Contentions Politics and Social Movements
17
I
Contentious Politics and Social Movements
In this book, I will argue that contentious politics emerges in response to changes in political opportunities and threats when participants perceive and respond to a variety of incentives: material and ideological, partisan and group-based, long-standing and episodic. Building on these opportunities, and using known repertoires of action, people with limited resources can act together contentiously - if only sporadically. When their actions are based on dense social networks and effective connective structures and draw on legitimate, j action-oriented cultural frames, they can sustain these actions even in contact with powerful opponents. In such cases - and only in such cases - we are in the presence of a social movement. When such contention spreads across an entire society - as it sometimes does - we see a cycle of contention. When such a cycle is organized around opposed or multiple sovereignties, the outcome is a revolution.
The solutions to the problem of mobilizing people into campaigns and coalitions of collective action depend on shared understandings, social networks, and connective structures and the use of culturally resonant forms of action. But above all -1 shall argue - they are triggered by the ebb and flow of political struggle. In this chapter, I will lay out each of these factors as they will be used in this book to describe, analyze, and raise questions about contentious politics and social movements. Before doing so, however, it will be helpful to see how scholars - associated with four classical traditions - have conceived of the problem of collective action and its relation to grievances, resources, cultural frames, and political struggle. We will begin with the origins of social movement theory in the works of Marxist and post-Marxist scholars, before turning to the current generation of social scientific work on contentious politics.
MARX, LENIN, GRAMSCI, AND TILLY
Many sociologists trace the lineage of the field of social movements to society's negative reactions to the horrors of the French Revolution and to the outrage
16
of the crowd.1 Although writers such as Tarde (1989) and Le Bon (1977) make a convenient polemical starting point for theorists who reject their ideas, their work in fact was an offshoot of crowd psychology. In this book, conflict between challengers and authorities will be seen, instead, as a normal part of society and not as an aberration from it. This is why we will begin with the preeminent theorists who saw conflict inscribed in the very structure of society -Karl Marxand Friedrich Engels.
Marx and Class Conflict
It would not have occurred to the earliest theorists of social movements, Marx and Engels, to ask what makes individuals engage in collective action. Instead, they would have posed the problem as one of the readiness of society's structural development rather than one of individual choice. But although they saw collective action rooted in social structure, Marx and Engels seriously underrated the resources needed to engage in collective action, its cultural dimensions, and the importance of politics. Marx and Engels were classical structuralists who left little room for the concrete mechanisms that draw individuals into collective action. People will engage in collective action, they thought, when their social class comes into fully developed contradiction with its antagonists. In the case of the proletariat, this meant when capitalism forced it into large-scale factories, where it lost ownership of its tools but developed the resources to act collectively.
Among these resources were class consciousness and trade unions. It was the rhythm of socialized production in the factory that would pound the proletariat into a "class for itself" and give rise to the unions that gave it political form. Although there are many more elegant (and more obscure) formulations of this thesis, Marx put it most succinctly in The Communist Manifesto:
The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association____The real fruit of their battle lies,
not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers (Tucker, ed. 1978: 481 and 483).
Marx dealt summarily with a problem that has worried activists ever since: why members of a group who "should" revolt when history provides the "objective conditions" for revolt often fail to do so. Concerned with the problem that the workers' movement would not succeed unless a significant proportion of its members cooperated, he developed a theory of "false consciousness," by which he meant that if workers failed to act as "History" dictated, it was because they remained cloaked in a shroud of ignorance woven by their class enemies. The theory was unsatisfactory because no one could say whose consciousness was
1 For an account of theorists who focus on civil violence as die antithesis of normal social processes, see James Rule's Theories of Civil Violence (1988: Chapter 3).
MA&ARVKOVA IJUiVERZITA rskulta sodilmch stucSi
Jostovi: 10 _^
______----rTiri
18 Power in Movement
false and whose was teal. Marx thought the problem would resolve itself when capitalism's contradictions ripened and the solidarity that came from years of toiling side by side with others like themselves would open workers' eyes to their real interests. Marx, however, died before he could test that thesis.
We now know that as capitalism developed, it produced divisions among the -workers and created mechanisms that integrated them into capitalist democracies. Through nationalism and protectionism, workers often allied themselves with capitalists, suggesting that much more than class conflict was necessary to produce collective action on their behalf. A form of consciousness had to be created that would transform economic interests into revolutionary collective action. But who would create this consciousness? Marx had neither a clear concept of leadership nor a concept of working-class culture and, as a result, he seriously underspecified the political conditions that were needed to provide opportunities for revolutionary mobilization (1963b: 175).
Lenin and Resource Mobilization
The first of these problems - leadership - was the major preoccupation of Vladimir Illyich Lenin, Marx's foremost interpreter and the father of the Russian Revolution of November 1917. Learning from the Western European experience that workers on their own will act only on behalf of narrow "trade union interests," he refused to wait for objective conditions to ripen, instead proposing the creation of an elite of professional revolutionaries (7929: 5zff.). Substituting itself for Marx's proletariat, this "vanguard" would act as the self-appointed guardian of workers' "real" {i.e., revolutionary) interests. When that vanguard, in the form of the Russian Bolshevik Party, succeeded in gaining power, it transposed the equation, substituting party interest for that of the working class (and, ultimately, in its Stalinist involution, substituting the will of the leader for that of the party). In 1902, this involution was too far in the future to see. To Lenin, it seemed that organization was the solution to the collective action problem of the working class.
