Kenneth T. Andrews

Making the News: Movement Organizations, Media Attention, and the Public Agenda

Increasingly, scholars have come to see the news media as playing a pivotal role in shaping whether social movements are able to bring about broader social change. By drawing attention to movements’ issues, claims, and supporters, the news media can shape the public agenda by influencing public opinion, authorities, and elites. Why are some social movement organizations more successful than others at gaining media coverage? Specifically, what organizational, tactical, and issue characteristics enhance media attention? We combine detailed organizational survey data from a representative sample of 187 local environmental organizations in North Carolina with complete news coverage of those organizations in 11 major daily newspapers in the two years following the survey (2,095 articles). Our analyses reveal that local news media favor professional and formalized groups that employ routine advocacy tactics, mobilize large numbers of people, and work on issues that overlap with newspapers’ focus on local economic growth and well-being. Groups that are confrontational, volunteer-led, or advocate on behalf of novel issues do not garner as much attention in local media outlets. These findings have important implications and challenge widely held claims about the pathways by which movement actors shape the public agenda through the news media.

The Dynamics of Protest Diffusion: Movement Organizations, Social Networks, and News Media in the 1960 Sit-Ins

The wave of sit-ins that swept through the American South in the spring of 1960 transformed the struggle for racial equality. This episode is widely cited in the literature on social movements, but the debate over its explanation remains unresolved—partly because previous research has relied on case studies of a few large cities. The authors use event-history analysis to trace the diffusion of sit-ins throughout the South and to compare cities where sit-ins occurred with the majority of cities where they did not. They assess the relative importance of three channels of diffusion: movement organizations, social networks, and news media. The authors find that movement organizations played an important role in orchestrating protest; what mattered was a cadre of activists rather than mass membership. There is little evidence that social networks acted as a channel for diffusion among cities. By contrast, news media were crucial for conveying information about protests elsewhere. In addition, the authors demonstrate that sit-ins were most likely to occur where there were many college students, where adults in the black community had greater resources and autonomy, and where political opportunities were more favorable.

The impacts of social movements on the political process : The civil rights movement and black electoral politics in Mississippi

In this paper, the author examines the relationship between social movements and political outcomes. He begins by assessing the existing social movement literature and identifying key areas in which further theoretical development and additional empirical research will advance current knowledge. Building on the issues raised by this assessment, he examines the civil rights movement in Mississippi from the period of widespread mobilization in the early 1960s through the early 1980s. Specifically, he examines the impacts of local movements on four political outcomes : (1) number of black voters registered, (2) votes cast for black candidates in statewide elections, (3) the number of black candidates running for office in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and (4) the number of black elected officials. The strategies used by white to defeat or minimize the impact of the movement are critical pieces of the analysis. The evidence indicates that local movements have continued to play a central, though complex, role in the transformation of local politics long after the civil rights movement peaked. This suggests that, while mobilization plays a key role in the short run, its long-term consequences must be considered as well

Leadership, Membership, and Voice: Civic Associations That Work

Why are some civic associations more effective than others? The authors introduce a multidimensional framework for analyzing the effectiveness of civic associations in terms of public recognition, member engagement, and leader development. Using original surveys of local Sierra Club organizations and leaders, the authors assess prevailing explanations in organization and movement studies alongside a model highlighting leadership and internal organizational practices. Although available resources and favorable contexts matter, the core findings show that associations with more committed activists, that build organizational capacity, that carry out strong programmatic activity, and whose leaders work independently, generate greater effectiveness across outcomes.

Leading Associations How Individual Characteristics and Team Dynamics Generate Committed Leaders

Leaders make vital contributions to the survival and success of civic associations, but they vary widely in levels of commitment to those groups. Why are some leaders more committed than others? We draw from scholarship on civic participation, volunteering, social movements, and team management to develop an original explanation. Although theory suggests individual and organizational factors may explain differences, most prior empirical studies examine only individual-level hypotheses. We use data collected from 1,616 Sierra Club volunteer leaders and the 368 chapters and groups they led to conduct multilevel analyses of the determinants of behavioral commitment among leaders. At the individual level, we find that leaders with more applicable skills, available time, and aligned motivations are more committed to the organization. At the organizational level, we find that leaders whose organizations are more complex, and who are on teams that operate more interdependently, share work more equally, and devote smaller shares of time to meetings, are more committed. These findings have implications for scholars of leadership and commitment and for organizations seeking more committed leaders.

