Catherine Corrigall-Brown

Patterns of protest : trajectories of participation in social movements

Asked to name an activist, many people think of someone like Cesar Chavez or Rosa Parks-someone uniquely and passionately devoted to a cause. Yet, two-thirds of Americans report having belonged to a social movement, attended a protest, or engaged in some form of contentious political activity. Activism, in other words, is something that the vast majority of people engage in. This book examines these more common experiences to ask how and when people choose to engage with political causes. Corrigall-Brown reveals how individual characteristics and life experiences impact the pathway of participation, illustrating that the context and period in which a person engages are critical. This is the real picture of activism, one in which many people engage, in a multitude of ways and with varying degrees of continuity. This book challenges the current conceptualization of activism and pushes us to more systematically examine the varying ways that individuals participate in contentious politics over their lifetimes.

Explaining time trends in public opinion: Attitudes towards immigration and immigrants

Why does public opinion change over time? Much debate on this question centers on whether it is caused by the replacement of people or by individuals changing how they think. Theoretical approaches to this question have emphasized the importance of birth cohort succession, generational differences, and changing macro-economic conditions. In this article, we consider the extent to which these processes can account for changing attitudes towards immigration and immigrants. We use a new approach to the study of time trends in public opinion to analyze over 20 years of data on attitudes in Canada. This approach uses multi-level analysis to split attitudinal change into its cohort and period components. We find that most attitude change is the result of changing macro-economic conditions. In contrast, birth cohort succession has little effect. While there is modest evidence of generational differences in attitudes, these differences do not comprise a major part of the overall trend.

Picturing Protest: The Visual Framing of Collective Action by First Nations in Canada

Images of collective action shape public understanding of social movement campaigns and issues. Modern media includes more images than ever before, and these images are remembered longer and are more likely to elicit emotional responses than are textual accounts. Yet when it comes to media coverage of collective action, existing research considers only the written accounts. This means that little is known about the extent to which images of collective action events conform to or diverge from the “protest paradigm,” a pattern of reporting found in articles that tends to marginalize protesters and legitimizes authorities. The authors address this gap by analyzing newspaper photographs of one of the most significant recent cases of Indigenous-state conflict in North America—the 1990 “Oka Crisis.” This 78-day armed standoff between Indigenous peoples and Quebecois and Canadian authorities was sparked by the attempted expansion of a golf course onto Mohawk territory. The mass media produced thousands of articles and photographs in their coverage of the event. This article uses these photographs to assess the manner in which images frame collective action and collective actors. The authors find that images of collective action frame these events differently and in a more nuanced way than do textual accounts. For example, while challengers are just as likely to be shown in images of collective action, they are less likely to be specifically named. In addition, officials are more likely to be shown in dominant positions, but certain groups of officials (particularly government representatives) are also the most likely to be shown as emotional and angry. These findings illustrate the sometimes conflicting messages depicted in images of collective action.

Explaining the Puzzle of Homeless Mobilization: An Examination of Differential Participation:

In this article, the authors examine participation in protests about homelessness by an unlikely set of participants—the homeless themselves. Through an analysis of data derived from 400 structured interviews with homeless individuals in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Tucson, the authors examine why and to what extent some homeless individuals, and not others, participate in movement-sponsored protest activities. In addition, the authors assess the degree to which the factors that affect participation in this population align with previous research on participation in social movements generally. They find that certain characteristics of the homeless population reduce the importance of social ties with other homeless individuals in the recruitment process and that, contrary to what much past work would lead one to expect, homeless individuals who are less biographically available are more likely to engage in protest activity. In addition, strain, which is often not a significant predictor of engagement in other populations, is an important predictor of differential participation among the homeless. This study highlights features of the homeless population that yield somewhat different correlates of participation than found in most movement participation studies and, in turn, cautions against presuming an overall model of participation that explains the engagement of all groups in the same way.

