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When do protest organizations borrow issues or claims that are outside their traditional domains? Sociologists have examined the consequences of borrowing claims across movement boundaries, but not the antecedents of doing so. We argue that movement boundaries are strong when there is consensus about the core claims of a social movement, which we measure by cohesion and focus. Cohesion and focus enhance the legitimacy of a movement and impede member organizations from adopting claims associated with other movements. Analyzing movement organizational activity at U.S.-based protest events from 1960 to 1995, we find that a social movement organization is less likely to adopt claims from other movements when the social movement in which it is embedded exhibits high cohesion and focus. However, when movement organizations do borrow claims, they are more likely to do so by borrowing from movements that themselves exhibit high cohesion and focus. We describe the application of our findings to organization theory, social movements, and field theoretic approaches to understanding social action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combining ethnographic and statistical methods, this study identifies interlocking mechanisms that help explain how disadvantaged neighborhoods influence their residents’ political capacity. Support systems that arise in low-income neighborhoods promote social interaction that helps people make ends meet, but these systems also expose residents to heavy doses of adversity, which dampens perceptions of collective political capacity. For the poorest residents of these neighborhoods in particular, the expected positive effect of informal social support is suppressed by the negative effect of perceived trauma. These findings present a micro-level account of poverty, social interaction, and political capacity, one that holds implications for scholarship and public policy on participatory inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on Karl Mannheim's theory of generations, this address argues that U.S. Millennials comprise a new political generation with lived experiences and worldviews that set them apart from their elders. Not only are they the first generation of "digital natives," but, although they are more educated than any previous U.S. generation, they face a labor market in which precarity is increasingly the norm. And despite proclamations to the contrary, they confront persistent racial and gender disparities, discrimination against sexual minorities, and widening class inequality--all of which they understand in the framework of "intersectionality." This address analyzes the four largest social movements spearheaded by college-educated Millennials: the young undocumented immigrant "Dreamers," the 2011 Occupy Wall Street uprising, the campus movement protesting sexual assault, and the Black Lives Matter movement. All four reflect the distinctive historical experience of the Millennial generation, but they vary along two cross-cutting dimensions: (1) the social characteristics of activists and leaders, and (2) the dominant modes of organization and strategic repertoires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What drives local decisions to prohibit industrial land uses? This study examines the passage of municipal ordinances prohibiting gas development using hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in New York State. I argue that local action against fracking depended on multiple conceptions of the shale gas industry. Matching these alternative conceptions with prevailing spatial models of public response to industrial land uses—“not in my backyard,” “not in anyone’s backyard,” and “please in my backyard”—improves our understanding of where local contention might emerge and how it contributes to policy change. Results from event history and logistic regression analyses show, first, that communities lying above favorable areas of the shale did not pass anti-fracking laws because opposition to fracking was counteracted by significant local support for development. Fracking bans passed primarily in a geographic sweet spot on the periphery of targeted regions, where little or no compelling economic interest in development existed. Second, as fracking became the subject of a highly politicized national debate, local opposition increasingly reflected mobilization by political liberals. This trend is reflected in the increasing rate of ordinance adoption among Democratic-leaning communities outside the geographic sweet spot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement researchers argue that tactical innovation occurs as a response to changes external to movements, such as police repression and shifts in political authority, or is due to internal movement processes, such as the characteristics of movement organizations and actors. In this study, we locate the roots of tactical innovation in the multiplicity of movement claims articulated at protest events. With data on more than 23,000 protest events that took place in the United States between 1960 and 1995, we develop novel measures of two forms of tactical innovation and the relationships between protest event claims. Our results show that multi-issue protest events are more likely to use novel recombinations of tactics, and protest events with more peripheral movement claims tend to introduce new protest tactics. Our approach brings together work on social movement dynamics, innovation, and field theoretic approaches to theorize about the relationship between the tools and content of activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why is there no labor party in the United States? This question has had deep implications for U.S. politics and social policy. Existing explanations use “reflection” models of parties, whereby parties reflect preexisting cleavages or institutional arrangements. But a comparison with Canada, whose political terrain was supposedly more favorable to labor parties, challenges reflection models. Newly compiled electoral data show that underlying social structures and institutions did not affect labor party support as expected: support was similar in both countries prior to the 1930s, then diverged. To explain this, I propose a modified “articulation” model of parties, emphasizing parties’ role in assembling and naturalizing political coalitions within structural constraints. In both cases, ruling party responses to labor and agrarian unrest during the Great Depression determined which among a range of possible political alliances actually emerged. In