With the virtues of hindsight, we see that Lenin's organizational amendments to Macx's theory were a response to the particular historical conditions of Czarist Russia. In superimposing an intellectual vanguard on the young and unsophisticated Russian working class, he was adapting Marx's theory to the context of a repressive state and to the backward society it ruled - both of which retarded the development of class consciousness and inhibited collective action.1 Nobody knows what a "mature" working class in a liberal political system would have done had it come to power independently, because after Leninism took hold in Russia, the entire international system was transformed.
- Lenin criticized the theory, then current in some socialist circles, char revolutionary leadership must necessarily Fall mainly upon the shoulders of an extremely small intellectual force. "It is because we [in Russia] are backward." What Is To Be Done? (1319: 123-124).
Contentions Politics and Social Movements 19
When the theory of the vanguard was applied indiscriminately co the world Communist movement with little regard for social and political opportunities and constraints, the result was a weakening of Western social democracy and, in Italy and Central Europe, of democracy tout court. Some of the problems raised by Lenin's theory were addressed by one of his Western successors, Antonio Gramsci, who paid with his life for his mechanical adoption of Lenin's theory by Communist parties in the West.
Gramsci and Cultural Hegemony
When the Russian Revolution of 1977 failed to spread westward, European Marxists such as Gramsci realized that, at least in Western conditions, vanguard forms of organization would not be sufficient to raise a revolution. For Gramsci, it would be necessary to develop the workers' own consciousness, and he therefore conceived of the workers' movement as a "collective intellectual," one of whose prime tasks was to create a working-class culture. This was a subtle but important change from Leninism. Just as he had thought that Italy shared Russia's social conditions, Gramsci at first accepted Lenin's injunction that the revolutionary party had to be a vanguard. But after being clapped into Mussolini's prisons, he revised Lenin's organizational solution with two theorems: first, that a fundamental task of the party was to create a historic bloc of forces around the working class (7971: 768); and, second, that this could occur only if a cadre of "organic intellectuals" were developed from within the working class to complement the "traditional" intellectuals in the party leadership (pp. 6-23).
Both innovations turned out to hinge on a strong belief in the power of culture.3 Gramsci's solution to the cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie was to produce a countercultural consensus among workers, give them a capacity for talcing autonomous initiatives, and build bridges between them and other social formations. The process would be a long and a slow one, requiring the party to operate within the "trenches and fortifications" of bourgeois society, while proselytizing among nonproletarian groups and learning to deal with cultural institutions such as the Church.
But Gramsci's solution - as seen in the reformist turn taken by Italian Communists, who inherited his mantle after World War II - posed a new dilemma. If the party as a collective intellectual engaged in a long-term dialogue between the working class and bourgeois society, what would prevent the
3 In 1324, Gramsci wrote;
The error of the party has been to have accorded priority in an abstract fashion to the problem of organization, which in practice has simply meant creating an apparatus of functionaries who could be depended on for their orthodoxy towatds the official view.
See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971: LXI) i, where this passage is translated.
io Power in Movement j
cultural power of the latter - what Gramsci called "the common sense of j
capitalist society" - from transforming the party, rather than vice versa?'1 \
Without a theory of political mobilization, Gramsci's solution ignored the give- I
and-rake of politics. Gramsci did not provide a guide to how the battle within j
"the trenches and fortifications" of bourgeois society should be fought (1971: " i
22.9-2.39), nor did he differentiate between polities in which the opportunities \
and constraints would be strong or weak. However, he did provide a link from j
materialist Marxism to the constructivist turn in social movement studies of |
the 1980s and 1990s. !
Tilly's Polity Model J
Gramsci came of age during and after World War I and during the excitement ;j of the Russian Revolution. It would take the generation that came of age after World War II to transcend the vulgar Marxist idea that politics was merely part of the "superstructure," without autonomy of its own. Charles Tilly's work can stand as one such example. Coming from under the Marxian umbrella of his great teacher, Barrington Moore Jr. (1965), Tilly was equally influenced by British Marxists such as E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm and by French social historians such as Fernand Braudel. Although Tilly's first book, The Vendee (1964), began from the classical Marxian premise that structural variables such as urbanization shape contention, his attention soon shifted to the importance of state structure and to state strategic imperatives (Tilly 1986; 1990). Foremost among these imperatives were the processes of war making, state building, and extraction, which led to "white-hot bargaining" between rulers and ordinary people. Early on, Tilly proposed the static "polity model" of relations among rulers, insiders, and outsiders (1978) that is reproduced in Figure 1.1. This model would guide his work for the next two decades. Later, he would substitute for it the "relational realism" that will be presented later in this book.
Summing Up
Each of these theorists - Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, and Tilly - emphasized a different element of collective action:
• Marx focused on the cleavages of capitalist society that created a mobilization potential without specifying the mechanisms that led particular workers in specific settings to revolt.
• Lenin created the movement organization that was necessary to structure this mobilization potential and prevent its dispersion into narrow trade union
4 This was a special danger on the periphery of the working-class parry, among the middle class and the peasantry. See Stephen Hellman, "The PCI's Alliance Strategy and the Case of the Middle Class" (1975) and Sidney Tarrow, Peasant Communism in Southern Italy (1967). |
Contentions Politics and Social Movements
Challenger Polity
figure 1,1. Tilly's Simple Polity Model. Source: Doug McAdam et al., Dynamics of Contention, p. 11. Copyright €> 2001 Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with permission.
claims but lodged the mechanism of mobilization in an elite of revolutionaries.
