Debra C. Minkoff

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.

The sequencing of social movements

Conventional accounts of protest cycles posit a demonstration effect-successful protests incite other constituencies to activism. The author offers an alternative theory that builds on population ecology models of organizational behavior. He argues that the expansion of social movement organizations, or organizational density, is also an essential component of protest cycles. Multivariate analyses of the effects of civil rights protest and organizational growth on feminist protest and organizational foundings between 1955 and 1985 demonstrate that organizational density promotes the diffusion of protest. Protest also engenders activism by others, but only under favorable political conditions. This implies that an enduring organizational niche and political allies in power are necessary for protest to spread beyond single movements and create protest opportunities for other challengers

Bending with the wind : Strategic change and adaptation by women's and racial minority organizations

This article provides an integrated analysis of social movement organizational change and survival based on the activities of national womens and racial minority organizations during 1955‐‐85. Results demonstrate that core transitions in social change strategies are influenced in contradictory ways by the social movement environment. Older and more formalized movement organizations are more flexible, but the kinds of changes undertaken are not necessarily conservative. The benefits of transformation are limited, however, and organizational change increases the risk of failure with little evidence of a declining effect over time. In the long run, this shapes the organizational system in ways that potentially improve its legitimacy but may also limit the development of an infrastructure for future mobilization.

The Emergence of Hybrid Organizational Forms: Combining Identity-Based Service Provision and Political Action:

After the 1960s, women, Blacks, and other ethnic groups mapped political objectives onto a more traditional form of voluntary association, along with investing in direct political protest and advocacy for civil and social rights. One result was the development of a hybrid organizational form that combines advocacy and service provision as its core identity and thus faces distinctive environmental uncertainties and boundary conditions. This article provides a community ecology framework for analyzing the development of the service/advocacy organizational form. The author argues that hybrid forms of organization, by expanding the resource infrastructure and legitimacy available to identity-based organizations, play a critical role in anchoring the continued viability of identity-based service organizations under newly politicized conditions. Data are drawn from a study of national women’s and racial and ethnic minority organizations since 1955.

Producing Social Capital: National Social Movements and Civil Society

This article analyzes the conceptual treatment of national social movement organizations (SMOs) in current debates over civil society and the decline of social capital in the United States. Despite the rapid growth of national organizations since the 1960s, civil society proponents systematically dismiss their relevance. The author argues instead that national SMOs play a critical role in civil society and the production of social capital by providing an infrastructure for collective action, facilitating the development of mediated collective identities that link otherwise marginalized members of society, and shaping public discourse and debate. Theories that exclude this form of citizen participation not only overlook the important ways that social capital and collective identity are constructed by national organizations, but they ultimately promote the continued marginalization of less powerful social groups.

Interorganizational Influences on the Founding of African American Organizations, 1955-1985

This paper examines the relationship between traditions of social action and patterns of organizational development, using data on the formation of national African American protest, advocacy, and service organizations between 1955 and 1985. Following research in organizational ecology, Poisson regression is used to examine the association between organizational density and organizational formation across strategic forms. The results provide some support for the idea that interorganizational influences are important in shaping the contours of the African American social movement industry. Outside funding, internal organizational capacities and protest levels also play a significant role.

The Local Embedding of Community-Based Organizations

Although social organizations are considered a vital aspect of life in neighborhoods, research seldom examines how neighborhood context influences organizational vitality. This article considers how organizational and neighborhood characteristics influence organizational survival over time via a case study of immigrant organizations in Amsterdam. Using multilevel analysis, we investigate which features give organizations an advantage in uncertain environments and which neighborhood characteristics influence organizations’ ability to remain active sponsors of immigrant interests. We conclude that neighborhood context has little substantial influence on the failure rates of immigrant organizations in Amsterdam. We take this as provisional evidence that the residential environment on the neighborhood level may not be a relevant source of institutional material or resources for community-based organizations. Rather, what appears to be more crucial are organizational characteristics that enhance the embeddedness and legitimacy of immigrant organizations among the immigrant constituency and external actors in the urban context.

The payoffs of organizational membership for political activism in established democracies

This article contributes to long-standing debates about the influence of voluntary association membership on political participation by drawing on recent advances in counterfactual analysis. Propensity score matching methods are used to assess the effects of different forms of membership (active and passive) in distinct organizational forms (civic and political) on political activism, taking selection bias into account. Results demonstrate that organizational membership increases levels of nonconventional political action—for active and passive members in both political and civic groups. The “participatory dividend” is highest for members of political organizations, but there is also support for the argument that membership in civic organizations enhances political activism, net of selection. Focusing only on the subset of joiners, however, suggests that the distinction between active and passive membership is less pronounced than skeptics of such symbolic affiliation have argued.

Welcome to the neighbourhood: The spatial dimensions of legitimacy for voluntary leisure organisations

With an understanding that organisations in a city are spatially located and that the geographical distribution of their resources is uneven, this paper examines how neighbourhood characteristics affect the spatial dimension of one basic resource in particular: organisational legitimacy. Specifically, we investigate how the presence of immigrants, the presence of youth and the degree of residential mobility in a neighbourhood may influence collective frames among its residents on what constitutes appropriate and suitable organisational forms. Employing multilevel analysis on data about the voluntary leisure organisations of immigrants in Amsterdam during three periods of time, we consider whether these neighbourhood characteristics do indeed have an impact on the number of organisations to be found and on their vitality. We conclude that an immigrant presence reduces the spatial dimension of organisational legitimacy, which consequently decreases organisational density and survival rates; a youth presence has the opposite effect; and the degree of residential mobility has no significant effect.

Rhyming Hope and History: Activists, Academics, and Social Movement Scholarship

for the state agency that funded and supervised rape crisis services. The third part of the book, introduced by Helen Ingram, focuses on the ways that identities are shaped by policy and reshaped by struggles over policy, ranging from veterans and the GI Bill to the prisoners’ rights movement to immigrants’ rights. These three chapters offered revealing examples of the feedback effects of policies on (further) collective action, including the dampening of contentious politics after policy successes. I like this book very much—I found it informative and it stimulated me to think about my own work in new ways. Readers can also learn about useful resources, such as the Policy Agendas Project that Frank R. Baumgartner co-founded and that he and Christine Mahoney write about here. Still, I’m left with that nagging question, “Then what is a social movement?” The editors conclude that “social movements and government entities interpenetrate such that the boundaries between the two become both hard to discern and highly permeable” (p. 293). So perhaps my question is irrelevant. Social movement scholars have spent the past thirty years arguing that movements are part of politics as usual, not aberrations, and this book helps to make the case that states and social movements are not “separate entities in the policymaking process” but “a nexus of political activity in democratic societies” (p. 301). I can live with that. I would like to have seen the “democracy” part of the title analytically developed more. This book focuses mainly on policy successes, even if acknowledging the sometimes repressive aspects of those wins. Perhaps the models developed here can also be put to telling the stories of challengers who didn’t win, who, even with insider activists facilitating their causes, got shut down (e.g., movements to change funding approaches for public education). Routing the Opposition at least offers suggestive pointers on how to look for democracy in action. Rhyming Hope and History: Activists, Academics, and Social Movement Scholarship, edited by David Croteau, William Hoynes, and Charlotte Ryan. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 296 pp.