the United States, FDR used the crisis to mobilize new constituencies. Rhetorical appeals to the “forgotten man” and policy reforms absorbed some farmer and labor groups into the New Deal coalition and divided and excluded others, undermining labor party support. In Canada, mainstream parties excluded farmer and labor constituencies, leaving room for the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) to organize them into a third-party coalition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we use comparative historical analysis to explain agenda-setting and the timing of policy outcomes on same-sex marriage in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Unlike the United States and Canada, Australia does not have a bill of rights, making litigation to obtain rights not enumerated in existing legislation unavailable to activists. Extending the literatures on the development of public policy and on political and historical institutionalism, we argue that in the absence of domestic opportunities for legal change, international law becomes more important to activists in wealthy democracies, but it is contingent on states’ specific institutional and cultural features. Even when international law is “domesticated” into national political structures, it is still secondary to internal conditions in countries with extensive rights-based polities. International law may set a political agenda, but once introduced, policies move according to internal conditions related to party discipline, the centralization of courts, and policy legacies within those countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do police treat religious-based protest events differently than secular ones? Drawing on data from more than 15,000 protest events in the United States (1960 to 1995) and using quantitative methods, we find that law enforcement agents were less likely to show up at protests when general religious actors, actions, or organizations were present. Rather than reflecting privileged legitimacy, we find that this protective effect is explained by religious protesters’ use of less threatening tactics at events. When religion is disaggregated into different traditions, only mainline and black Protestant groups have lower rates of policing than secular groups. As with the general religion finding, the buffering effect these traditions have on policing is mediated by protester tactics. Moreover, we find that fundamentalist Christians are more likely to be policed than are secular activists when threatening tactics are included. Finally, when actors associated with non-Christian religions engage in extremely confrontational tactics, they are more likely to provoke a police response than are similarly behaving secular groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship highlights the importance of public discourse for the mobilization and impact of social movements, but it neglects how cultural products may shift discourse and thereby influence mobilization and political outcomes. This study investigates how activism against hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) utilized cultural artifacts to influence public perceptions and effect change. A systematic analysis of Internet search data, social media postings, and newspaper articles allows us to identify how the documentary Gasland reshaped public discourse. We find that Gasland contributed not only to greater online searching about fracking, but also to increased social media chatter and heightened mass media coverage. Local screenings of Gasland contributed to anti-fracking mobilizations, which, in turn, affected the passage of local fracking moratoria in the Marcellus Shale states. These results have implications not only for understanding movement outcomes, but also for theory and research on media, the environment, and energy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political opportunity theory has proven extremely generative, highlighting the importance of macro-structural shifts in making established authorities vulnerable to insurgent challenge. But as critics point out, political opportunity theory flattens both culture and agency, and has fared poorly in explaining the timing of insurgency. Re-theorizing opportunity as leveraged by particular practices, rather than independently conferring to groups, redresses these limits, revealing the proximate causes of mobilization and influence. For a strategic test, this article revisits the forging ground of opportunity theory. Why did President Harry S. Truman, initially an apologist for the slow pace of racial reform in 1945–46, suddenly become an avid advocate of civil rights? Opportunity scholars argue that macro-structural forces caused Truman to advocate civil rights, generating the opportunity for insurgency by blacks as a group. But event structure analysis reveals how Black Anti-colonialist practices leveraged opportunities afforded by the earlier Progressive Challenge to compel Truman to adopt civil rights advocacy. Civil rights advocacy, in turn, allowed Truman to repress Black Anti-colonialist practices, even while setting the stage for the Civil Rights Movement to come. Different forms of insurgent practice leveraged opportunities created by different institutional cleavages; the same opportunities did not advantage all insurgency by a social group. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Radical social movements can exacerbate tensions in local settings while drawing attention to how movement goals align with political party agendas. Short-term movement influence on voting outcomes can endure when orientations toward the movement disrupt social ties, embedding individuals within new discussion networks that reinforce new partisan loyalties. To demonstrate this dynamic, we employ longitudinal data to show that increases in Republican voting, across several different time intervals, were most pronounced in southern counties where the Ku Klux Klan had been active in the 1960s. In an individual-level analysis of voting intent, we show that decades after the Klan declined, racial attitudes map onto party voting among southern voters, but only in counties where the Klan had been active. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Competing visions of who is deserving of rewards and privileges, and different understandings of the fairness of reward allocation processes, are at the heart of political conflict. Indeed, social movement scholars generally agree that a key component of most, if not all, social movements is a shared belief that existing conditions are unfair and subject to change (Gamson 1992; McAdam 1982; Snow et al. 1986; Turner and Killian 1987). In this article we consider the role that residential segregation by education level plays in shaping perceptions of distributive justice and, in turn, providing a context conducive to conservative political mobilization. We apply these ideas in an analysis of Tea Party activism and show that educational segregation is a strong predictor of the number of Tea Party organizations in U.S. counties. In a complementary analysis, we find that individuals with a bachelor’s degree are more likely than people who do not have any college education to support the Tea Party; this relationship is strongest in counties with higher levels of educational segregation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The embattled state of U.S. labor has generated a voluminous body of research on the processes of deunionization contributing to its decline. Revisiting the less researched topic of unionization, this study explores the social conditions facilitating union growth during the labor movement’s formative years. Focusing on the first decade of the twentieth century—in many respects for labor, a period not unlike the present—I seek to explain the pattern of organizing success and failure across industries and occupations. I find that the most organized settings occurred where workers had greater disruptive capacities due to the high cost of being replaced during work stoppages. The highest replacement costs were associated with three conditions: scarcity of skilled labor, geographically isolated worksites that raised the cost of importing strikebreakers, and time-sensitive tasks that rendered replacement workers economically impractical. Workplaces that had at least one of these conditions formed the backbone of the early U.S. labor movement. The conclusion considers the impact of declining replacement costs on current challenges facing U.S. labor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Religious economies theory, which views religious organizations as akin to single-unit firms competing for adherents in local markets, has three shortcomings that we solve by reconceptualizing religious organizations and developing a new theory of religious mobilization. First, we treat religious organizations as multi-unit entities operating in interdependent markets in a national field. Second, we incorporate insights from social movement theory to challenge the exclusive focus on the impetus to mobilize (competition) by also considering the capacity to do so (resources). Third, we consider competition within organizations as well as between them. To analyze mobilization directly, we study a key religious resource, magazines. We analyze original data covering virtually all faiths and affiliated magazines in antebellum America, a time of great religious ferment. Consistent with our conception of religious organizations, we find that competition played out mostly within a national field. Consistent with resource mobilization theory, we find that the geography of religious mobilization reflected variations in the availability of resources more than variations in the intensity of competitive pressures. Conceiving of religious organizations as translocal movement organizations rather than local firms better accounts for their behavior. Our analysis sheds light on group dynamics in general by revealing how translocal groups in modern societies mobilize and build identity through group media. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the dramatic rise in the U.S. Hispanic population, scholars have struggled to explain how race affects welfare state development beyond the Black-White divide. This article uses a comparative analysis of welfare reforms in California and Arizona to examine how anti-Hispanic stereotypes affect social policy formation. Drawing on interviews, archival materials, and newspaper content analysis, I find that animus toward Hispanics is mobilized through two collective action frames: a legality frame and a racial frame. The legality frame lauds the contributions of documented noncitizens while demonizing illegal immigrants. The racial frame celebrates the moral worth of White citizens and uses explicit racial language to deride Hispanics as undeserving. These subtle differences in racialization and worth attribution create divergent political opportunities for welfare policy. When advocates employ the legality frame, they create openings for rights claims by documented noncitizens. Use of the racial frame, however, dampens cross-racial mobilization and effective claims-making for expansive welfare policies. These findings help to explain why the relationship between race and welfare policy is less predictable for Hispanics than for Blacks. They also reveal surprising ways in which race and immigration affect contemporary politics and political mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the 1980s and 1990s, single-disease interest groups emerged as an influential force in U.S. politics. This article explores their effects on federal medical research priority-setting. Previous studies of advocacy organizations’ political effects focused narrowly on direct benefits for constituents. Using data on 53 diseases over 19 years, I find that in addition to securing direct benefits, advocacy organizations have aggregate effects and can systemically change the culture of policy arenas. Disease advocacy reshaped funding distributions, changed the perceived beneficiaries of policies, promoted metrics for commensuration, and made cultural categories of worth increasingly relevant to policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Culture and politics have a close relationship, but how exactly does the cultural become the political? This article builds a theoretical framework for this question by examining Vietnam-era U.S. poets’ politicization of Buddhism at the expense of more effective or more easily controllable discursive resources. I find, first, that outcomes depend on whether would-be appropriators and legitimate owners of the appropriated resource can strike a mutually beneficial bargain. Second, whether two such distinct parties emerge depends on how tightly contexts of the appropriation process are linked. Consequently, appropriation is best understood as reciprocal exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social scientists describe culture as either coherent or incoherent and political dissent as either unifying or divisive. This article moves beyond such dichotomies. Content, historical, and network analyses of public debates on how to organize four lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Washington marches provide evidence for an integrative position. Rather than just describe consistencies or contradictions, we contend that the key analytic challenge is to explain the organization of differences. We propose one way of doing this using the mechanism of a cultural anchor. Within and across marches, a small collection of ideas remains fixed in the national conversation, yet in a way that allows activists to address their internal diversity and respond to unfolding historical events. These results suggest that activists do not simply organize around their similarities but, through cultural anchors, they use their commonalities to build a thinly coherent foundation that can also support their differences. Situated at the nexus of culture, social movements, sexualities, and networks, this article demonstrates how the anchoring mechanism works in the context of LGBT political organizing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How does the race of protesters affect how police respond to protest events? Drawing on the protest policing literature and on theories of race and ethnic relations, we explore the idea that police view African American protesters as especially threatening and that this threat leads to a greater probability of policing. We examine more than 15,000 protest events that took place in the United States between 1960 and 1990 and find that in many years, African American protest events are more likely than white protest events to draw police presence and that once at events, police are more likely to take action at African American protest events. Additional analyses complicate these findings by showing that they vary over time. In many years, for example, African American protest events are no more likely than white protest events to be policed. While there is support for a ‘‘Protesting While Black’’ phenomenon, it is not invariant across the entire period of inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This project explores cohort and period trends in political participation in the United States between 1973 and 2008. We examine the extent to which protest attendance and petition signing have diffused to different kinds of actors across multiple generations; we test claims central to understanding trends in social movement participation. Using aggregated, cross-sectional survey data on political involvement from 34,241 respondents, we examine changes in the probability of ever having attended a protest or signed a petition over time periods and across cohorts using cross-classified, random-effects models. We find a strong generational effect on the probability of ever having attended a protest, which explains much of the observed change in self-reports of protest behavior. More than half of this generational effect is a result of compositional change, but we find little evidence that protest attendance diffused to new types of actors. We compare these findings with a less confrontational form of protesting, petition signing, which shows more period than cohort effects. We argue that social movement activities have not become a widespread means of civic engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We suggest that moral panics exert spillover effects through stigma by mere association. Individuals are harmed even if their ties to stigmatized affiliates are heterophilous, and high-status individuals can also suffer. This creates a broadcast effect that increases the scale of the moral panic. Analyzing the U.S. film industry from 1945 to 1960, we examine how artists’ employment in feature films was influenced by their associations with co-workers who were blacklisted as communists after working with the focal artist. Mere association reduces an artist’s chances of working again, and one exposure is enough to impair work prospects. Furthermore, actors’ careers are impaired when writers with whom they worked are blacklisted. Moreover, the negative effects of stigma by mere association hold even when the focal artist has received public acclaim. These findings have broad implications. When a few individuals or organizations are engaged in wrongdoing and publicly targeted, stigma by association can lead to false positives and harm many innocents. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article uses time-series data from 1900 to 2005 to explore the effects of rivalry between labor unions as a special case of inter-organizational competition. Holding constant economic and political factors that typically account for changes in union density, we investigate how competition from rival labor federations and from independent unions affect both union density and a measure for the density of the dominant federation (AFL/AFL-CIO), adjusted for membership changes from mergers and splits. We measure competition by the number of unions and the size of rivals. While much existing literature measures state regulation with categorical coding for specific periods, we measure the effect of state enforcement directly with counts of pro-labor and pro-management unfair labor practice cases adjudicated by the National Labor Relations Board. We assess the effect of left-wing political culture using the popular vote for socialist and communist candidates in presidential elections. Both the number of members in rival unions and the total number of rival unions positively impact the rate of change in overall union density and in AFL density. The size of independent unions has a negative impact on AFL/AFL-CIO density but no effect on overall union density. Unfair labor practices cases adjudicated for employers negatively affect union density but positively affect AFL/AFL-CIO density, while cases adjudicated for unions negatively affect AFL/AFL-CIO density. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social movement scholars have long been skeptical of culture's impact on political change, perhaps for good reason, since little empirical research explicitly addresses this question. This article fills the void by examining the dynamics and the impact of the month-long 2004 same-sex wedding protest in San Francisco. We integrate insights of contentious politics approaches with social constructionist conceptions and identify three core features of cultural repertoires: contestation, intentionality, and collective identity. Our analyses, which draw on rich qualitative and quantitative data from interviews with participants and movement leaders and a random survey of participants, highlight these dimensions of cultural repertoires as well as the impact that the same-sex wedding protest had on subsequent activism. Same-sex weddings, as our multimethod analyses show, were an intentional episode of claim-making, with participants arriving with a history of activism in a variety of other social movements. Moreover, relative to the question of impact, the initial protest sparked other forms of political action that ignited a statewide campaign for marriage equality in California. Our results offer powerful evidence that culture can be consequential not only internally, with implications for participant solidarity and identity, but for political change and further action as well. We conclude by discussing the specifics of our case and the broader implications for social movement scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the shifting boundaries between the public and private spheres in advanced capitalist societies through an examination of grassroots lobbying firms. These organizations, which became a fixture in U.S. politics in the 1970s and have grown in number and prominence since, subsidize public participation on behalf of corporations, industry groups, and associations using direct mail, telephoning, and by mobilizing members and stakeholders. I examine the dynamics of this organizational population—whose existence calls attention to broad transformations in civil society—with reference to dramatic growth in the organizational populations of civic and trade associations. Results, derived from a Generalized Estimating Equation panel regression of firm founding events across U.S. regions from 1972 to 2002, suggest that the increasing formal organization of civil society has supported the development of a field of organizations that subsidize participation. These organizations do so, however, in a manner that restricts the development of social capital and civic skills while augmenting the voice of private interests in public and legislative discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do social movements promote diversity and alternative organizational forms? We address this question by analyzing how cooperative enterprise was affected by the Grange—a leading anticorporate movement in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. State-level analyses across three industries yield three findings. First, the Grange had positive effects on cooperatives and mutuals during the nineteenth-century populist struggles over corporate capitalism. Second, these effects were stronger where corporations counter-mobilized to block challengers' political efforts. Grangers pursued economic organization as an alternative to politics and in response to blocked political access. Third, the Grange continued to foster cooperatives even as populist revolts waned. It did so, however, by buffering cooperatives from problems of group heterogeneity and population change, rendering them less dependent on supportive communities and specific economic conditions. These findings advance research at the movements/organizations interface by documenting movement effects and by isolating different causal pathways through which mobilization, counter-mobilization, and political opportunity shape economic organization. The results also provide economic sociology with new evidence on how social structure moderates economic forces, and help revise institutional analyses of American capitalism by showing how cooperatives emerged as significant, rather than aberrant, elements of the U.S. economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social scientists typically examine social movements as grassroots phenomena, yet public leaders and elite actors also play important roles. This article examines their role in one contemporary social movement, American evangelicalism. Through semistructured interviews with 360 elite informants, as well as archival and ethnographic research, I explore the mechanisms through which leaders have sought to advance evangelicalism between 1976 and 2006. These public leaders founded organizations, formed networks, exercised convening power, and drew on formal and informal positions of authority to achieve movement goals. Results suggest that salient religious identity and cohesive networks have played important roles in shaping the goals and ambitions of leaders within the evangelical movement. Structural coincidence provided by governance structures at evangelical organizations, as well as evangelical programs directed toward elite constituents, have facilitated the formation of overlapping networks across social sectors. Institutional inertia and internal factions, however, have been countervailing forces. This empirical study demonstrates the persistence of institutional differentiation among America's leadership cohort, but it also points to a religious identity that can provide vital, cross-domain cohesion within the structure of elite power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collective actors typically attempt to bring about a change in law or policy by employing discursive tactics designed to convince key political decision-makers to alter policy, yet few systematic studies of the effects of social movement framing on political outcomes exist. We theorize that the cultural context in which framing takes place moderates the success of movement framing in winning changes in policy. We examine the efforts of organized women, during roughly the first half of the twentieth century, to convince lawmakers to broaden jury laws to give women the opportunity to sit on juries. To examine the combined effect of framing and the discursive opportunities provided by hegemonic legal principles, traditional gender beliefs, gendered political opportunities, opposition framing, and wartime, we use logistic regression. The findings provide substantial evidence that framing's influence is moderated by discursive elements in the broader context. Our results suggest that investigations of how citizen groups influence law and policy must take into account framing's important role and the ways in which the cultural context conditions framing's influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at social policy research. According to the article, mass opinion research helps to reveal phenomena such as path dependency and cross-national differences in welfare states. The article discusses social policy, the connection between mass opinion and legislative decision-making, social movements, political sociology, Social Security privatization in the U.S., the importance of mass opinion in welfare states, aggregate public opinion, welfare state attitudes, and Hausman's specification test for endogeneity.