• Gramsci centered on the need to build consensus around the party's goals but failed to specify the political conditions in which resource-poor and exploited workers could be expected to mobilize on behalf of their interests.
• The early Tilly focused on those political conditions but in a largely static way.
Contemporary social scientists - mainly sociologists and political scientists, with an assist from economists - beginning in the 1970s, have begun to propose solutions to these problems.
SOCIAL SCIENTISTS, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, AND COLLECTIVE ACTION
Although the parallels are seldom made explicit, these four elements in classical social movement theory are the sources of four recent traditions in the study of collective action and social movements:
• Without sharing Marx's fixation on class, collective behavior theorists of the 1950s and early 1960s focused on the grievances responsible for mobilization and saw them stemming from underlying structural strains.
Power in Movement
Contentions Politics and Social Movements
' Without sharing Lenin's belief in an elite vanguard, resource mobilization theorists of the late 1960s and the 1370s concentrated on leadership and organization.
• Like Gramsci, framing and collective identity theorists of the 1980s and 1990s focused on the sources of consensus in a movement.
• From the 1970s on, political process theorists followed Tilly's lead in focusing on the political opportunities and constraints that structure contentious politics.
Let us briefly examine how these four schools of thought emerged in recent social science and what they each contribute to our understanding of contentious politics and social movements today.
Grievances and Collective Behavior Theory
Perhaps because they saw social movements from a mainly social-psychological standpoint, American sociologists took a long time to develop a politically connected view of social movements. For many years, in fact, they conceived of movements as the result of "strain," seeing them largely outside the normal institutions of society as part of a construct that came to be called "collective behavior."5 Collective behavior theory posited that movements were little more than the most well-organized and most self-conscious part of an archipelago of "emergent" phenomena, ranging from fads and rumors, to collective enthusiasms, riots, movements, and revolutions, "While political scientists focused on interest groups as "normal" parts of the political process, collective behavior theorists saw movements as exceptions to normal political processes - virtually as part of abnormal psychology.
In some versions of the theory (e.g., see Kornhauser 1959), society itself was seen to be disoriented, and mobilization resulted from the urge to recompose it. This was sometimes linked to Emile Durkheim's theory, in which individuals -unhinged from their traditional roles and identities - join social movements to escape the anomie of a "mass society" (Dürkheim 1951; also see Hoffer 1951). Other versions (e.g., Gurr 1971) included no overall vision of breakdown, but individual deprivation was at the center of analysis. The most sophisticated versions of the theory linked collective behavior to a functional view of society in which societal dysfunctions produce different forms of collective behavior -some of which took the form of political movements and interest groups (Smelser 1962.; Turner and Killian 1972.),
Unlike Marx, who used a mechanistic class theory to predict which collectivities could be expected to mobilize at what stages of capitalism, collective behavior theorists had no preferred social subject. But like Marx, though for
1 I will not attempt to summarize this school here, but refer the reader to Doug McAdam's synthesis in Chapter 1 of his The PoliticalTrocess and the Development of Black Insurgency (1999 [1982.]), For a somewhat more sympathetic account of "strain" and "breakdown" theories, see Buechler (2004).
different reasons, they tended to underspeciiy the mobilization process. And because they started from the assumption that collective behavior was outside the routines of everyday life, few specified its relationship to the political. This may be why few variants of collective behavior theory retained their popularity after the spectacular cycle of protest of the 1960s, which had an intimate relationship to politics (see Chapter 9).
Rational Choice and Resource Mobilization
Both in Western Europe and in the United States, the decade of the 1960s revitalized the study of social movements. All shifts in scholarly focus depend in some way on the historical conditions in which they emerge. Marx's model of class conflict was deeply marked by the emergence of capitalist enterprise in England; the interest of scholars in the collective behavior tradition with alienation and anomie was influenced by the horrors of Stalinism and fascism; in the 1960s, a new generation of scholars, many of them associated with Civil Rights or antiwar movements, saw social movements through a new, more positive lens. For former movement activists and those who studied them, Marx's theory of the proletariat producing a revolution, and the collective behavior theorists' image of "true believers" searching for roots in an atomized society, were difficult to reconcile with the determined young activists - most of them from the middle class - mobilizing in the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements (Keniston 1968).
The study of contentious politics was also affected by trends in the academy, where economics was emerging as the "master" social science. In the traces of microeconomics, for many scholars the problem for collective action came to be seen not as how classes struggle and states rule, but as how collective action is even possible among individuals guided by narrow economic self-interest. The most influential student of this dilemma was the American economist Mancur Olson.
For Olson and those influenced by him (DeNardo 1985), the problem of collective action was a parallel to marketing: how to attract as high a proportion of a group as possible on behalf of its collective good. Only in this way could the group convince its opponents of its own strength. In his classic book, The Logic of Collective Action (1965), Olson posited that, in a large group, only its most important members have a sufficient interest in its collective good to take on its leadership - not quite Lenin's "vanguard," but not far from it. The only exception to this rule is seen in small groups in which the individual good and the collective good are closely associated (pp. 43ff.).6 The larger the group, the more people will prefer to "free ride" on the efforts of the individuals whose
6 The problem of the size of the group has exercised a great fascination among scholars in both public goods and game theoretic traditions. See John Chamberlin's "Provision of Collective Goods as a Function of Group Size," Russell Hardin's Collective Action (1982.: Chapter 3), and Gerald Marwell and Pam Oliver's The Critical Mass in Collective Action: A
2.4 Power in Movement
interest in the collective good is strong enough to pursue it.7 To overcome this problem, Olson posited that would-be leaders must either impose constraints on their members or provide them with "selective incentives" to convince them that participation is worthwhile (p. 51).
