Doug McAdam

Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings

Introduction: opportunities mobilizing structures and framing processes Doug McAdam Part I. Political Opportunities: 1. Clarifying the concept of political opportunities Doug McAdam 2. States and opportunities: the political structuring of social movements Sidney Tarrow 3. Social movements and the state: thoughts on the policing of protest Donatella della Porta 4. Opportunities and framing in the East European revolts of 1989 Anthony Oberschall 5. Opportunities and Framing in the Political Cycle of Perestroika Elena Zdravomyslova Part II. Mobilizing Structures: 6. Mobilizing structures: constraints and opportunities in adopting, adapting and inventing John D. McCarthy 7. The organizational structure of new social movements in relation to their political context Hanspeter Kriesi 8. The impact of national contexts on social movement structures: a cross-movement and cross-national comparison Dieter Rucht 9. Organizational form as frame: collective identity and political strategy in the American Labor Movement 1880-1920 Elisabeth S. Clemens 10. The collapse of a social movement: the interplay of mobilizing structures, framing, and political opportunities in the Knights of Labor Kim Voss Part III. Framing Processes: 11. Culture ideology and strategic framing Mayer N. Zald 12. Accessing public media electoral and governmental agendas John D. McCarthy, Jackie Smith, and Mayer N. Zald 13. Media discourse, movement publicity, and the generation of collective action frames: theoretical and empirical exercises in meaning construction Bert Klandermans and Sjoerd Goslinga 14. Framing political opportunity William A. Gamson and David S. Meyer 15. The framing function of movement tactics: strategic dramaturgy in the American civil rights movement Doug McAdam.

Specifying the Relationship Between Social Ties and Activism

Much empirical work in the social-movements literature has focused on the role of social ties in movement recruitment. Yet these studies have been plagued by a troubling theoretical and empirical imprecision. This imprecision stems from three sources. First, these studies are generally silent on the basic sociological dynamics that account for the reported findings. Second, movement scholars have generally failed to specify and test the precise dimensions of social ties that seem to account for their effects. Finally, most studies fail to acknowledge that individuals are embedded in many relationships that may expose the individual to conflicting pressures. This article seeks to address these shortcomings by means of an elaborated model of recruitment that is then used as a basis for examining the role of social ties in mediating individual recruitment to the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project.

Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Introduction: Opportunities, mobilizing structures, and framing processes – toward a synthetic, comparative perspective on social movements

In a widely read book published in 1960, the sociologist Daniel Bell proclaimed the “end of ideology.” As the 1960s dawned, a good many social scientists believed we had reached a stage in the development of society where ideological conflict would gradually be replaced by a more pluralistic, pragmatic consensus. Bell and his colleagues could not have been more mistaken. In the very year Bells book was published, black students staged sit-in demonstrations throughout the American South. In turn the sit-ins revitalized both a moribund civil rights movement and the tradition of leftist activism dormant in America since the 1930s. During the ensuing decade the country was rent by urban riots, massive antiwar demonstrations, student strikes, and political assassinations. On a global level, student movements proliferated: in France, Mexico, Italy, Germany, Spain, Japan, Pakistan, and numerous other countries. In Czechoslovakia, an effort to reform and “humanize the face of communism” was brutally suppressed by Soviet forces. In short, the 1960s witnessed a proliferation in the very kinds of social movements and revolutions that Bell had assumed were a thing of the past. The last twenty-five years have only served to underscore the poverty of Bells argument. If anything, social movements and revolutions have, in recent decades, emerged as a common – if not always welcome – feature of the political landscape. In the 1970s Islamic fundamentalists wrest power from the Shah of Iran. The Sandinistas depose Somoza in Nicaragua. Terrorist groups in Germany and Italy step up their attacks on military installations, politicians, and symbols of “corporate hegemony.” The 1980s were witness to more of the same.

Tactical Innovation and the Pace of Insurgency

The pace of black insurgency between 1955 and 1970 is analyzed as a function of an ongoing process of tactical interaction between movement forces and southern segregationists. Given a political system vulnerable to challenge and strong internal organization the main challenge confronting insurgents is a preeminently tactical one. Lacking institutionalized power, challengers must devise protest techniques that offset their powerlessness. This is referred to as a process of tactical innovation. Such innovations, however, only temporarily afford challengers increased bargaining leverage. In chess-like fashion, movement opponents can be expected, through effective tactical adaptation, to neutralize the new tactic, thereby reinstituting the power disparity between themselves and the challenger. This perspective is applied to the development of the black movement over the period, 1955-1970. Evidence derived from content-coding all relevant story synopses contained in The New York Times Index for these years is presented showing a strong correspondence between the introduction of new protest techniques and peaks in movement activity. Conversely, lulls in black insurgency reflect the successful efforts of movement opponents to devise effective tactical counters to these innovations.

