Economic and Political Contention in Comparative Perspective

Maria Kousis, Charles Tilly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781594510748
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317260844
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

European and American specialists in economic and political processes move beyond earlier debates to look seriously, systematically, and innovatively at social change and protest, with particular attention to the influence of economic change and variation on contentious politics. The essays take up two widely recognized but much contested questions in contentious politics: how threats and opportunities faced by potential participants in joint political action affect the likelihood, character, and consequences of that action; and, how economic change and variation either a) constitute significant political threats and opportunities or b) shape responses to political threats and opportunities. Contributors: Maria Kousis, Charles Tilly, Marc Giugni, Julie Berclaz, Marc Steinberg, Jeffery Broadbent, Klaus Eder, John K. Glenn, Dieter Rucht, Richard Hogan, Maryjane Osa, Cristina Corduneanu-Husi.

I

ECONOMIC, POLITICAL, AND OTHER OPPORTUNITY STRUCTURES

Chapter One

Specifying the Concept of Political Opportunity Structures

Julie Berclaz and Marco Giugni

The Classical Theory of Political Opportunities

A great deal of work on contentious politics during the past two decades has focused on the role of political opportunity structures for the emergence, forms, and, less often, outcomes of social movements. The early work of Charles Tilly clearly played a major role in initiating this strand of research. In particular through the first systematic statement in From Mobilization to Revolution (1978), the concept of political opportunities has paved the way to a “silent revolution” in the study of popular contention and social protest. From a matter of grievances and discontent, it became a matter of power struggle and political process.

Tilly’s legacy was taken up successfully by such authors as Herbert Kitschelt (1986), Hanspeter Kriesi (see Kriesi et al. 1995), Doug McAdam (1999b), Sidney Tarrow (1998b), and many others. In the meantime, the idea of seeing contention as a result of power relations, opportunities, and threats was elaborated and formally defined through the concept of political opportunity structures for use in empirical analysis of actual instances of contention. First introduced by Eisinger (1973) to study the relationship between the degree of institutional access in American cities and the protests that hit the United States in the late 1960s, this concept was then elaborated by various authors and used to analyze the impact of the political context on social movements and other forms of contentious politics, to such an extent that it became hegemonic in the existing literature.¹

Generally speaking, political opportunities refer to those aspects of the political context of movements that mediate the impact of large-scale social changes on social protest. Tarrow (1996c: 54) has aptly defined them as “consistent but not necessarily formal, permanent, or national signals to social or political actors which either encourage or discourage them to use their internal resources to form social movements” (emphasis in original). As Gamson and Meyer (1996) pointed out, there are today nearly as many definitions of political opportunity structures as there are studies using this concept for empirical purposes. Similarly, Goodwin and Jasper (2004) have stressed the tendency to stretch this concept to cover a wide variety of empirical phenomena and causal mechanisms. McAdam (1996: 27) made an attempt to summarize the existing definitions into four main dimensions: the relative openness or closure of the institutionalized political system, the stability or instability of that broad set of elite alignments that typically undergird a polity, the presence or absence of elite allies, and the state’s capacity and propensity for repression.

Some of these aspects of the external environment of social movements are rather stable (e.g., the institutional structure of the state), while others are more volatile and subject to shifts over time (e.g., political alignments). Yet they all are of a very general nature and imply a pattern of influence that concerns all kinds of challenging groups in a given political context. In other words, these “classical” political opportunity structures represent a general setting that is assumed to affect all movements in a similar fashion and to a similar extent, as if they could be defined irrespective of the characteristics of specific issue fields and collective actors. This clearly is a major limitation to this model, one that sometimes can lead to inaccurate or—worse—wrong predictions. For one thing, political institutions do not affect all social groups to the same extent. Take the example of migrants. Access to the political system is defined in the opportunity approach by the characteristics of political institutions and their impact on challenging groups. Thus, the strength of the state, the degree of (territorial and functional) centralization of the state, the presence of direct democratic procedures, and so forth provide a mix of opportunities for the mobilization of challenging groups. However, migrants often lack basic citizenship rights allowing them to “make use” of these institutions to mobilize. The institutions that affect their mobilization are (partly) to be found elsewhere, as for example in the citizenship rights that facilitate or prevent their being part of the national community. Similarly, the unemployed, another socially excluded group, are probably affected more by specific legislation pertaining to the welfare state than by such general political institutions as the strength or degree of centralization of the state. Thus, rights deriving from welfare provisions are likely to have an important impact on their mobilization, while they probably play no role whatsoever for other groups and movements. It is this idea that we would like to elaborate in this chapter, starting from what we see as one of the first attempts to specify the concept of political opportunity structure.