Olson's reception into the study of contentious politics was slow and uneven." This is in part because of the irony that, during a decade in which contentious politics was buzzing and blooming, he focused on why it is unlikely (Hirschman 1982). Moreover, Olson seemed to limit the motivations for collective action to material and personal incentives and lacked a theory of participation (Klander-mans 2004}. But what of the thousands of people who were striking, marching, rioting, and demonstrating on behalf of interests other than their own? Finally, though he named his theory "collective action," Olson had little to say beyond the aggregation of individuals by preexisting organizers.
How could Olson's collective action problem be reconciled with the flourishing movements of the 1960s? Two sociologists, John McCarthy and Mayer Zald, proposed an answer that focused on the resources that are increasingly available to people and groups in advanced industrial societies (1973; 1977). McCarthy and Zald agreed with Olson that the collective action problem was real, but argued that the expanded personal resources, professionalization, and external financial support available to movements in such societies provide a solution - professional movement organizations.8
While the earlier generation of scholars had focused on the "why" of collective action, McCarthy and Zald's theory - resource mobilization - fastened on the means available to collective actors - on its "how" (Melucci 1988). This emphasis on means was a disappointment to critics looking for deep structural explanations for the origins of movements, but it lent a refreshing concrete-ness to the study of movements. For McCarthy and Zald, a rational answer to Olson's paradox of the free rider lay in organization. By the early 1980s, their theory of resource mobilization by organizations had become a dominant background paradigm for sociologists studying social movements.
But McCarthy and Zald's emphasis on the "solution" of professional movement organizations seemed to ignore that many of the new movements of the 1960s and 1970s lacked formal organization when they emerged (Evans and Boyte 1992; McAdam 1999 [1982]). And in a decade in which many scholars were beginning to take what came to be called "the cultural turn," many younger scholars found a paradigmatic alternative to organization in
Micro-Social Theory (1993- Chapter 3), which demonstrate theoretically that the size of the group is not the critical variable that Olson thought it was.
7 Thus, for Olson, General Motors has enough of an interest in the collective good of American auto production to take on the leadership of all domestic car producers, including those that are too small to rake action on their own. If enough members of the group take a free ride, not only are the leaders' efforts to no avail - their efforts themselves will induce free riding.
a It is no surprise that Zald's dissertation and first book (1970) dealt with the formation, transformation, and politics of the YMCA. For an updated account of resource mobilization, see Edwards and McCarthy (1004).
f Contentious Politics and Social Movements 2.5
: culture, which began to emerge as a countermodel to resource mobilization
; (Williams 2004). For these critics, McCarthy and Zald took no account of
I emotion, focused far too much on formal organization, and left grievances out
J of their equation. By the 1980s, an alternative model, emphasizing movement
i decentralization, informal participation, and grassroots democracy, began to
I arise (Fantasia 1988; Rosenthal and Schwartz T989).
j
j Cultures of Contention
Ilf the emphasis of the collective behavior paradigm on grievances recalled Marx, and if the focus of resource mobilization on leadership was a sequel to Lenin's organizational theory, this new turn was resonant of Gramsci's interest . I in culture. Just as the Italian theorist had added a cultural dimension to Lenin's
j concept of class hegemony, culturalist writers have tried to shift the focus
:j of research on social movements from structural factors to the framing, the
I discourse, and the emotions in collective action. It is interesting to note that the
J earliest hint of a paradigm shift came from a Marxist - from E.P. Thompson's
I enculturation of the concept of class (1966).
I Thompson did not want to throw class out the window, but only to substi-
[ tute for the materialist version of Marxism a focus on class se//-creation. This
.j took him far from the factory floor - to factors like custom, grain seizures,
j and consumer mentalities (1971). He invented the culturally enriched concept
j of "the moral economy" to indicate that people do not revolt in mechanical
response to grievances, but only when such grievances are empowered by a sense of injustice. This links Thompson's work to the more theoretically self-conscious "cultural turn" in recent social history (e.g., see Steinberg 1999) and to the "constructivist turn" in American political science (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998).
I Thompson had used eighteenth century grain seizures to illustrate a basically
I Marxian theory, but the idea of a moral economy of protest had more general
resonance with the cultural turn that was simultaneously percolating into social movement studies from anthropology, social psychology, and cultural history. For example, his emphasis on meaning was appropriated by an anthropologically gifted political scientist, James Scott (1976), who adapted Thompson's concept of the moral economy to study the reaction of subsistence peasants in Southeast Asia to the strains of commercialization.9 Scott's work went well beyond the subject of social movements and resonated with the experiences of scholars and activists in the global South (Scott and Kerkvliet, eds. 1986).
Another influence came from social psychology. First from Erving Goff-man's concept of framing (1974), anc> tnen fr°m Bert Klanderman's concept of "consensus mobilization" (1988; 1997), and from William Gamson's idea
' Scott went on to apply his thinking to peasant resistance in general, in his Weapons of the Weak (1985), before turning to the culturalist formulation of what he called "hidden transcripts" (1990).
