David S. Meyer

Movements, Countermovements, and the Structure of Political Opportunity

Movement-countermovement interaction is an ongoing feature of contemporary social movements and, indeed, of contemporary politics. Yet the interplay of contending movements is understudied and undertheorized. This article begins to remedy this deficit by arguing that new work on political opportunity structure provides important insights and significant theoretical leverage for this study. Through a review of the literatures on countermovements and political opportunity, this article argues that this interaction increases when states enable but do not satisfy challengers. This article presents a general framework of theoretical propositions for understanding the interplay of movements and their opponents to animate and guide subsequent research.

Conceptualizing Political Opportunity

This article reviews central problems in political opportunity theory and explores the implications of adopting certain conceptualizations of political opportunities for explaining the emergence, development, and influence of protest movements. Results from multivariate analyses of civil rights protest, organizational formation, and policy outcomes indicate significant variation depending on (1) whether the political opportunity structure is conceptualized broadly or narrowly, (2) the dependent variable concerned, and (3) the underlying assumptions about the mechanisms through which opportunities translate into action. We argue that the variation in results can best be understood by adopting a broader understanding of protest and the political process and that theory development requires more careful and more explicit — although not necessarily more uniform — conceptualization and specification of political opportunity variables and models.

Social Movement Spillover

Social movements are not distinct and self-contained; rather, they grow from and give birth to other movements, work in coalition with other movements, and influence each other indirectly through their effects on the larger cultural and political environment. Building on both political process and collective identity perspectives, this paper uses a case study of the womens movements impact on U.S. peace movement activity in the 1980s to develop a theory of movement-movement influence. We argue that this influence is shown by: 1) the adoption of feminist ideological frames by the peace movement; 2) the spread of the womens movements tactical innovations into peace protest; 3) increased presence of women in leadership positions in both the institutionally-oriented and direct action wings of the movement; and 4) the adoption of organizational structures that built on feminist processes designed to avoid hierarchy. Drawing data from both movements at local and national levels, we suggest four mechanisms of transmission between the movements: 1) organizational coalitions; 2) overlapping social movement communities; 3) shared personnel; and 4) broader changes in the external environment. Social movement spillover effects have implications for our understanding of both the continuity and impact of social protest movements.

Missed opportunities : Social movement abeyance and public policy

Social movements can continue in hostile political climates by adapting abeyance structures, that is, disengaging from active challenge to the state on policy matters to focus instead on preserving enduring values and identity. But doing so can be politically costly. In this article we provide a theoretical framework for understanding the political outcomes of movement abeyance, drawing from recent work on political opportunity structure and policy domains. We present a more developed model of social movement abeyance, which includes not only retreat from political engagement, but also the fragmentation of a broad movement coalition, and use this model to examine the womens movement in the 1980s. We then look at the costs of movement abeyance on two policy areas: family leave and fetal protection. Partly in response to a hostile national political climate in the 1980s, the womens movement adopted a less visible public profile. This may have allowed womens groups to maintain their identity and values, but choices activists made to survive in hostile times had longer term consequences in terms of lost policy influence. We conclude with a discussion of the interaction of political opportunities and movement abeyance.

Institutionalizing dissent: The United States structure of political opportunity and the end of the nuclear freeze movement

This article uses the recent nuclear freeze movement as a vehicle for analyzing the ways in which United States political institutions cope with dissident movements. Building on the literature on political opportunity structure, I argue that United States political institutions reflect James Madisons strategy for coping with dissent by fragmenting political power. The Madisonian structure of United States government, by providing relatively easy institutional access to some challengers and numerous venues for often ritualized participation, serves to fragment, coopt, and dissipate dissident movements. I identify three complementary components of the process of fragmentation and dissipation: marginalization, depoliticization, and institutionalization. I then examine the political implications of institutionalization in the case of the nuclear freeze movement with a discussion of the movements influence on policy. I conclude with a call for more comparative research on the process and political impact of institutionalizing social protest movements.

Framing national security: Elite public discourse on nuclear weapons during the cold war

Political discourse can provoke, preempt, or quell social movements, identifying which issues are most accessible for challenge and how. Movements are not simply reactive, however, and can affect public discourse, forcing political leaders and established elites to respond to their concerns. As a result public discourse may reflect the conflict between various actors, as challengers seek to redefine the issues of their concerns and shape viable political solutions. Challengers offer alternative “frames” for ordering consideration of political issues, creating contests both between activists and mainstream media within mainstream media. This article analyzes the “framing” of national security in elite discourse on nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union and its relationship to the broader political climate, including peace movement activism. I compare specialized political discourse, expert strategic discourse, and scientific public discourse from 1945 to 1989. I identify three “master frames” regarding natio...

Tending the Vineyard: Cultivating Political Process Research

Goodwin and Jaspers criticisms of various iterations of political process theory are incorrectly applied to the entire developing paradigm. Their indictment offers a rigid and narrow representation of the theory and rejects the social science enterprise of building theory altogether. At the same time, their criticisms raise important puzzles for scholars working on social movements, particularly about defining opportunities, and studying culture. I answer their criticisms of the theory, acknowledge useful questions and challenges that they offer, and conclude by suggesting an agenda for research on social movements in the future.

Political opportunity and the rise and decline of interest group sectors

Abstract Interest group activity is always affected by the political environment in which groups operate. As a result, effective study of public interest groups must situate them in a larger political context. We propose a means of doing so by building on theoretical and empirical studies of both social movements and interest groups. We argue that groups can best be understood by changing the unit of analysis from an individual group to the set of groups pursuing common agendas, or an “interest group sector.” Drawing from both empirical and theoretical literature, we establish both the necessity and the theoretical parameters for a sectoral analysis, and offer a basic framework for such an analysis. We demonstrate empirical support for a sectoral approach by looking at the periodicity of group formation in five public interest sectors. We then propose a six stage framework to describe a cyclic process of issue emergence, resource mobilization, organization building, and their relation to the policy process. We conclude by discussing the potential policy impact of interest group mobilization and institutionalization, and its relationship to democracy.

Signals and Spillover: Brown v. Board of Education and Other Social Movements

The watershed Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education affected activist politics on issues that extend well beyond African-American civil rights or education. The apparent success of the Court decision in spurring social change encouraged activists in other social movements to emulate the NAACP Legal Defense Funds litigation strategy, and to adapt organizational structures, political strategies, and rhetoric borrowed from the civil rights movement. We examine how a Supreme Court decision and its subsequent interpretation influenced the development of other social movements. Borrowing from work on social movements, we contend that the Court decision signaled judicial openness to stand up for minority points of view on questions of fundamental rights, and that the civil rights movement spilled over to affect other movements. Activists continued to respond to that signal decades after Brown, even when that signal of judicial responsiveness and openness did not reflect the real prospects for achieving influence through a litigation-based strategy. David S. Meyer is Professor of Sociology and Political Science (dmeyer@uci.edu) and Steven A. Boutcher is Doctoral Candidate (sboutche@uci.edu) in Sociology, University of California, Irvine. We are grateful for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper from Lisa Garcia Bedolla, Catherine Corrigall-Brown, Stephanie DiAlto, Sharon Lean, Sharon Oselin, and Su Yang.

Coalitions and Political Movements: The Lessons of the Nuclear Freeze

This work employs multidisciplinary perspectives to better understand the nuclear freeze movement, a movement that at one time produced a vast national network of activism and the largest political demonstration in the history of the United States.