Black Voting During the Civil Rights Movement: A Micro-level Analysis

This article examines why some black Southerners but not others were politically active during the early stages of the civil rights movement. Using a survey of more than 600 black Southerners in 1961, we investigate whether perceptions about opportunity and threat, politicized social capital and individual orientations toward social change shaped voting in the 1960 Presidential election. Perceptions of solidarity in the black community and repression against politically active blacks encourage voting, while the perception of white support for integration does not. Participating in civic and religious organizations and discussing politics with friends and co-workers (but not family members) increase the likelihood of voting. Our findings extend political opportunity and social capital theories in important ways while offering new insights into this historically important case of civic engagement.

Protest Campaigns and Movement Success Desegregating the U.S. South in the Early 1960s

Can protest bring about social change? Although scholarship on the consequences of social movements has grown dramatically, our understanding of protest influence is limited; several recent studies have failed to detect any positive effect. We investigate sit-in protest by black college students in the U.S. South in 1960, which targeted segregated lunch counters. An original dataset of 334 cities enables us to assess the effect of protest while considering the factors that generate protest itself—including local movement infrastructure, supportive political environments, and favorable economic conditions. We find that sit-in protest greatly increased the probability of desegregation, as did protest in nearby cities. Over time, desegregation in one city raised the probability of desegregation nearby. In addition, desegregation tended to occur where opposition was weak, political conditions were favorable, and the movement’s constituency had economic leverage.

Group Threat and Policy Change: The Spatial Dynamics of Prohibition Politics, 1890-1919.

The authors argue that group threat is a key driver of the adoption of new and controversial policies. Conceptualizing threat in spatial terms, they argue that group threat is activated through the joint occurrence of (1) proximity to threatening groups and (2) the population density of threatened groups. By analyzing the adoption of county and state “dry laws” banning alcohol from 1890 to 1919, they first show that prohibition victories were driven by the relative strength of supportive constituencies such as native whites and rural residents, vis-à-vis opponents such as Irish, Italian, or German immigrants or Catholics. Second, they show that threat contributed to prohibition victories: counties bordering large immigrant or urban populations, which did not themselves contain similar populations, were more likely to adopt dry laws. Threat arises primarily from interactions between spatially proximate units at the local level, and therefore higher-level policy change is not reducible to the variables driving local policy.

Sampling Social Movement Organizations

Scholars of nonprofits, interest groups, civic associations, and social movement organizations employ samples of organizations derived from directories or other available listings. In most cases, we are unable to evaluate the representativeness of these samples. Using data on the population of environmental organizations in North Carolina, we assess the methodological strengths and weaknesses of widely used strategies. We find that reliance on any single source yields bias on theoretically important characteristics of organizations. We show that scholars can reduce bias significantly by combining sources, creating what we call a “peak list” compiled from different types of sources. Compared to any single source, our peak list differed less from the population on the thirty-one organizational characteristics including geographical coverage, issues, discursive frames, targets, and organizational demographics such as age, organizational form, and resources. From these analyses, we offer methodological recomm...

The Cultural-Cognitive Mapping of Scientific Professions

Even with widespread interest, public perceptions of science remain understudied and poorly theorized by social scientists. A central issue has been the persistent assumption that publics require a base of scientific knowledge for science to have broad cultural meaning. Yet, recent advances in cultural and cognitive sociology point to alternative research programs seeking to identify how publics come to understand complex and uncertain issues, when information is incomplete and asymmetric. We use this approach to analyze data on public perceptions of how scientific different fields are from the 2006 and 2012 National Science Foundation’s Science and Technology Survey. Our multivariate analyses allow us to approximate how mass publics map the social space of scientific professions, while accounting for individuals’ social location and cultural identity (e.g., race, class, gender, age, scientific sophistication, and political ideology). We then focus our attention on public perceptions of sociology and economics. Overall, we find that public perceptions, rather than being disorganized, map onto recognizable dimensions indicating how publics distinguish between scientific professions.