2.6
Power in Movement
Contentious Politics and Social Movements
of "ideological packages" (1988), scholars began to examine how individuals construct their participation in movements. From assuming grievances, scholars of social movements now began to focus 011 how movements embed concrete grievances within emotion-laden "packages" {Gamson 1992.), or in "frames" capable of convincing participants that their cause is just and important. While " Goffman's work had focused on how individuals frame their actions, David Snow and his collaborators began work on the "framing" of collective action (Snow et al. 1986; Snow 2.004).
A third influence came from the constructivist turn in history, with its roots I in French social theory. Here the key figure was Michel Foucault, who was " concerned with resistance to the overall structure of power in society. "Fou- • cault," in Kate Nash's summary, suggested that "we begin to study power by • studying resistance," by which he meant the anti-authority struggles of social [ movements. In particular, he thinks social movements are engaged in struggles ', against the imposition of identity. The construction of subjectivity by those who tell us the "truth" of who we are... is at the same time a subjection to the power they exercise" (Nash 2000: 3; Foucault 2.000). Influenced by Foucault was the work of historical sociologist Marc Steinberg on the eighteenth century transformation of working class ideology and action (1999).
Culturally sensitive work in the 1980s and 1990s also came out of the once resolutely structuralist field of comparative revolution, first in John Foran's Fragile Resistance: Social Transformation in Iran from ijoo to the Revolution (I993 )> then in Mark Selbin's Modem Latin American Revolutions (1993), and finally in Jeff Goodwin's No Other Way Out (aooi). These authors attempted to transcend the dominant structuralist trope that had dominated the study of revolution since Marx, in bold attempts to bring agency centrally into its study.10
To some degree, all movements construct meanings (Eyerman and Jamison i99r). But if this is the case, skeptics have asked, why do waves of movements emerge in some periods and not in others, and why are some movements more adept at manipulating cultural symbols than others (Tarrow 1992)? Without answers to these questions, cukuralism might prove just as static a meta-narrative as the structuralism its proponents wished to displace. To this dilemma, political scientists and politically attuned sociologists proposed an answer: variations in political structure and in the workings of the political process. :
The Political Process Model j
Inspired by the rise of contentious politics in the Civil Rights movement, American scholars were first to develop a more political approach to move- I ments, one that eventually centered on several versions of the concept that came j
I
10 When it came to the Iranian revolution, even a committed structuralist, Theda Skocpal, had I to admit the importance of culture. See her essay "Rentier State and Shi'a Islam in the Iranian j Revolution" in her Social Revolutions in the Modern World (1994).
to be known as "political opportunity structure."11 The foundation stone in this tradition was laid by Tilly, in his rgy8 classic, From Mobilization to Revolution.1- In this book, Tilly elaborated a set of conditions for mobilization, foremost among which were opportunity/threat to challengers and facilitation/repression by authorities (Chapters 3, 4, 6). Just as important in the United States was the path-breaking work of Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, in Regulating the Poor (1971) and Poor People's Movements (1977). They questioned the orthodox idea of Marxists such as Eric Hobsbawm that organizational leadership was the key to movement success, and they offered the clearest account of disruption in the literature on protest (1977: Chapter 1), which they considered the key to effective pressure on elites.
Tilly had argued that the development of the national social movement was concomitant, and mutually interdependent, with the rise in consolidated national states (1984b). It followed that movements could be studied only in connection with politics, and that they would vary in their strategy, structure, and success in different lands of states. This was an insight that students of social revolution, such as Theda Skocpol (1979), were also exploring, and that comparativists in political science were quick to pick up on (Kitschelt 19 8 6; Kriesi et al. 1995; Tarrow 1989).
Given his grounding in European social history, Tilly's model appeared resolutely structural - at least until the 1990s. But Americanists' models were more rooted in the intricacies of the political process. Political scientists such as Michael Lipsky (1968) and Peter Eisinger (1973) focused on American urban politics, with the former linking the urban movements of the 1960s to the use of protest as a political resource, and the latter correlating protest with various measures of local opportunity. In a similar vein, Piven and Cloward turned their attention to the historical relations between welfare and social protest (1993). But it was a sociologist, Doug McAdam, who synthesized these approaches into a fully fledged "political process model" of social movement mobilization by tracing the development of the American Civil Rights movement to political, organizational, and consciousness change (1999 [1982]).
While opportunity/threat and facilitation/repression were parts of the original Tillian synthesis, political process theorists tended to narrow their attention to opportunities and forget about threats. Some scholars - in Eisinger's footsteps - studied how different political structures provide greater or lesser degrees of opportunity to insurgent groups (Amenta et al. 1992.; Kitschelt 1986); others looked at how particular movements exploit opportunities provided by institutions (Costain 1992); others examined how the opportunities of a particular movement change over time (Jenkins and Perrow 1977); still
11 See the excellent survey in Kriesi {1004). The source of these ideas was of course Tilly's foundational work in the 15705. The main steps in the development of this concept were provided by Eisinger (1973), Kitschelt (1586), Kriesi et al. (1995), McAdam (1599 [1982.D, Piven and Cloward (1977), Tarrow (1989), and Amenta (ioo^J.
