While this study addresses the question of democracy’s importance to urban protest, it still leaves a number of questions and implications which I address in this chapter. Firstly, why should cities be interested in engaging with unruly protests? Moreover, given that I argue that democratic transitions played an important role in facilitating traversion, is each city’s prospects of improving citizen engagement already predetermined? Furthermore, what are some of the limits of a contentious politics that centers around nationalist history? Additionally, I look at the prospects for future unruly protest and for large-scale government subsidy programs, many of which have increasingly experienced reforms. Lastly, I explore potential ways autoconstruction and traversion can be utilized in different contexts.

Does democracy matter for urban protest? Citizens across different African cities have deployed a variety of contentious strategies to advance demands for basic goods like housing, electricity, sanitation, or food. This includes more unruly, or insurgent tactics like riots or illegal occupations. Scholars, political leaders, and global organizations have long promoted democracy’s capacity to enhance, even transform, citizen participation. But does democracy’s impact extend to these sorts of urban protests as well? In order to answer this question, this study traces three examples of similar urban protest over time: bread protests in Cairo, Egypt, fuel protests in Lagos, Nigeria, and housing protests in Johannesburg, South Africa. All three of these cases emerged under autocracies in the 1970s to 1980s. Yet by the 2000s, the cities had experienced contrasting outcomes with democratization. For these protesting communities, does democracy make a difference? I find that democracy did not significantly change the forms of protest (e.g. tactics, demands) over time. Yet despite similar tactics, I find that greater levels of democracy in each city has led to significant differences in the outcome of the protests today.

This chapter examines how labor market structures – particularly informality and unemployment – shape political discontent and redistributive preferences. Drawing on household surveys and LAPOP data (2008–18) across seven countries, the authors find that informal and unemployed workers consistently show lower support for democracy, but moderate or even strong support for redistributive policies, especially when framed as targeted social spending. Informality is shown to be both an economic condition of vulnerability and a political driver of discontent, especially in contexts of high expectations and low state responsiveness. The authors argue that feelings of relative deprivation – rooted in the contrast between formal and informal labor – fuel both vertical and horizontal forms of political dissatisfaction. While public employees tend to support democracy and redistribution, informal workers are more prone to justify authoritarian solutions and express distrust in political institutions. National comparisons (Argentina and Colombia) illustrate how differences in labor market formalization, unionization, and welfare infrastructure shape these dynamics.

This concluding chapter synthesizes the volume’s findings on political discontent in Latin America, emphasizing that discontent stems not from sudden crises but from frustrated expectations born of prior social gains. The conclusion also highlights how discontent manifests through both “voice” (mobilization) and “exit” (migration, crime), and underscores the role of youth, gender, indigeneity, informality, and migration in shaping disaffection. The volume’s comparative lens, combining Sociology and Political Science, provides a nuanced framework to understand how social transformations and weak state capacity jointly fuel democratic dissatisfaction. Contrasting Latin America with the Global North, the chapter argues that discontent in the region arises from aspirations never fulfilled—not lost entitlements—and that relative deprivation will likely persist. The authors call for future research on media, the environment, and how social structures shape political agency, noting that current discontent has yet to crystallize into new political alignments.

This is a concluding chapter that summarizes previous findings. The importance of greater cultural competence on the part of elites is a particular emphasis.

Provides historical background on the clash between science and democracy and how previous scholars have approached it. One popular approach is to democratize science by subjecting scientific conclusions to popular review. This approach may work for certain discrete issues but is less successful for ongoing issues that involve substantial political content.

In Chapter 4, we turn to the contemporary manifestations of the managerial approach. To the extent that we view digital technology as a problem, we tend to think of it as a problem with managerial solutions. In other words, we tend to believe that the right experts, in the right institutions, focusing on the right questions, could make the harms of digital technology disappear. Some want to erect new administrative agencies or private “oversight boards” to govern digital life; some want to empower courts to address the “addictive” features of social media; others prefer to use public officials and NGOs to put pressure on technology platforms themselves. In each of these cases, reformers call on private or public managers to resurrect the goods of robust associations without defending associations themselves. We show that seemingly disparate efforts to address “digital addiction,” fight the “loneliness epidemic,” combat “misinformation,” regulate AI development, and reimagine “privacy” all fall into this same trap. These are often misguided attempts to respond to problems better understood and addressed as the consequences of a social order in which intermediary associations lack the three powers.

In Chapter 1, we argue that social associations, to remain functional, ought to retain three core features. First, boundaries – physical, informational or social – enable associations to shield themselves from society at large. Separating members from non-members, associations create a distinct “we” with which to identify. Second, to foster unique experiences, associations develop internal hierarchies, norms, and practices. These are the rules and rituals that define the culture of the association. Third, to emerge and sustain themselves, social associations must serve specific functions: Activities or goods around which people coalesce. We call these three features boundary power, medium power, and agenda power, respectively. We trace the importance of these three “powers” in a variety of contexts: among the earliest settler societies, among Freemasons in pre-liberal societies, in nineteenth century America, and in Habermas’s account of European coffeehouses. We also draw on empirical work to show why these three powers matter. And we point to the specific means of communication that make the exercise of the three powers possible.