From the Balconies to the Barricades, and Back? Trajectories of Participation in Contentious Politics

Scholars have long been interested in explaining why some individuals engage in civil society through acts of protest while others do not. However, what happens after individuals are involved? Using a nationally representative panel data set that follows Americans from 1965 until 1997, I show that almost half of participants either engage in ‘individual abeyance’, moving in and out of engagement over time, or disengage. I examine the role of socio-political orientations, resources, biography or life-course factors, and group affiliation in predicting patterns of civil society participation over time. Past work suggests that persistent activists differ from those who disengage due to the formers’ particular socio-political orientations. However, I show that there are no significant differences in these orientations between those who persist and those who do not. Instead, biographical changes and engagement in political groups are the most important factors predicting persistent participation over time.

Media exposure and the engaged citizen: How the media shape political participation

Abstract Media exposure is widely known to increase institutional forms of political participation such as voting. Less well understood is whether media exposure also affects protest, a less institutional form of engagement. This paper examines the mechanics through which this relationship operates by considering the medias direct and indirect effect on voting and protesting, via political trust, efficacy, and knowledge. We make these comparisons by analyzing the unique Jennings panel dataset that collects information on respondents at three separate points. The results show that media exposure affects voting more than protesting and that these relationships operate through different mechanisms. While media exposure leads to voting because it increases political knowledge, it is associated with protest via external political efficacy. Furthermore, while this relationship is causal for voting it is only correlational for protest. The results illustrate the importance of disentangling forms of political engagement when considering media effects.

What Gets Covered? An Examination of Media Coverage of the Environmental Movement in Canada

This article analyzes press releases from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Greenpeace (GP) to assess how their tactics and frames affect the amount of coverage they receive in The Globe and Mail and National Post from 2000 to 2010. While it is clear that some tactics are more likely to garner media coverage, the full range of tactics and frames are not effective for all groups. For example, calling to the public to engage in a social issue leads to increased media coverage for GP but not WWF. And, using research does not affect media coverage for WWF, but decreases coverage for GP. This study demonstrates that the effect of tactical choices on media coverage is contingent on the identity of the group using them.

Concentrating or Sprinkling? Federal Funding for Indigenous, Women’s, and Environmental NGOs in Canada, 1972-2014

Governments have a long history of funding nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and their programs. While there is much work describing this funding, there has been little research systematically examining how the political and economic context shapes the level and type of funding NGOs receive. This article examines the factors that predict levels of government funding for NGOs over time, focusing on spending for interest groups in three areas, Indigenous, women, and the environment. We use data collected from the Canadian Public Accounts, which lists all grants to groups by the federal government from 1972 until 2014. We use these data to assess how federal funding has changed over this period, how funding across issue areas is related, and the role of political and economic factors in shaping rising and declining funding over time. We find that the factors that predict funding vary across issue areas. Our analysis also shows government’s tendency to sprinkle funding across a larger number of groups or concentrate it in a smaller number of organizations is strongly related to the party in power and the issue area.

Partisan Publics: Communication and Contention across Brazilian Youth Activist Networks

row and particularistic” (p. 9). Differences emerge in the kinds of tactics used as well. Although litigation is relatively rare, organizations are more likely to use this more expensive tactic to press advantaged subgroup issues. In contrast, participation in coalitions (a less costly tactic) is used frequently to pursue disadvantaged subgroup issues, but organizations devote less energy to coalitions addressing disadvantaged subgroups than advantaged ones. In her final chapter, Strolovitch identifies practices that might cultivate and enact commitment to “intersectionally linked fate,” thereby offsetting organizational tendencies that reproduce representational bias. For example, organizations could bolster participation in coalitions that address disadvantaged subgroups and link disadvantaged subgroup issues to broader organizational mandates. Affirmative Advocacy is a book that should provoke broad-ranging debate and opens new questions for scholars of advocacy organizations, social movements, and inequality. For example, Strolovitch’s findings should motivate further research that looks more closely at the development, dynamics, and the successes and failures of coalitions. Given the critical role of leaders, including their commitments, relationships to one another, and their decisions, this study along with other recent work helps draw our attention to how little we know about leaders and leadership. Finally, scholars could build on Strolovitch’s study to inform ongoing work on the policy impacts of advocacy organizations to understand how the strategic outcomes examined here shape political agenda-setting and policy enactment.