11 Tilly's theory of collective action has gone through several permutations since then, some of which will he outlined later in this volume. For an outline of his fundamental contributions to this field, see my review article, "Charles Tilly and the Practice of Contentious Politics" (2.008}.
iS Power in Movement 1
others studied entire cycles of protest to understand how triggering of a wave of J mobilization affects successor movements (Koopmans 2.004; McAdam 1995; Tarrow 1989a).
As these works progressed, lacunae and ambiguities began to appear.13 For example, political process models were almost always lodged in the democratic" West. The perspective began to be systematically applied elsewhere only in the 1990s (Brockets 1991 and 1995; Boudreau 1996; O'Brien and Li 2006; O'Brien, ed. 2,008), Schneider 1995). A second question - whether repression has a positive or a negative impact on movement formation - only began to be explored in the 1990s, with a series of works inspired by Donatella della Porta (1995 and 1996; della Porta et al. 1998; della Porta and Kllieule 2004). Third, while some scholars (McAdam 1996; Tarrow 1996b) worked from a limited list of dimensions of opportunity, as more and more aspects of the links between politics and movement formation emerged, the concept tended to balloon (see Gamson and Meyer's critique 1996).
Most important, the political process model was not really about the process of contention because most of its practitioners (including this author) failed to specify the mechanisms that connect different elements in the model to one another. Although it was refreshing to move beyond the macrostructural approach of a Marx, a Lenin, or a Gramsci, how contentious actors interacted with each other and with others remained implicit in the model, rather than explicitly specified. Concerted efforts to put die political processes of contention in motion through the specification of their component mechanisms had to await the first decade of this century (see Chapter 9).
Nevertheless, the political process/opportunities approach proposed an answer to the questions that had dogged previous approaches: Why does contentious politics seem to develop only in particular periods of history? Why does it sometimes produce robust social movements and sometimes flicker out into sectarianism or repression? And why do movements take different forms in different political environments? It eventually emerged that the political process model cannot claim to explain every aspect of contentious politics or social movements and is best seen not as a theory, but as a framework in which to examine the dynamics of contention. But this is possible only through synthesis with insights from other branches of social movement theory, as I will argue below.
TOWARD A SYNTHESIS
The most forceful argument of this study will be that people engage in contentious politics when patterns of political opportunities and constraints
13 For a sensitive critique from the inside, see Gamson and Meyer, "Framing Political Opportunity" (1996). For a robust attack on political opportunity theory, see Jeff Goodwin and j James Jasper, "Caught in a Winding, Snarling, Vine: A Critique of Political Process Theory" in their edited book, Rethinking Social Movements (2004), in which, to their credit, they invited responses from adherents of the approach, including the present author.
Contentious Politics and Social Movements 2.9
change, and then by strategically employing a repertoire of collective action, creating new opportunities, which are used by others in widening cycles of contention. When their struggles revolve around broad cleavages in society; when they bring people together around inherited cultural symbols; and when they can build on - or construct - dense social networks and connective structures, these episodes of contention result in sustained interactions with opponents in social movements. Because each of these four elements is the topic of a chapter in Part H of this book, a brief introduction should suffice here.
The Repertoire of Contention
People do not simply "act collectively." They vote, petition, assemble, strike, march, occupy premises, obstruct traffic, set fires, and attack others with intent to do bodily harm (Taylor and Van Dyke 1004). No less than in the case of religious rituals or civic celebrations, contentious politics is not born out of organizers' heads but is culturally inscribed and socially communicated. The learned conventions of contention are part of a society's public culture.14 Social movements are repositories of knowledge of particular routines in a society's history, which helps them to overcome the deficits in resources and communication typically found among disorganized people (Kertzer 1988: 104ft.).
Because social movements seldom possess either Olson's selective incentives or constraints over followers, movement leadership has a creative function in selecting forms of collective action that people will respond to. Leaders invent, adapt, and combine various forms of contention to gain support from people who might otherwise stay at home. Economist Albert Hirschman had something like this in mind when he complained that Olson regarded collective action only as a cost - when to many it is a benefit (1982.: 82—91). For people whose lives are mired in drudgery and desperation, the offer of an exciting, risky, and possibly beneficial campaign of collective action may be an incentive in itself.
Forms of contention can be common or rare, habitual or unfamiliar, solitary or part of concerted campaigns. They can be linked to themes that are inscribed in the culture or invented on the spot or - more commonly - can blend elements of convention with new frames of meaning. Protest is a resource, according to political scientist Michael Lipslcy (1968). Forms of contention are themselves a collective incentive for some people under some circumstances to challenge opponents, drawing on incentives that undergird their networks of trust and solidarity (Tilly 2.005b).
Particular groups have a particular history - and memory — of contention. Workers know how to strike because generations of workers struck before
1,1 The concept first appears in Tilly's From Mobilization to Revolution (1978: Chapter 6), again in his "Speaking Your Mind Without Elections, Surveys or Social Movements" (1983), and then in his The Contentions French (1986: Chapter 1). The culmination of his research on the repertoire, published after his death in zooS, is his book Contentious Performances.
30 Power in Movement
them; Parisians build barricades because barricades are inscribed in the history of Parisian contention; peasants seize the land carrying the symbols that their fathers and grandfathers used in the past. Political scientists Stuart Hill and Donald Rothchild put it this way:
Based an past periods of conflict with a particular group(s) or the government, individuals construct a prototype of a protest or riot that describes what to do in particular circumstances as well as explaining a rationale for this action (1391: 13a).
