The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements

David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, Hanspeter Kriesi, Holly J. McCammon, David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, Hanspeter Kriesi, Holly J. McCammon

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781119168553
• eBook ISBN: 9781119168591
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The most up-to-date and thorough compendium of scholarship on social movements

This second edition of The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements features forty original essays from the field. With contributions from both established and ascendant scholars, the Companion seeks to present current research on social movements in all its diversity. It is the most up-to-date, comprehensive volume of social science research on social movements available today.

The essays address: facilitative and constraining contexts and conditions; social movement organizations, fields, and dynamics; strategies and tactics; micro-structural and social psychological dimensions of participation; consequences and outcomes; and various thematic intersections, including the intersection of social movements and social class, gender, race and ethnicity, religion, human rights, globalization, political extremism and more.

• Offers an illuminating guide to understanding the dynamics and operation of social movements within the modern, global world
• Covers a diverse range of topics in the field of social movement studies
• Offers original, state-of-the-art essays by internationally recognized scholars

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements is recommended for graduate seminars on social movement and for scholars of social movements worldwide. It is also an excellent text for college and university libraries, especially with graduate programs in the social sciences.

Part I
Facilitative and Constraining Contexts and Conditions

1
The Political Context of Social Movements

Doug McAdam and Sidney Tarrow

Introduction

Social movements are an inherently complex, multifaceted set of phenomena, permitting any number of viable analytic perspectives. The first modern perspective on movements was psychological (Adorno et al. 1950; Hoffer 1951; Kornhauser 1959; Le Bon 1960; Smelser 1962). But the emergence and consolidation of a distinct field of social movement studies after the 1960s brought with it the development of analytic frameworks that emphasized the organizational (McCarthy and Zald 1973, 1977), economic (McAdam 1982; Paige 1975; Piven and Cloward 1977; Schwartz 1976), cultural (Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994; Melucci 1985; Snow et al. 1986; Snow and Benford 1988), demographic (Goldstone 1991), and network (Diani 1995; Diani and McAdam 2003; Gould 1991, 1993, 1995; McAdam 1986; McAdam and Paulsen 1993; Snow, Zurcher, and Eckland‐Olson 1980) dimensions of social movements.

In the 1950s and the 1960s, scholars of contentious politics took the relations between social movements and their social and economic contexts seriously: In his classic, The Making of the English Working Class (1966), E.P. Thompson charted how industrialization shaped the future class consciousness and forms of collective action of English workers; Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé, in Captain Swing (1975), showed how machine‐breaking was a response to technological innovation; and in The Vendée (1964), Charles Tilly found that the urbanization in Western France produced a secular middle class that found just what it needed in the French Revolution. Politics, for these early specialists, was part of the transmission belt from socio‐economic structure to movements.

The first hints of a more political contextual framework for understanding and analyzing movements can be glimpsed in the work of two political scientists writing in the early 1970s. Michael Lipsky (1970: 14) urged scholars to be skeptical of system characterizations presumably true for all times and places. Lipsky argued that the ebb and flow of movement activity was responsive to changes that left institutional authorities either vulnerable or receptive to the demands of particular challengers. Three years later, another political scientist, Peter Eisinger (1973: 11) deployed the concept of political opportunity structure to help account for variation in riot behavior in American cities. But it would remain for a pair of sociologists to translate the central insights of Lipsky and Eisinger into a more systematic analytic framework emphasizing the reciprocal relationship between social movements and systems of institutionalized politics.

In 1978, Tilly elaborated on these conceptual beginnings by devoting a full chapter of his landmark book, From Mobilization to Revolution, to the important facilitating effect of “political opportunity” in emergent collective action. Four years later the key premise underlying the work of Lipsky, Eisinger, and Tilly was incorporated as one of the central tenets of a new political process model of social movements (McAdam 1982). Like the other early proponents of the general perspective, both Tilly and McAdam argued that the timing and ultimate fate of movements were powerfully shaped by the variable opportunities afforded challengers by changes in the institutional structure of political systems and shifting policy preferences and alliances of established “polity members” (Gamson 1990). Soon after, three political scientists added a cross‐sectional specification to the temporal changes in opportunity structure: Kitschelt (1986) compared “new social movements” in four democracies, according to the strength or weakness of the state; Kriesi et al. (1995), working in four European democracies, and Tarrow (1989), working on “cycles of protest,” took the political opportunity perspective to Europe.

Since then, countless movement analysts have contributed to the ongoing elaboration of the general political process framework. So thoroughgoing has this elaboration been that we cannot hope to summarize all the extensions and nuances now associated with the perspective. In our structure for the chapter, however, we have tried to accommodate at least some of the more recent and, in our view, important critiques and “friendly amendments” that continue to make the analysis of the political context of movements a vital and central component of the overall field of study. More specifically, the chapter is organized into three main sections. The first deals with the ways in which the more enduring features of institutionalized politics help us understand the different fate of the same movements cross‐nationally or cross‐sectionally within the same state. The second section deals with how the variable and changing features of institutionalized political systems influence the emergence and subsequent ebb and flow of movement activity. While these two analytic agendas are the oldest in the political process tradition and continue to structure much of the work on political context, they hardly exhaust all the work that has defined the framework over the years. We will bring the chapter to a close with a section devoted to what we see as: (1) the most important lines of criticism; and (2) theoretical extensions currently enriching the perspective.

Enduring Opportunities and Their Effects on Contention

The underlying assumption of this section is that stable political contexts – both within and across regimes – condition contentious politics. This is not to assume that the internal properties of movements – i.e., their organizations, resources, composition, and demands – or characteristics of the individuals within them are unimportant; only that these properties, which are examined in other contributions to this volume, are channeled through political contexts that shape the directions they take and the relative disposition of actors to follow one or another route to collective action.

There is a general tendency – especially among critics – to characterize the political process model as if political opportunities automatically lead to movement emergence or success. While there may be applications of the model that embrace this stark a view, in McAdam’s (1982) original formulation, favorable opportunities were just one of three factors that condition the emergence and impact of a movement. It is the confluence of political opportunities, indigenous organizational capacity, and the emergence of an oppositional consciousness (or “cognitive liberation”) that shape the rise of a movement and its prospects for success. And of these, the third was seen as the real catalyst to emergent mobilization. To quote McAdam:

Expanding political opportunities and indigenous organization do not, in any simple sense, produce a social movement …Together they only o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Mapping and Opening Up the Terrain
• Part I: Facilitative and Constraining Contexts and Conditions
• Part II: Social Movement Organizations, Fields, and Dynamics
• Part III: Social Movement Strategies and Tactics
• Part IV: Microstructural and Social‐Psychological Dimensions
• Part V: Consequences and Outcomes
• Part VI: Thematic Intersections
• Index
• End User License Agreement