This article elaborates a political mediation theory of the impact of social movements on states and policy, positing that the influence of mobilization and specific strategies of collective action depends on specified political contexts and the type of influence sought. Examining the influence of the US. old-age pension movement, which involved millions of people, this article appraises the mediation model using state-level data from the 1930s and 1940s on Old Age Assistance—the main support for the aged at the time—and a Senate vote for generous senior citizens 'pensions in 1939. Our models con trol for other potential influences, notably public opinion, which is often ignored in empirical studies and sometimes claimed to be responsible for causal influence mistakenly attributed to challengers. We employ pooled cross-sectional and time series analyses and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (FSQCA), which is especially suited to appraising the combinational expectations of the political mediation model. Both sets of analyses show that the pension movement was directly influential on the outcomes and provide support for the political mediation arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the spontaneous memories of a national sample of Americans in 1985, Schuman and Scott (1989) largely confirmed Mannheim's theory of generational identity by demonstrating that respondents' age structured their recall of important national and world events over the past 50 years. But they did not find the predicted age patterns for whites 'recollections of civil rights. I argue that their failure was the consequence of ignoring regional differences in the impact of the Civil Rights movement on whites. Because the South was the target of and the battle field for civil rights, 'civil rights memory" should be greater for southern whites who experienced the movement as mature teenagers or young adults than for their equal-aged peers elsewhere or for southern whites in different age groups. I also hypothesize that this cohort of southern whites should attribute more historical importance to civil rights than do others. Both hypotheses are supported by analysis of the 1993 General Social Survey and Schuman's and Scott's original 1985 data. The theoretical import of the study is that where highly charged events happen shapes consciousness and memory, suggesting that Mannheim c idea of the "social location" of generational identity formation is place-specific, as well as age-dependent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Variation in compliance with public policies across local settings is examined through an analysis of the number of reported hate crime incidents in United States counties. Particular attention is given to the role that activist organizations play in promoting, or impeding, compliance with public policies. Each hate crime reported to the federal government is conceptualized as a successful outcome of social movement mobilization. Drawing upon political mediation theory and Fine's model of discursive rivalry, the analysis shows how social movement resources, framing processes, political incentives, and features of local contexts combine to promote successful social movement outcomes. The presence of resourceful civil rights organizations in a county can lead to higher numbers of reported hate crimes, but the influence of civil rights organizations is contingent upon the political context and upon objective conditions that lend credibility to civil rights framing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hypotheses about police presence and police action at social movement protest events in New York State between 1968 and 1973 are tested with the aim of understanding the broad mechanisms of social control used by authorities during this cycle of mass protest. Contrary to the popular perception of overzealous police repression of protest in this period, results show that police presence using logistic regression analysis indicate that the best predictor of police presence at a protest event was how threatening the event was--police attended larger protest events and those that used confrontational tactics. Tests (using mutlinomial logistic regression) of explanations of police action, given police presence at an event, indicate that extreme forms of police action were also triggered by threatening characteristics of events. Events in which subordinate groups and social movement organizations participated were also more likely to draw police action. Novel contributions include the comparison of dominant explanations of protest policing and methods that move beyond the tradition of examining repression through police presence or absence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State women's suffrage movements are investigated to illuminate the circumstances in which social movements bring about political change. In 29 states, suffragists were able to win significant voting rights prior to passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. In addition to resource mobilization, cultural framing, and political opportunity structures, the authors theorize that gendered opportunities also fostered the successes of the movements. An event history analysis provides evidence that gendered opportunity structures helped to bring about the political successes of the suffragists. Results suggest the need for a broader understanding of opportunity structure than one rooted simply in formal political opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collective action rests, in part, on group identity and political opportunity. Just how group identity is manifested and perceptions of political opportunity are altered, however, remain unclear, particularly in the case of a geographically dispersed population. An often overlooked mechanism is media technology. This article analyzes an important yet underexamined instance of worker mobilization in the United States: the southern textile strike campaigns of 1929 to 1934 during which more than 400,000 workers walked off their jobs. Using historical data on textile manufacturing concentration and strike activity, FCC data on radio station foundings, and analyses of political content and song lyrics, the authors show that the geographic proximity of radio stations to the "textile belt" and the messages aired shaped workers' sense of collective experience and political opportunity: Walk-outs and strike spillover across mill towns resulted. The implications of the analyses for social movement theory generally, and for the understanding of how media can enable or constrain collective struggle, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study of the Mississippi civil rights movement and the War on Poverty examines the relationship between social movements and policy implementation. A "movement infrastructure" model is developed that focuses on organizational structure, resources, and leadership to account for the impact of social movements on policy implementation. A two-tiered research design is employed that includes (1) a quantitative analysis of poverty programs in Mississippi counties from 1965 to 1971, and (2) case studies that show the complex interaction between the civil rights movement, resistance by whites, local powerholders, and federal agencies. The quantitative analysis shows that counties with strong movement infrastructures generated greater funding for Community Action Programs. The case studies show that movements were excluded from the initial formation of these programs as local whites attempted to preempt civil rights activists. However, in counties with strong movement infrastructures, activists were able to gain access to decision-making bodies and shape the content of poverty programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The WPA was the most expensive and politically prominent U.S. social