New social movements and political opportunities in Western Europe (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
Support for New Social Movements In Five Western European Countries
Social change and political transformation, 1994
Chapter 6 Support for new social movements in five western European countries1 Dieter Fuchs and Dieter Rucht Introduction In Western democracies, in the wake of the student revolts of the late 1960s, several waves of collective protest have been superimposed and have coa- ...
DISENTANGLING PROTEST CYCLES: AN EVENT-HISTORY ANALYSIS OF NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN WESTERN EUROPE
The theory of protest cycles has informed us that the external political environment and the internal competition among social movement organizations are distinct elements leading to the emergence, development, and decline of popular protest. This theory, however, has not been examined systematically. I conduct an event-history analysis to test and refine the theory of protest cycles using a well-known new social movement event dataset. While proposing a general way of operationalizing the core concepts in social movement studies, I show that political opportunity only matters during the initial phase of social movement mobilization, rather than throughout the movement’s lifespan. What explains declining frequencies of protest occurrence during the demobilization phase is the joint effect of two internal factors: the institutionalization of social movements and the growing violence during protests.
The Emergence of a European Social Movement Research Field
In this chapter we trace the emergence and consolidation of research on social movements and grassroots collective action as a distinctive field within European social science. We refer to 'social science' rather than 'sociology' because in this particular area of research it is virtually impossible, not to say misleading, to disentangle work conducted by sociologists from work conducted by other researchers, most notably, political scientists.
Social movement research in Europe – the state of the art
2013
As we write this, scenes of struggle on the streets of Europe, of official policy increasingly at odds with popular opinion, and a massive crisis of legitimacy spreading across many countries are repeating a drama familiar since the events of 1789-92, 1830 and 1848 - described in 1850-5 by Lorenz von Stein as “the social movement”. In the uneven and contradictory struggle for substantive democracy across the last quarter-millennium in Europe, unofficial popular agency keeps reappearing as a central figure on the European stage, with a wide variety of forms, issues and ideologies. Research on social movements in this broad sense is a long-standing feature of European Studies under many disciplinary headings: sociology, political science, history, anthropology, geography, industrial relations, women’s studies and so on, and is routinely invoked as part of the background of the study of literature, popular culture, philosophy etc. When social movements have been part of the making and ...
Radical social movements in Western Europe. A configurational analysis
There has been little comparative research on the differences across radical social movements in the context of consolidated democracies. This paper analyses the squatting movement, as an exemplary case of contemporary radical movement. This study aims to identify the causal contexts that explain the differences of strengths within these movements across 52 large cities in Western Europe. It examines three main hypotheses drawn from the literature on social movements concerning the characteristics of political systems, the availability of resources, and the presence of economic grievances. I use fuzzy sets Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to identify configurations of causal conditions. The findings show that diverse contexts (multi-causation) lead to strong movements. A first causal context combines grievances, resources, and closed or unresponsive institutions, and is typically found in Southern European cities. A second context highlights the presence of robust far-right parties in combination with less severe grievances and relative scarcity of resources, and is typically found in Northern European cities. These findings demonstrate that resources and grievances are quasi-necessary conditions for strong radical movements, although polarization can lead to a similar outcome where these characteristics are not present
European social movements and social theory: a richer narrative?
Understanding European movements, 2013
This chapter argues that conventional accounts of “European” new social movement theory constitute part of an origin myth for social movement studies rather than an accurate representation of European contributions in the field. The first part of the chapter shows how European social theory has been centrally shaped by an engagement with social movements, in ways which are not represented within subdisciplinary contexts. The second re-examines European debates on movement developments between 1965 and 1985 and shows that the canonical account severely misrepresents a far more complex and interesting set of debates.
Social movements and direct democracy in Switzerland
European Journal of Political Research, 1996
Taking a political process approach to the study of social movements, we analyze the impact of the availability of direct democratic institutions on the action repertory of Swiss social movements. Comparing social movements in the German and the Latin parts of the country, we show that the availability of direct-democratic instruments induces most social movements to use them. This has a moderating impact on their action repertory. However, we have to relativize this general result in two ways. On the one hand, direct-democratic institutions are selective to the extent that they favour the mobilization of certain types of movements at the expense of others. On the other hand, very radical movements such as counter-cultural movements may refuse to rely on this type of instrument altogether. We also note that in a polity with an important direct-democratic opening, such movements have little legitimacy and are likely to be less successful than in a polity where no such opening exists at all, or where it provides only a limited access to the political system.
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.