These are the issues that will be taken up in Chapter 5. Networks and Mobilizing Structures
Although it is individuals who decide whether to take up collective action, it is in their face-to-face groups, their social networks, and the connective structures between them that collective action is most often activated and sustained (Diani 1004; Diani and McAdam, eds. 1004). This has been made clear through recent research both in the laboratory13 and in the real world of movement mobilization. In the collective behavior approach, the tendency was to see isolated, deprived individuals as the main actors in collective action. But by the early 1980s, scholars were finding that it is life within groups that transforms the potential for action into social movements.16 It is not "groupness" itself that induces mobilization but the normative pressures and solidary incentives that are encoded within networks, and out of which movements emerge and are sustained.
Institutions are particularly economical "host" settings in which movements can germinate. This was particularly true in estate societies such as
IS Experimental researchers were also learning about the importance of social incentives for cooperation. In an ingenious piece of research, Gamson and his collaborators showed that a supportive group environment was essential for triggering individuals' willingness to speak out against unjust authority - authority that they might well tolerate if they faced it on their own (Gamson et al. 1981). Similarly, when Robyn Dawes and his associates carried out a series of experiments on collective choice, they found that neither egoistic motives nor internalized norms were as powerful in producing collective action as "the parochial one of contributing to one's group of fellow humans" (Dawes etal. 1988:96). In social dilemma situations, they argue in their article "Not Me or Thee But We" as follows: "people immediately start discussing what 'we' should do, and spend a grear deal of time and effort to persuade others in their own group to cooperate (or defect!), even in situations where these others' behavior is irrelevant to the speaker's own payoffs" (p. 94).
15 For example, McAdam's work on the "Freedom Summer" campaign showed that —far more than their social background or ideologies - it was the social networks in which Freedom Summer applicants were embedded that played a key role in determining who would participate in this campaign and who would stay at home (McAdam: 1986; 1988). At the same time, European scholars such as Hanspeter Kriesi (1988) were finding rhar movement subcultures were the reservoirs in which collective action took shape. This dovetailed with what sociologist Alberto Melucci (1989; 1996: Chapter 4) was learning about the role of movement networks in defining the collective identity of the movements he studied in Italy.
I Contentions Politics and Social Movements 3 r
i pre-revolutionary France, where the provincial Parliaments provided institu-
i tional spaces where liberal ideas could take hold (Egret 1977). But it is also
I true in America today. For instance, sociologist Aldon Morris showed that
1 the origins of the Civil Rights movement were bound up with the role of
j black churches (1984). And political scientist Mary Katzenstein found that the
I internal structures of the Catholic world were unwitting accomplices in the
I formation of networks of dissident religious women (1998; also see Levine
j 199° and Tarrow 1988). Movements that can appropriate such institutions
I for their own purposes are more likely to succeed than are those that create
new organizational niches (McAdam et al. 2.001). The role of organizations and networks in the process of mobilization will be examined in Chapter 6.
Constructing Contention
The coordination of collective action depends on the trust and cooperation that are generated among participants by shared understandings and identities, or, f to use a broader category, on the collective action frames that justify, dignify,
and animate collective action. Ideology, as David Apter wrote in his classic essay in Ideology and Discontent, dignifies discontent, identifies a target for grievances, and forms an umbrella over the discrete grievances of overlapping groups (1964).
But "ideology" is a rather narrow way of describing the mixture of precon-( ceptions, emotions, and interests that move people to action. In recent years,
I students of social movements have begun to use terms such as cognitive frames,
ideological packages, and cultural discourses to describe the shared meanings i that inspire people to collective action.17 Whatever the terminology, rather than
regarding ideology as a superimposed intellectual category, or as the automatic result of grievances, these scholars agree in seeing that movements take on passionate "framing work" (e.g., shaping grievances into broader and more resonant claims) (Snow and Benford 198S), stimulating what William Gamson I calls "hot cognitions" around them (1992),
Framing relates to the generalization of a grievance and defines the "us" and "them" in a movement's structure of conflict and alliances. By drawing on inherited collective identities and shaping new ones, challengers delimit the boundaries of their prospective constituencies and define their enemies by their real or imagined attributes and evils. They do this through the images they project of both enemies and allies, as much as through the content of their ideological messages (Snow 2004). This requires paying attention to the
Some of the main sources are collected in Bert Klandermans, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Sidney Tarrow, eds., From Structure to Action (1988), and in Aldon Morris and Carol Mueller, eds., Frontiers of Social Movement Research (1991). For an ingenious use of frame analysis to examine the ideas of ordinary American citizens, see William Gamson's Talking Politics (1991b).
32- Power in Movement
"costumes" of collective actors as they appear on the public stage, as well as to the ideological framing of their claims. This we will attempt to do in Chapter 7.
While movement organizers actively engage in framing work, not all framing takes place under their auspices or control. In addition to building on inherited cultural understandings, they compete with the framing that goes on' through the media, which transmit messages that movements must attempt to shape and influence (Gamson 2.004). As sociologist Todd Gitlin found, much of the communication that helped shape the American New Left in the 1960s passed through the media, in the place of what would have had to be organizational efforts in earlier periods (1980). The new media that have exploded since the 1990s complicate but do not neutralize the influence of the media's framing capacity. Through the Internet, various forms of social networking, and personal media, individuals and groups have gained a capacity to "make the news" that far outstrips the ability of traditional print and visual media to shape collective action, as we will also see in Chapter 7.