program of the 1930s, and the generosity and very nature of U.S. social policy in its formative years was contested through the WPA. In this article, an institutional politics theory of social policy is elaborated that incorporates the influence of both institutional conditions and political actors: Institutions mediate the influence of political actors. Specifically, it is argued that underdemocratized political systems and patronage-oriented party systems dampen the cause of generous social spending and the impact of those struggling for it. State actors, left-party regimes, and social movements spur social policy, but only under favorable institutional conditions. To appraise this theory, key Senate roll-call votes on WPA wage rates are examined, as well as state-level variations in WPA wages at the end of the 1930s. The analyses, which include multiple regression and qualitative comparative analysis, support the theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Culture consists of rhetorical, interaction's, and material tools that are organized into strategies of action. Social movement theory is beginning to recognize the role of culture in facilitating or frustrating collective organizing. I use social constructionist as an analytical approach to bridge social movement and cultural theory. Social constructionists ask how social action is constructed, rather than what issues or ideas are being constructed. Using data from more than three years of ethnographic research in Grove land, an African American neighborhood in Chicago, I find that the black church provides a cultural blueprint for civic life in the neighborhood. Prayer, call-and response interaction, and Christian imagery are important parts of the cultural "tool kit" of Grove land's black residents, and these cultural practices invigorate activism. Particular theological foundations of black Christianity--especially its collective ethos and the notion of God as active in earthly affairs--support the content of secular activism. Black church culture constitutes the taken-for-granted practices that put civic efforts into action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine the relationship between social movements and political outcomes. I begin 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, I examine the civil rights movement in Mississippi from the period of widespread mobilization in the early 1960s through the early 1980s. Specifically, I examine 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 Whites 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I propose a generational model of continuity and change in social movements. Building on political generation and cohort replacement theories, I offer three propositions about generational processes in social movements: (1) The collective identity of an activist cohort remains consistent over time, contributing to movement continuity; (2) cohorts construct different collective identities based on the external contexts and internal conditions of the movement at the time they enter; (3) cohort replacement contributes to change in social movements. These three generational processes interact with organizational factors and political opportunity structures to shape movement continuity and change. I illustrate these propositions by drawing on an in-depth case study of the women's movement from 1969 to 1992 in Columbus, Ohio, and I suggest key questions about generational processes in other cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For over two decades, resources have been assumed to be a fundamental determinant of the course and character of social movement organizations (SMOs) and their activities. Yet surprisingly little research evaluates this taken-for-granted assumption. Using data from ethnographic fieldwork on 15 homeless SMOs in eight U.S. cities, we construct an empirically grounded typology of resources and assess the combinations of resources necessary for the viability of homeless SMOs. We then examine the sources of support for these organizations, highlighting the influence of benefactor organizations on SMO viability and tactics. Employing qualitative comparative analysis, we identify three resource configurations among the viable SMOs and find that certain resource types contributed more than others to viability. Support from benefactors also ensured viability of these organizations without moderating their tactics. We explain the implications of these findings for understanding the roles that resources and sponsorship or patronage play in the careers of SMOs and the relevance of resources, sponsorship, and organization to social movements of the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the U.S. peace movement at the end of the cold war, 1988 to 1992. Our hypotheses derive from recent research in organizations and social movements; they specify those organizational characteristics likely to be associated with the demise of peace movement organizations (PMO). Using a stratified, national longitudinal sample of PMOs representative of the late 1980s peace movement, we analyze organizational mortality through the use of logistic regression techniques. Consistent with previous research on comparable organizations, smallness, organizational "adolescence," lack of legitimacy, and lack of threshold levels of organizational structure predict mortality in the population as a whole. However, the determinants of PMO mortality differ substantially by movement domain: The survival of small domain PMOs is associated with those resources that enable them to carve out a broadly focused issue niche and establish themselves in community networks. The survival of large domain PMOs is associated with factors that enable them to elicit and maintain broad-based support from a localized resource base. National PMOs are less likely to disband; having a broad peace focus and avoiding delegitimating public affiliations enhance their survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I examine the relationship between social movements and political parties through the study of late-nineteenth-century Populism in North Carolina. I use county-level data on North Carolina Farmers' Alliance membership and People's Party votes to test theories on the social-structural bases of the two organizations and gauge the relationship between them. The results indicate a striking disjuncture between Alliance membership and People's Party support and suggest a new interpretation of the defeat of Populism. The results also provide the basis for analysis of the different organizational and mobilizational processes of movements and parties. Additional study of movement-party relationships should improve our understanding of Populism and other insurgent political movements as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Townsend movement, institutionalism and the political opportunity in the U.S. The largest and most ambiguous American social movement of the Great Depression was led not by a menacing demagogue, but by a befuddled gray-haired doctor, Francis E. Townsend. The Townsend movement seems to fit conflicting views on social movements and thus presents a puzzle for social theorists. It has been concluded that grievances due to crises can augment challenger theories and require more consideration. These grievances are not constant and may influence the development of insurgencies consistent with the challenger perspective in at least two ways. Crises can breed uncertainty in people that may change their perceived long-term interests and the parameters of the free-rider problem. The analysis shows that political opportunities play a positive role in promoting movements, as suggested by the polity model. The standard polity model emphasizes aid from social movements and polity members, and we found that where the labor movement was strong, the Townsend movement also flourished.

