Lorenzo Bosi

The Consequences of Social Movements

Social movements have attracted much attention in recent years, both from scholars and among the wider public. This book examines the consequences of social movements, covering such issues as the i ...

The Impact of Protest Movements on the Establishment: Dimensions, Models, and Approaches

A broad consensus exists within the literature on collective action that protest movements can have a multitude of important, intended, and unintended impacts on the establishment. There is, however, less agreement on how we can measure such effects, a problem that has clearly hindered systematic investigations in this important area of research. This chapter argues that the methodological question of how to study the impact of protest movements on the establishment leads to a much broader theoretical issue and to the main challenge facing researchers of social movement outcomes to date, namely, how to establish a link between movement activities and political, social, and cultural changes.1

Incorporation and democratization: the long-term process of institutionalization of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement

It is quite common nowadays in the social movement literature to recognize that “no protest wave ends up where it began” (Koopmans 2004: 22). If this is true, as we believe it is, we should also recognize that in such transformation what changes are the continuous interactions between different actors in the political system, and in particular the interactions between the movement and the state. This changing power relation between the different actors is, more often than not, a critical catalyst for a change in the distribution of power – whether this has positive effects, or results in a backlash for the social movement and its constituency. What we surely can say is that no protest wave leaves the power relation between the movements constituency and the state unaffected. Thus, the aim of this chapter is to study how political changes (that either benefit or damage the collective good) emerge from the complex interplay of state and social movement, and to study the shifting balance of power relations between them at different stages of the institutionalization process. By “social movement institutionalization,” this chapter means the process of inclusion in the terrain of formal politics of some of its ideas (i.e., movement concerns come to be recognized as legitimate within mainstream politics and/or among the general public), personnel (i.e., activists gain positions within political parties, committees, and/or the civil service), or whole movement strands (i.e., sections of the movement establish political parties) (Giugni and Passy 1998; Meyer 2007; Suh 2011). Such a process seems to occur only when two conditions are combined: the willingness of the social movement, in whole or in part, to institutionalize, and the consent of the state for such a path to be pursued (Banaszak 2010; Suh 2011). While both are necessary, they do not need to occur simultaneously. Hence, institutionalization is not a linear process, nor a natural evolution of social movement development, and neither is it structurally determined. Rather it is the result of competing strategic choices: those of a social movement (or parts thereof) to participate in the arena of formal politics, and those of the state to integrate movement activists and their demands into political institutions, under specific, favorable conditions.

The consequences of social movements: taking stock and looking forward

Citizens of both democratic and authoritarian countries seem to become less supportive of those in power and more willing to use non-conventional forms of collective action for putting pressure on authorities. This was the case, for example, during the past few years, with the major upsurges of protest, in Eastern Europe (Coloured Revolutions), in the Middle East (Arab Spring), in Southern Europe (the Indignados in Spain, the Agonaktismenoi in Greece), in the United States (Occupy Wall Street), in Chile (the Pinquinos ), as well as anti-government protests in Hong Kong, Thailand, and South Africa. Such waves of mobilization, comparable in their size to those of the 1960s and 1970s, bring to the fore some important questions for social movement research and call for a deeper understanding of social and political change: When and how does mobilization make a difference? When and how do activists achieve their goals? Is protest a necessary and/or sufficient condition for producing social and political change? Do social movements have any long-term legacies on our societies? Do they change the life choices of those participating in protest activities? How does all this vary both across contexts and across different movements? These and related questions are not new, but until the 1970s scholars paid little attention to the consequences of social movements as protest was mainly regarded as an irrational action with no instrumental goals (Buechler 2004). Since then, also thanks to some pioneering works (Gamson 1990; Piven and Cloward 1979; Schumaker 1975), a new research field emerged slowly and allowed one of the present authors to note as late as in 1998 that “we still lack systematic empirical analyses that would add to our knowledge of the conditions under which movements produce certain effects” (Giugni 1998: 373). The field was revamped, amongst other things, also thanks to two edited collections entirely devoted to the study of different kinds of the effects of social movements (Giugni et al. 1998, 1999). This sudden focus on social movement outcomes could be related not only to the wave of democratization in the Eastern Europe and Latin America in the 1990s, but also to the fact that sufficient time had passed from the mobilization of the 1968 generation in Western Europe and civil rights mobilization in the United States.

Aggregate-level biographical outcomes for gay and lesbian movements

As social change occurs, individuals’ lives are altered. Whether produced by social movements or other forces, social change can affect the demography, life-course, and life chances of participants or of populations as a whole (Goldstone and McAdam 2001). Most empirical and conceptual work on how social movements affect biography focuses on effects on movement participants, who experience a range of lasting effects, as the introduction to this section describes. Movements can also shape biographical outcomes for the larger population, or for certain cohorts or demographics, what Guigni and McAdam (Goldstone and McAdam 2001; Guigni 2004; McAdam 1999) term “aggregate biographical outcomes.” There has been little research on aggregate-level biographical outcomes. Existing work suggests that they vary according to cohort location, spreading from activists to the general population over time, as activists develop “alternative conceptions of the life-course and related behavioral norms,” which then spread to subcultural locations such as college campuses, and finally diffuse to youth in general (Goldstone and McAdam 2001). Such life-course outcomes are generational; cohorts that have already begun trajectories of education, occupation,marriage, or childbearing are less likely to be affected by newnorms. Factors such as gender and class also likely shape aggregate biographical outcomes; that is, social movements affect the life-course of different segments of the population in different ways (Hagan and HansfordBowles 2005; Van Dyke et al. 2000). As Guigni (2004) points out, such aggregate biographical outcomes are often unintentional.