Issue-Specific Opportunity Structures

Kriesi et al. (1995: chap. 4) suggested a way to define the concept of political opportunity structures in more specific terms and hence to increase its explanatory power. They proposed a specification based on the idea that political opportunities might be more favorable or less favorable according to the issues raised by challenging groups and the issue fields (policy domains, in their terminology) they address. As a result, instead of being fixed and constant for all movements, hence influencing the whole social movement sector in the same way and to the same extent, political opportunity structures are at least in part issue specific.

Following this line of reasoning, the authors have looked at how political authorities and allies may provide different responses to the challenges addressed by social movements. In this respect, they proposed a distinction between high-profile and low-profile policy domains depending on how members of the polity define them on the basis of their conception of the core tasks and interests of the state.² Specifically, issues addressing high-profile policy domains are more threatening for the state than issues targeting low-profile domains or issue fields. The openness and closedness of the political system, according to their argument, varies across policy domains and therefore the system is less accessible to certain challenges and more open to others. In other words, political opportunities are more favorable for certain challenges and challenging groups than for others. In terms of the two dimensions that form the general structural setting for the mobilization of social movements in their conceptualization—the formal structure of the state and the prevailing strategies of the authorities—movements addressing high-profile policy domains, which pose a greater threat to the state, face rather closed political opportunity structures, while movements addressing low-profile policy domains, which are less threatening for the members of the polity, face rather open political opportunity structures. Similarly, the strategies of political authorities are likely to be exclusive toward the former and inclusive toward the latter.

Kriesi et al. (1995) took antinuclear and ecology movements as examples, respectively, of high-profile and low-profile movements, and showed that the more moderate action repertoire of the latter can in part be explained by the less threatening character of environmentalist claims, as compared to antinuclear opposition or peace activism, which often touch upon the core interests of the state. Their explanation is a bit more elaborated than that, as they relate the high-profile or low-profile character of policy domains to a constructionist argument about the politicization of issues and how the members of the polity define the state’s core interests. The main point for our present purpose, however, is that a general and invariant view of political opportunity structures is replaced by a more issue-specific definition that makes it possible to explain both intranational differences and international similarities that would have remained obscure in the “classical” approach.

The idea that political opportunity structures are flexible to different types of issues paves the way for a further development that, in our view, represents an improvement of the political process approach to social movements, in both conceptual and explanatory terms. This development consists in acknowledging that opportunity structures can vary from one issue field to another as well as among types of collective actors. Therefore, it is necessary to define field-specific opportunity structures.

In the remainder of this chapter, we would like to illustrate the advantages of the issue-specific approach to political opportunity structures through two examples concerning two highly contested political fields: migration and employment. In doing so, we take a second idea suggested by Kriesi et al. (1995: chap. 2) but going back to Tilly’s (1978) seminal work, namely, the idea of “concrete opportunities” as a way to bridge the gap between abstract political opportunity structures and actual movement behavior.³ Proposing a motivational theory consisting in a set of derivatives of the political opportunity structures that directly affect the costs and benefits of collective action, Kriesi et al. made an attempt to specify the mechanisms that translate social structures into individual and group actions. Thus, their explanatory model is made of three levels of analysis (see figure 1.1): the general political opportunity structure (the structure of social cleavages, the political institutions, the prevailing strategies of authorities, and the configuration of political alliances), the concrete opportunities representing individual perceptions of these structural aspects of the political system (repression, facilitation, the couple reform/threat, and the chances of success), and the action level (extent and forms of collective mobilization).⁴ In our illustration of the issue-specific opportunity approach, we will draw a parallel between this model and the two specific opportunity structures for the fields of migration and unemployment.

Fig. 1.1. The “classical” model of political opportunity structures

Source: Adapted from Kriesi et al. (1995).

The Case of Migration Politics

The issue-specific opportunity approach was developed in a collaborative effort aimed at studying the contentious politics of immigration and ethnic relations from an opportunity perspective.⁵ This research attempts to combine institutional and discursive aspects of the political opportunity structures in the study of migration politics. Unsatisfied with the all-too-abstract approach adopted by political opportunity theorists and following the lead of neo-institutionalist students of citizenship and immigration (e.g., Brubaker 1992), we look at the impact of national citizenship and integration regimes on claim making in the field of immigration and ethnic relations. In particular, we try to explain cross-national variations in the collective mobilization of migrants through the concept of models of citizenship, which in this approach form a specific (institutional and discursive) opportunity structure for the claim making in this field.