The article focuses on the issue of social change and collective memory. For this purpose it focuses on two theoretical approaches to collective memory. The first relates the discontinuities of the past to an ongoing constructive process motivated by the changing concerns of the present. The second approach draws attention to continuities in our perceptions of the past and to the way these perceptions are maintained in the face of social change. The author seeks to determine whether the difference between these approaches can be resolved by rejecting one in favor of the other. It also determines whether conditions for the applicability of each approach can be specified. The author also discusses whether a new theory that reconciles their conflicting claims can be formulated and whether a single, unifying property exists beneath their manifest differences. In order to discuss these issues image of former U.S. President George Washington before and after the civil war.

This article uses social movement and organization theory, to develop a set of concepts that help explain social movement continuity. The theory is grounded in new data on women's rights activism from 1945 to the 1960s that challenge the traditional view that the American women's movement died after the suffrage victory in 1920 and was reborn in the 1960s. This case delineates a process in social movements that allows challenging groups to continue in nonreceptive political climates through social movement abeyance structures. Five characteristics of movement abeyance structures are identified and elaborated: temporality, purposive commitment, exclusiveness, centralization, and culture. Thus, social movement abeyance structures provide organizational and ideological bridges between different upsurges of activism by the same challenging group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A longer life means that current cohorts can spend more years as members of a family in the statuses of parent, child, or spouse and in the combination of these statuses that defines the conjugal family. How much has this potential been realized? This question is addressed for the United States through a simulation of demographic conditions in 1800, 1900, 1960, and 1980. Despite declining fertility and higher divorce rates, women in the 1960 and 1980 cohorts spent more years in marriage and as parents than did earlier generations. They also spent more years as children of aged parents. But much of the potential offered by longer life spans has not been achieved. Not only did the number of years in marriage and parental statuses decline between 1960 and 1980, but current cohorts spend a smaller proportion of their adult lives in them. On the basis of these results, we propose some scenarios of the ways that potential increases in the amount of time that people spend in family statuses may provoke social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's comments on the paper titled "Nineteenth-Century Cherokee History," by Russell Thornton. The author argues that his comparative study of Cherokee, Choctaw, Delaware and Iroquois societies concentrated on identifying political, economic and social-structural conditions that led to institutionalized responses to the U.S. political and economic pressures. A social movement becomes institutionalized when some members of a society maintain long-term commitments to participation in the movement's organization and toward effecting its goals. Thornton is not interested in whether a revitalization movement becomes institutionalized or not, but rather with the conditions under which such movements occur. Thornton argues that by 1828 the "more progressive" Cherokee remained east of the Mississippi River, while the "more conservative" Cherokee emigrated to Arkansas and finally to northeastern Oklahoma to avoid incorporation into the Cherokee state and to continue their traditional lifestyles. This argument is not entirely consistent with the Yonaguska Movement of 1830, which firmly resisted emigration to the west on the grounds that the Cherokee could be happy only in the country where nature had planted him.

This paper examines trends, patterns and implications of religious mobility in the United States. Previously published data, and analysis of 1975-76 NORC data indicate that about 25% to 32% of American adults have switched religions (including movement out of religion) in theft life times. High and Low Status denominations are gaining members due to switching (more in-mobility than out-mobility), and Baptists, Catholics and Medium Status denominations are losing members due to switching. The most common pattern of religious movement is out of religion altogether. Additional analyses show that religious switching patterns are congruent with explanations stressing the switcher's desire to worship with individuals of similar socioeconomic status, that some switching is the result of an individual moving to the religion of a stable spouse, and that movement out of religion is disproportionately composed of young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]