State actors are constantly framing issues to gain support for their policies or to contest the meanings placed in public space by movements - indeed, they may take opposing sides in disputes over framing. In the struggle over meanings in which movements are constantly engaged, it is rare that they do not suffer a disadvantage in competition with states, which not only control the means of repression but have at their disposal important instruments for meaning construction. The struggle between states and movements takes place not only in the streets, but in contests over meaning (Melucci 1996; Rochon 1998).
Political Opportunities and Threats
Earlier, I argued that neither Marxist nor culturalist theorists can answer the question of why movements emerge in some periods and not in others, or why some movements prove more adept at manipulating cultural symbols than others. In the political process model sketched above, a key set of mechanisms that help to explain these variations is found in the political opportunities and threats to which movement actors respond.
• By political opportunities, I mean consistent - but not necessarily formal, permanent, or national - sets of clues that encourage people to engage in contentious politics.
• By threats, I mean those factors - repression, but also the capacity of authorities to present a solid front to insurgents - that discourage contention.
No simple formula can predict when contentious politics will emerge, both because the specification of these variables varies in different historical and political circumstances, and because different factors may vary in opposing directions. As a result, the term political opportunity structure should be understood not as an invariant model inevitably producing a social movement but as
Contentions Politics and Social Movements 33
a set of clues for when contentious politics will emerge and will set in motion a chain of causation that may ultimately lead to sustained interaction with authorities and thence to social movements.
The concept of political opportunity emphasizes resources external to the group. Unlike money or power, these can be taken advantage of by even weak or disorganized challengers but in no way "belong" to them. In Chapter 8, I will argue that contentious politics emerges when ordinary citizens, sometimes encouraged by leaders, perceive opportunities that lower the costs of collective action, reveal potential allies, show where elites and authorities are most vulnerable, and trigger social networks and collective identities into action around common themes. Political opportunities are also shaped by features of the political system that, in turn, shape patterns of interaction between movements and political parties. And at the most general level, as I will argue in Chapter 8, opportunities and constraints are shaped by political regimes.
Similar to Hanspeter ICriesi and his collaborators (1995), I will argue that state structures and political cleavages create relatively stable opportunities (the most obvious of which are forms of access to institutions and the capacity for repression). But it is the changing opportunities and threats and the capacity of actors to take advantage of the former that provide the openings that lead them to engage in contentious politics. Whether contention ripens into social movements depends on how people act collectively; on the mobilization of consensus; and on actors' ability to create or to appropriate mobilizing structures.
To summarize what will have to be shown in greater detail in later chapters: Contentious politics is produced when threats are experienced and opportunities are perceived, when the existence of available allies is demonstrated, and when the vulnerability of opponents is exposed. Contention crystallizes challengers into a social movement when it taps into embedded social networks and connective structures and produces vivid collective action frames and supportive identities able to sustain contention against powerful opponents. By mounting familiar forms of contention, movements become focal points that transform external opportunities into resources. Repertoires of contention, social networks, and cultural frames lower the costs of bringing people into collective action, induce confidence that they are not alone, and give broader meaning to their claims. Together, these four sets of factors trigger the dynamic processes that have made social movements historically central actors in political and social change.
THE DYNAMICS OF MOVEMENT
Part HI of the book will turn to the essentially relational nature of contentious politics. Unlike the classical political process approach, it will argue that we cannot predict the outcome of any episode of contention by focusing on what a single social movement does at a given moment in time. Challengers must be
34
Power in Movement
seen in relation to those they challenge and to influential allies, third parties, and the forces of order, in the context of the specific type of regime in which they operate (Tilly 2.006).
Chapter 9 specifies some of the key mechanisms and processes through which challengers interact with opponents, allies, third parties, and institutions. But these interactive dynamics will be visible only through examination of more or less extended trajectories of contention, to which I turn in Chapter 10. That chapter, which ranges from relatively pacific protest cycles to fully fledged revolutions, will focus on how varied groups of people mobilize at once and on how contention diffuses through campaigns and coalitions. It will also touch on a too-little-studied process of contentious politics: how and why these same people demobilize.
Chapter 11 turns from the dynamics of cycles to the outcomes of cycles of contention. In such general episodes of contention, policy elites respond not to the claims of any individual group or movement, but to the overall degree of turbulence and to the demands made by elites and opinion groups, which only partially correspond to the demands of those they claim to represent. That is why Chapter 11 has the paradoxical title "Struggling to Reform" -because individual movements almost never satisfy their largest ambitions. The important point is that, although movements usually conceive of themselves as outside of and opposed to institutions, acting collectively inserts them into complex political networks, and thus within the reach of the state.
Movements - and particularly waves of movement that are the main catalysts of social change - cannot be detached from national struggles for power. But in the last decade or so, a number of protest campaigns have clearly transcended national boundaries. What do they portend for contentious politics and, more broadly, for the shape of the future international system? Chapter 12 will employ the approach developed in the book to examine complex interactions between insiders and outsiders in the world polity.
The book closes by raising questions about three major issues in the study of contentious politics: First, how do movements interact with institutions, particularly electoral institutions; second, what about the "warring movements" that threaten the peace and stability of ordinary people; and, third, is the world becoming a "movement society," one in which the line between institutional and unruly politics is increasingly erased, or is the threat of transgressive contention producing ever more repressive states?
PART I
I THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN SOCIAL MOVEMENT
-1
1
■I
%