Citizenship models are conceptualized through the combination of two dimensions: the formal criteria and the cultural obligations of having citizenship rights (Koopmans and Statham 1999, 2001). On the one hand, citizenship can be acquired on an ethnic-cultural or a civic-territorial basis (Brubaker 1992). At stake here is how and to what extent the state grants individual citizenship rights to migrants. On the other hand, states usually follow two main strategies toward migrants: assimilation to the dominant (national) culture (a monist approach) or recognition of particular cultures and identities of migrants (a pluralist approach). At stake here is how and to what extent states grant cultural group rights to migrants.

The resulting typology yields four (ideal-typical) models or configurations of citizenship. The first, assimilationism, combines an ethnic definition of citizenship and a monist view of cultural obligations. Here the state pushes toward assimilation to the norms and values of the national community on an ethnocultural basis and tends to exclude from this community those who are not entitled to share its norms, values, and symbols. Germany and Switzerland are typical examples, in spite of recent changes moving in the direction of expanding the rights of immigrants, especially in the former country.⁶ The second type is multiculturalism, which combines a civic conception of citizenship and a pluralistic approach to cultural obligations. Here foreigners born in the host country are in principle granted citizenship regardless of their ethnic origin, and minorities are granted their right to ethnic difference. Britain and the Netherlands are well-known examples. The third type is republicanism, which combines a civic conception of citizenship and a monist view of cultural obligations. It is relatively easy to obtain citizenship rights, but at the price of giving up ethnic-based identities in favor of accepting the republican ideal of the state. France, with its strongly republican conception of the state, is perhaps the most typical example. The fourth ideal type is segregationism, which combines an ethnic conception of citizenship with a pluralistic view of cultural obligations. This model is less common than the other three, at least in Europe.⁷

Differences in citizenship models are seen as determining variations in claim making in the migration political field. In particular, the citizenship model is assumed to impact on the levels and forms of mobilization of migrants. If we draw a parallel with the perspective followed by Kriesi et al. (1995), the causal path can be depicted as one going from models of citizenship to migrants’ mobilization (or claim making), via a set of specific concrete opportunities that work as intervening or relating variables: the political legitimacy, public resonance, and public visibility of claims (see figure 1.2). In other words, models of citizenship form a specific opportunity structure that provides varying degrees of legitimacy, resonance, and visibility to claims and the collective actors making them, which in turn affects the extent and forms of claim making. This, of course, is not to say that political institutions such as those studied by Kriesi et al. (1995) are irrelevant, but only that in the specific field of immigration and ethnic relations we must look at more specific aspects of opportunities as well, and often these aspects have a greater impact than the general ones. Furthermore, in addition to the institutional side of political opportunities, we must consider their discursive side, which is the one stressed in the simplified version of this model shown in figure 1.2.

This is not the place to go into a detailed discussion of the findings of this research. However, the example of the mobilization of migrants in France and Switzerland will help us to illustrate the advantages of an approach that aims to define political opportunities specific to a given political field. Following the classical opportunity approach, migrants should display a lower level of mobilization and a more radical action repertoire in France owing to the lack of access for challengers in this country and the exclusive prevailing strategies of the authorities (Kriesi et al. 1995). The opposite should occur in Switzerland, a country that provides easy access to the political system and tends to facilitate social movements. Indeed, the data provided by Kriesi et al. (1995) confirm these expectations at an aggregate level, that is, for all movements. The data collected in the MERCI project allow us to see whether this finding holds in the case of migrants’ mobilization as well.⁸

Fig. 1.2. The specific political opportunity structures for the mobilization of migrants

If we first look at the share of claims made by migrants in France and Switzerland between 1990 and 1998 (see table 1.1), we can see that this does not hold true in this case. Migrants were present to a larger extent both if we consider all forms of claims and if we focus on unconventional actions only. While the classical opportunity approach predicts a stronger mobilization by social movements in Switzerland due to larger opportunities, the mobilization of migrant groups is stronger in France. The difference is especially important for all claims, as the presence of migrants in France is more than double that observed in Switzerland.

Table 1.1. Presence of migrants in the public domain in France and Switzerland, 1990–1998

	France	Switz.
Share of all claims with migrants present	12.7	6.0
	(3319)	(1695)
Share of unconventional claims with migrants pres...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Introduction: Economic and Political Contention in Comparative Perspective
• Part I: Economic, Political, and Other Opportunity Structures
• Part II: How Politics and Economics Change Opportunities
• Part III: Threats, Opportunities, and Forms of Action in Changing Economies
• References
• Index
• About the Contributors