In Chapter 3, we trace the origins of the “managerial approach” to technology regulation. In the twentieth century, as mass communication weakened America’s associational life, reformers increasingly entrusted experts and managers with the task of producing social goods such as civility and accurate information. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has increasingly extended robust First Amendment rights to mass media companies, paving the way to an emerging status quo in which digital platforms themselves are “protected speakers” because they “select and shape other parties’ expression into their own curated speech products." Radically constraining the scope of technology regulation, courts have strengthened the authority of private managers over the terms of social life. The modern First Amendment, which once protected the autonomy of robust associations in the public sphere, has come to do the exact opposite: protect the forces of homogenization that undermine robust associations. Meanwhile, even private actors risk offending the rights of platforms when they attempt to build third-party applications – known as “middleware” – that interoperate with dominant platforms to empower users to modify platform features.

This chapter probes whether the theory travels beyond Tunisia by conducting a cross-national analysis of grand coalition governments across all democratic transitions between 1942 and 2020. It shows that grand coalitions are statistically associated with democratic collapse, even when controlling for the underlying structural challenges that lead to them. The correlation between grand coalitions and democratic breakdown likewise remains even when pursuing techniques to address potential confounding, such as propensity score matching, inverse probability weighting, and an instrumental variable. The data also lend support for both mechanisms, showing that grand coalitions lead to a higher vote share for populists in the next elections and lead to increased mass polarization as well. While grand coalitions in the first few years of a transition have only mixed effects on democratic breakdown, continuing a coalition beyond that point makes breakdown far more likely. After establishing the rules of the game, new democracies must transition to the politics of competition, rather than continued consensus.

In Chapter 2, we argue that the platformization of our social order – the process by which platforms appropriate the infrastructure of our social life – is fueled by three “structural trends.” First, Network Scaling: digital platforms rely on network effects that subsume human activities, imposing opportunity costs on those opting out. Second, Context Collapse: digital platforms appropriate communicative infrastructure at scale, removing the boundaries of membership and information on which intermediary associations depend. Third, Managerial Control: platform managers exercise the competencies that once justified the authority of independent, self-fashioning associations. By itself, none of these “structural trends” need imperil collective action. Our challenge comes from the way in which these structural trends interact with each other, a relationship that we attempt to untangle. We argue that, considered as one, the three structural trends form a self-reinforcing cycle: We let platforms subsume our activities, which undermines our ability to self-organize, which, in turn, makes us outsource more and more activities to digital platforms.

This introductory chapter outlines the core argument of the book: that power-sharing can be useful at the start of a democratic transition in order to generate consensus over the rules of the game, but extending power-sharing beyond that point can lead democracy to unravel. Power-sharing frustrates the voters of each party and risks the party system collapsing in favor of populists and extremists. By worsening polarization and populism, power-sharing thus makes democratic breakdown more likely. The chapter outlines the contributions of this theory to the existing literature on democratization, polarization, and populism, showing that democratic transitions require a balance between competition and consensus. The chapter illustrates the core argument in Tunisia and draws parallels to other cases in the Middle East, in Europe, and in Latin America. It ends by previewing each chapter of the book and defining the key terms.

In Chapter 5, we propose an alternative approach to technology regulation that focuses on (re-)building robust associations online and offline. We propose a three-tiered policy agenda. First, we propose measures to change the design of digital platforms to empower users to erect boundaries of information, membership, and authority among themselves. To this end, reformers should legally empower the production of “middleware,” third-party software that interoperates with dominant platforms to let users change the rules of social interaction and content moderation. Second, we propose measures to help intermediary associations assert control over both digital and physical spaces. We consider smartphone bans in schools, a “right to disconnect” outside the workplace, and even subsidies for institutions of art and culture that outlaw the use of technology within their walls. Third, we entertain more radical measures to carve out coordinated times and spaces away from technology. These include local “digital Sabbath” policies that (totally or partially) restrict internet usage for a limited, recurrent period.

This final chapter concludes by tracing out the book’s contributions to our understanding of democratization. It highlights that while inclusion, consensus, and power-sharing are useful in the transition to democracy, it is differentiation, competition, and polarization that help to consolidate democracy. It highlights how the more successful cases of democratization, like South Africa, pursued grand coalitions only at the very start of the transition, before shifting to normal competition once the constitution was established. The chapter also provides some initial theorization as to what a healthy degree of polarization might look like, introducing the notion of “polarization within bounds,” where parties seek consensus only when adjusting the rules of the game, but seek competition within those bounds. Finally, it offers some brief reflections on the state of democracy in the United States and Europe. It argues that the initial strategies of mainstream parties toward populist threats have been self-defeating and provides some recommendations building on the insights of this book for alternative strategies to deflate populist threats.

The internet once promised to strengthen our associational life. Instead, A Bounded Web shows that digital technology has replaced bounded institutions, where members gather to make decisions together, with porous social networks that platforms administer behind the scenes. In response, scholars and policymakers tend to reduce the pathologies of digital life to technical challenges that demand technocratic solutions. Against this trend, this book offers a new approach to technology policy that emphasizes the need to rebuild diverse and robust associations both online and offline. It defends efforts to build technological boundaries – like smartphone bans in schools – that empower cultural, educational, political, and social organizations to set their own terms for how we gather and communicate. It also calls for legal reform to enable the creation of “middleware” and even entertains the pursuit of local “digital Sabbath” policies to reshape our collective management of technology. Rigorously argued, A Bounded Web asks us to recognize what we’ve lost and imagine what we might build in its place.