how to save societies from authoritarian regimes and fearmongering leaders.

In a fascinating study on Peru, Jo-Marie Burt (Latin American Research Review, October 2006) argues Alberto Fujimori’s reign (1990–2000) was indeed due in part to structural factors like a weak civil society and economic crises, as others have articulated. But it also relied on a culture of fear and the per- petuation of personal insecurity.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with activists between 1992 and 2000, Burt notes the regime created an “authoritarian consensus” founded upon coercion. Using repression (disappearance, jail, and/or torture for political opponents) and exploitation of existing fears in society (of the Sendero Luminoso guerilla movement and economic chaos), Fujimori was able to legitimize his power and fragment civil society, thus keeping political com- petition to a minimum. It also kept the people terrified, and willing to surrender “their rights in exchange for the promise of order and stability.”

The key to preventing these kinds of despotisms in the future, Burt argues, is to guarantee the rule of law and accountability of public authorities. R.A.

when do leaders matter?

On January 21st the nation celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day for the 21st time. Sociologists wonder why we commemorate leaders and not the movements, and Sharon Erickson Nepstad and Clifford Bob (Mobilization, March 2006) argue it may be the dynamism leaders possess.

Leaders aren’t just surfers riding a social movement wave but rather have “leadership capital” that enables them to inspire those waves, the authors say. They also often play a seminal role in the movement’s direction and ultimately its success or failure.

Informed by cases from Africa, Latin America, Europe, and North America, the authors identify three types of leadership capital: social, cultural, and symbolic. Social capital refers to the leader’s networks of contacts, cultural capital to the local knowledge with which a leader can connect to a community, and symbolic capital to the leader’s legitimacy to direct the movement.

Leaders’ capital can, in fact, compensate for many problems social movements commonly face, such as lack of material resources, a closed political structure, or a deficit in the organizational structures.

So as the nation commemorates leaders like King and presidents like Washington and Lincoln, sociologists can reflect on the fact that there is still much to know about the critical roles these and others like them play in their struggles for a better world. R.A.

the slow lane on the information superhighway

The pace of Internet adoption among low-income citizens isn’t keeping up with the adoption rate among the more affluent, at least within the United States, according to Steve Martin and John Robinson (Social Problems, February 2007).

Each year more people have access to the Internet than the year before, but the spread of access has slowed in recent years. The slow-down has been greater for low-income Americans than the more affluent, the authors found.

If the Internet is to live up to its promise to democratize access to information, this is a problem. Low income and no Internet access can mutually reinforce negative effects on social mobility. In other words, low-income individuals can’t improve their economic well-being or participate politically without the information on the Internet.

Notably, this trend doesn’t hold in many other countries. For example, the United Kingdom has similar levels of income inequality as the United States, yet its levels of inequality with respect to Internet access by income are decreasing. J.S.