The consequences of social movements (original) (raw)
Related papers
Movements and Parties: Beyond Contentious Performances
PArtecipazione e COnflitto, 2023
Sidney Tarrow’s Movements and Parties stands on the shoulders of a long history of scholarship that tries to untangle the relationships between modern social movements and political parties. One of the earliest examples is the author’s own work on communists and peasant movements in Italy in the 1960s. These relationships are still understudied, however, in part because political scientists in general, and party scholars in particular, have long ignored, or at best underestimated, the relevance of social movements. Mainstream political science remains focused on elite actors and presumes that key decisions are made by small groups of people located in institutions such as parliaments and political parties. Beyond the idea that social movements are not really relevant when it comes to hard politics, political scientists tend to presume that social movements–often understood narrowly as protest movements–arise only when representative institutions are unable (or unwilling) to channel discontent through formal channels, such as elections. The social movement society thesis (Meyer and Tarrow 1997) did not thrive in a discipline that continued to view cycles of protest as signs of instability and inefficacy. The disconnect between social movement and party studies is, of course, a two-way street. Social movement scholars have lagged in exploring specific variables associated with the party system, such as party competition and issue-space (Cowell-Meyers 2014: 62). In the past decade, however, we have seen a revival of attention to the interactions between parties and movements, in no small part in response to emerging political phenomena …
Social movements and political parties: conflicts and balance 1
2009
The paper addresses aspects of the relationship between political parties and social movements, with a focus on the Australian Greens. It posits some of the limitations and possibilities of this relationship, arguing that it is a necessary one, both to social movements seeking to pursue their agendas through the political system, and to political parties needing to be open to broad public participation and to maintain strong links to on-the-ground issues. It concludes that the Australian Greens have sought to strike a balance between party and movement, recognising the limits of both.
1995
This paper analyzes the impact of changing political opportunities, and more particularly of changes in the composition of government, on the levels, political leaning and forms of protest mobilization. The literature provides us with contradictory expectations as to these questions, some stressing openess of the political system, some closure, and some a combination of openness and closure as the situation most conducive to protest mobilization. To assess these hypotheses, we use data on protest events in four West European countries (Germany, France, Great Britain and the Netherlands) for the period 1975-1979, as well as similar data derived from another project on protests in Germany between 1950 and 1991. Altogether, this provides us with data on protest mobilization (differentiated in left-wing and other protest) under fifteen different governmental constellations, which can roughly be classified as left, right and mixed. The data show, first, that mobilization by left-wing movements in Western Europe by far exceeds mobilization by the Right. Second, the mobilization of left-wing movements is concentrated during periods of right-wing government, whereas the Right tends to mobilize most strongly when the Left is in power. However, the highest levels of mobilization, of the Left and to some extent also of the Right, occur when mixed governments, in which power is shared by parties of the Left and of the Right, are in power. Self-evident as some of these results may seem at first sight, they run against the thrust of much of the recent social movement literature. In particular they make clear that in order to explain fluctuations in levels of social movement mobilization we should not only take into account (positive) opportunities for protest, but also its necessity from the point of view of potential activists and its relative attractiveness compared to more conventional ways of pressuring governments. In this view, the most conducive situations for mobilization are those in which protest seems both opportune and necessary; a situation that for instance prevails when mixed, often internally divided governmeents are in power.
It's Not the Left: Ideology and Protest Participation in Old and New Democracies
Comparative Political Studies, 2019
Multiple studies in political science consistently hold that left-wing ideology renders individuals more prone to protest behavior. However, the familiar association between left-wing ideology and protesting is not empirically corroborated in all democratic nations. Building on existing theoretical principles and applying them to diverse political contexts, this paper sheds light on puzzling variation in protest behavior across new and old democracies. It argues that it is not the left that engenders protest. Instead, we demonstrate that which political camp engages in protest behavior depends on its historical legacies and cultural liberalism. Historical legacies reflect the ideological configuration at democratization. Protesting tends to be more common in the ideological camp that opposed the pre-democratic political order. Simultaneously, it is culturally liberal individuals that more likely embrace protest participation, independent of their left-right identification. These theoretical expectations are supported through survey data analyses, explaining contrasting inter-and intra-regional variation in European democracies.
Social movements and political outcomes: why both ends fail to meet
Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-Skłodowska, sectio K – Politologia
The relationships between social movement challenges and political outcomes remain strongly under-researched in the field of social movements. Here, we use the labels "social" and "political" in a broad sense to comprise many types of challenges and many types of outcomes, such as economic and social outcomes for specific movements as well as general policy outcomes. Four theories are crucial for understanding successful mobilization of social movements: relative deprivation, resource mobilization, framing, and the theoretical figure of the opening political opportunity structure. Political outcomes, at least in democratic political systems, are usually the result of a parallelogram of different claims and means of influencing outcomes, in short, of compromises. Here, we list various forms of outcomes, from successful acceptance of movement demands to part-time successes or entire failures, and also the various strategies incumbents have in dealing with social movement challenges. Researchers usually have focused on the individual and structural conditions of the emergence of social movements but less so on the conditions of processing social movement demands and the outcomes for movements themselves, for the electorate and for policy changes. Consequently, there is little research 1 Portions of this paper were originally presented at the 12 th World Congress of the International Sociological Association, Madrid/Spain, July 1990, and never published, though there were requests for it. On reading parts of the more recent literature, the author believes that many of the analytical arguments made are still to the point today. Consequently, he wants to share them with a broader audience, adding a few comments on recent social movements and their outcomes. It is up to the audience to improve on these arguments. Paper presented to IPSA RC 21-29 Conference on "Social and Political Movements, Leaders, Education and Communication. Challenges and Expectations in the Age of Globalization", Lublin, Poland, September 11-13, 2014. EKKART ZIMMERMANN 32 available that would meet the requirements of an adequate research design in view of the numerous factors spelled out here as a theoretical control list. The idea of a response hierarchy of incumbents is suggested as a sort of a dispositional concept for further, more consolidated, research in this area. Also the notion of cycles of various sorts has to be kept in mind in order to avoid misjudging of both, the persistence of social movements over time, and their eventual successes and failures.