“"What is to be done?": Agency and the causation of transformative events in Ireland's 1916 Rising and 1969 Long March”

This article investigates the role of agency in the causation of transformative events by looking at the competition between rival strands within social movements. The creative activity involved in the elaboration and execution of rival strategies is used as a proxy for agency. We present a paired comparison of two very different transformative events in twentieth-century Ireland—the Easter Rising of 1916 and the Long March from Belfast to Derry in 1969—and the strategic interactions preceding them. The comparison shows how agency and structure can interact around transformative events. High levels of agency were instrumental in making the events, and in turn these events catalyzed powerful social forces. These forces were structural—that is, they reflected divisions, tensions, and power relations that were deeply engrained in the social structure over the long term. However, these structural forces could have remained dormant had it not been for the bursts of agency that brought about the transformative ...

Tactical competition and movement outcomes on markets: the rise of ethical fashion

Scholars of social movements have long ignored the consequences of movements on markets. But in the past decade, a number of studies bridging various disciplines started analyzing how movements interact with corporations and provoke market change (de Bakker et al. 2013; King, Chapter 9; Soule and King 2014; Walker 2012). In a review of this burgeoning literature on the “contentiousness of markets,” King and Pearce (2010) distinguish three major approaches through which movements attempt to change markets: contentious actions inside and outside of firms, collaboration, and the developing of new products and categories that constitute new market niches. Many studies have shown how the “success” – i.e., the resulting market change – of given tactics is mediated by contextual conditions (King 2008) and depends on processes involving different actors – movements, firms, states, and other relevant players – trying to shape new markets (Bartley 2007; Weber et al. 2008, 2009). But while it is possible to assess the outcomes of different tactical approaches individually, they are actually related to one another. Movement organizations are part of “multi-organizational fields” (Curtis and Zurcher 1973) or social movement arenas (Jasper 2011). They pursue similar goals, but use different tactical approaches depending on their social and organizational identities and “cultures of action” (Klawiter 2008). In a dynamic process involving different movement players and their targets, the consequences of one approach may then become an important factor in the contextual “conditions of success” for another one. Focusing on one or the other of these tactical approaches, most studies do not explicitly address this interplay in the transformation of a given market. This is also more generally the case in studies on movement outcomes in the political arena. From an empirical point of view, however, different movement actors very often pursue different approaches concomitantly, and they may be in a competitive or even conflicting relationship. Different tactics such as those of radical and reform-oriented organizations may be complementary and reinforce each others outcomes, but they may also clash and provoke disputes between movement actors. Given the frequency of such conflicts, studies on movement outcomes have paid surprisingly little attention to their role in achieving change. This chapter addresses this issue of tactical competition and its role for movement outcomes. How does the interplay of different tactics used by different movement players shape market change such as the emergence of niches?

Feminist mobilization and the politics of rights

On Sunday, March 7, 1965, hundreds of civil rights marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the outskirts of Selma, Alabama, headed for the state capitol in Montgomery. On the other side, state and local police descended on them with tear gas and billy clubs. National news captured shocking images of law enforcement officers beating nonviolent demonstrators who were seeking only the basic element of political freedom: the right to vote. The broadcast of media footage of the melee provoked national and international outrage. This violent episode in Selma, an event that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday,” proved to be a decisive catalyst for federal action on voting rights. During the Selma protests, over a hundred members of the House and Senate rose in their respective chambers to denounce lawlessness and the deprivation of fundamental rights (Garrow 1978). Only a week after Bloody Sunday, citing the events in Selma, President Lyndon Johnson announced his intention to submit sweeping voting rights legislation. Although southern Democrats filibustered the bill in the Senate, a bipartisan coalition swept aside their opposition and, five months later, enacted into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Because of these events, multiple studies of the civil rights movement document the association between protests, white violence, and government responsiveness to movement demands (Burstein 1979; Garrow 1978; McAdam 1982). Yet, in some ways, this extraordinary movement triumph encourages a faulty impression of how movements achieve political change because incidents such as this, and the public attention they garner, are extraordinarily rare. The far more common setting for social movements is one of broad public disinterest and inattention. Accordingly, research on the impact of social movements on public policy outcomes presents a much more mixed picture. In their extensive literature review of this topic, Andrews and Edwards (2004) find that, “[advocacy organizations exert] a modest role at best on congressional voting patterns.” Casting doubt on the efficacy of protests, Burstein and Sausner (2005) suggest that, given the infrequency of such events, even among the most active movements, it is hardly surprising that evidence for movement impact is uneven. It is implausible, they argue, that congressional majorities would feel impelled to respond to the demands of benefit-seekers active in relatively few localities and engaging in a small number of protests. Nevertheless, others find that movement mobilization does affect government responsiveness and policy outcomes (Amenta 2006).