Organizations and Movements

Introduction There is little question that two of the most active and creative arenas of scholarly activity in the social sciences during the past four decades have been organizational studies (OS) and social movement analysis (SM). Both have been intellectually lively and vigorous in spite of the fact that scholars in both camps began their projects during the early 1960s on relatively barren soil. Students of OS took up their labors alongside the remnants of scientific management, their human relations critics, and scattered studies of bureaucratic behavior. SM scholars were surrounded by earlier empirical work on rumors, panics, crowds, and mobs together with a “smorgasbord” of theoretical perspectives, including the collective behavior, mass society, and relative deprivation approaches (McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1988: 695). In both situations, prior work provided scant theoretical coherence and little basis for optimism. Moreover, in this early period no connection existed or, indeed, seemed possible between the two fields since the former concentrated on instrumental, organized behavior while the latters focus was on “spontaneous, unorganized, and unstructured phenomena” (Morris 2000: 445). OS began to gain traction with the recognition of the importance of the wider environment, first material resource and technical features, then political, and, more recently, institutional and cultural forces. Open systems conceptions breathed new life into a field too long wedded to concerns of internal administrative design, leadership, and work group cohesion.

The Cross-National Diffusion of Movement Ideas:

Current theory and research on social movements continue to treat these movements as discrete entities, rather than to focus on the ways in which activists in one struggle borrow elements from other similar groups. With its emphasis on the spread of information or other cultural elements, the diffusion literature represents a potentially fruitful starting point for theorizing about the transfer of ideas or tactics from one movement to another. Drawing on this literature, the authors sketch a model of the cross-national diffusion of movement ideas that emphasizes (1) the role of direct relational ties in encouraging an initial identification of activist-adopters in one country with activist-transmitters in another and (2) the role of nonrelational channels as the principal means of information transmission once this initial identification is established. The authors then use the case of the American and German New Left to illustrate the utility of the approach for the study of cross-national diffusion.

Social movements and the changing structure of political opportunity in the European union 1

To the extent that European integration results in the decline in the importance of the nation‐state as the exclusive seat of formal political power, we can expect attendant changes in those forms of interest aggregation and articulation historically linked to the state. This article suggests that a polity characterised by multi‐level governance is emerging in Europe and that this poses a set of new constraints and opportunities for groups that wish to influence political decisions. We argue that group strategy in response to this is a function of: (1) the structure of political opportunities facing a group in the EU; and (2) inherited institutions and ideologies that constrain the capacity of a group to exploit those opportunities. We use this framework to analyse the effect of European integration on four groups: the labour movement, regional movements, the environmental movement and the anti‐nuclear movement.

Civil Society Reconsidered: The Durable Nature and Community Structure of Collective Civic Action

This article develops a conceptual framework on civil society that shifts the dominant focus on individuals to collective action events—civic and protest alike—that bring people together in public to realize a common purpose. Analyzing over 4,000 events in the Chicago area from 1970 to 2000, the authors find that while civic engagement is durable overall, “sixties‐style” protest declines, and hybrid events that combine public claims making with civic forms of behavior—what they call “blended social action”—increase. Furthermore, dense social ties, group memberships, and neighborly exchange do not predict community variations in collective action. The density of nonprofit organizations matters instead, suggesting that declines in traditional social capital may not be as consequential for civic capacity as commonly thought.

The war at home: Antiwar protests and congressional voting, 1965 to 1973

Time-series analysis is used to assess the relationship between antiwar protests and congressional voting on war-related roll calls during the Vietnam era. Using protest event data coded from The New York Times and counts of roll-call votes generated from congressional voting data, we test for three specific mechanisms: disruptive protest, signaling, and public opinion shift. Extreme forms of disruptive protest are hypothesized as having a direct positive effect on congressional voting. Lohmanns signaling model posits exactly the opposite relationship between protest and policy. Especially extreme protests are expected to have a negative effect on both the pace and pro-peace direction of congressional action. Conversely, large (and more moderate) protests are expected to have a positive effect on House and Senate voting. The final mechanism, public opinion shift, depicts the relationship as indirect, with protest encouraging public opinion change, which, in turn, encourages increasingly favorable congressional voting. The results are somewhat mixed with respect to all three mechanisms, but suggest an interesting general pattern. The most extreme or threatening forms of protest (e. g., those featuring violence by demonstrators and/or property damage) simultaneously increase pro-peace voting while depressing the overall pace of congressional action. The reverse is true for more persuasive forms of protest (e.g., large demonstrations), which appear to increase the pace of voting while depressing the likelihood of pro-peace outcomes

Culture and Social Movements

McAdam presents a good example of focusing on the questions discussed in the introduction to this section, explaining: why groups form, why they adopt the characteristics they do, what factors shape their success and failure, and how cultures broadly influential in their societies shape their identity and opportunities. Key among the points in his analysis is the concept of “frames.” McAdam uses this term to refer to packets of shared assumptions through which particular social movements can be categorized. Frames also highlight common elements through which movements’ purposes can be understood. A core belief of the civil rights movement, for example, was that American society was denying African Americans the equality in which the broader society professed to believe. Subsequent movements, such as women’s and gay rights movements, have largely adopted the same approach as their members pursue their goals. Social movements, in McAdam’s analysis, are embedded in the cultures within which they act and should be understood in relation to both the broader culture and each other across time.