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The article focuses on a study that suggests ways for both national context and catalyst in understanding online activism. It states that context relates to the nature of issues and there are variation in the context of the online engagement within countries. It further discusses the use of online mobilization by the British activists and role of Internet in health issue campaigns in Russia.

Using E. E. Schattschneider's (1975) model of conflict socialization, this study conceptualizes rumor communities, instead of the more typical rumor chains, engaged in a form of social and political activism similar to that of interest groups. It examines online user-generated commentary from the "vaccines cause autism" rumor community, a grassroots group that resists government-mandated vaccine requirements. Community members limit the scope of conflict by asserting authority to speak publicly and rejecting contributors with countering opinions as irrelevant. They sustain their threatened community by denying scientific evidence and demanding unattainable levels of scientific proof, and they socialize conflict by recruiting bystanders to enter the fray using appeals to wider social values. Understanding rumors as persuasive appeals that are socially constructed and maintained helps explain the survival of rumors and has implications for official debunking efforts. Schattschneider's theory effectively models the behaviors of non-institutionalized groups but requires adaptation to the modern political communication environment and post-Reagan beliefs about government. Asserting the authority to speak publicly and maintaining group viability are necessary precursors to socializing conflict for grassroots interest groups. When citizens have been taught government is the problem rather than the solution, socializing political conflict may not be synonymous with federalizing it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes an in-depth look at one of the major sources of congressional territorial policy, the House Committee on Territories. Using archival resources and historical records, the project will tie together significant areas of concern for the Committee on Territories dealing with national expansion and territorial management. By analyzing the decisions and actions of this committee, the committee membership, and the specific issues it chose to focus upon, from its creation in 1825 until the Spanish-American War at the end of the 19th-century, this paper will highlight various ways in which policy decisions crafted political development in the country as a whole. Issues of representation will also be addressed since the House Committee on Territories had both voting members from states and non-voting territorial delegates assigned to it throughout its history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the political conditions under which social movement coalitions (SMC) prevail. SMCs are intra-movement coalitions comprised exclusively of organizations from a single movement, or inter-movement coalitions with member organizations. Several features of the resultant organization are noteworthy.

Human rights-based approaches (HRBAs) promise greater alignment of development efforts with universal norms as well as a focus on the root causes of poverty. While HRBAs have been widely adopted across the development sector, there is little systematic evidence about the actual impact of this strategic shift. Evaluating the effectiveness of HRBAs is challenging because various non-governmental and other organizations have developed very different understandings of how to apply a rights-based framework in the development context. This essay takes one small step towards the rigorous evaluation of HRBAs by offering a comprehensive review of rights-based programming implemented by Plan International, a child-centered organization. It shows that Plan's adoption of HRBA-inspired strategies has transformed its interactions with local communities and added an explicit focus on the state as the primary duty bearer. There is evidence for a systematic increase in individual rights awareness, greater ownership exercised by community organizations, and the application of evidence-based advocacy aimed at scaling up proven program activities. But Plan's peculiar brand of HRBA neglects collaboration with domestic social movements and civil society, largely avoids a more confrontational approach towards the state, and has yet to produce evidence for regular successful rights claims by disadvantaged communities against governmental representatives at local, regional, or national levels. The study also reveals a limited ability of Plan to address disparities and discrimination within local communities as well as a need to define clearly the organization's own accountability and duties deriving from its presence in local communities across more than fifty developing nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores whether social movements can resolve the political party system crisis in the U.S. The author tackles the possibility that the crisis might be resolved by non-electoral means, such as the Occupy protests and increased labor militancy. Also discussed is the use of social media to study the Occupy movement.

The article looks into the discursive terrain of resource conflict in Ecuador. The author provides an overview of the discursive landscape in the nation with details on the antagonistic and dialogic interaction between official claims and the critical discourses of variety of distinct but overlapping social movements. She also tackles increasingly tense conflict between movements and the state and the reclassification of the state activities brought by the social movement organizations.

This paper addresses the concept that our pedagogical approach can reinforce or undermine the content that we teach. Focusing on creating an engaged citizenry through a pedagogy centered on student participation and a content that emphasizes the idea that democracy is an unfinished and ongoing project, allows students to experience the power, possibilities, and contradictions inherent in a democratic system. This approach requires risk from the professor and deliberateness both in the development of pedagogy and the structuring of content. Towards this end, the paper examines the ways in which we teach the African-American freedom struggle and more particularly the civil rights movement. However, the arguments and lessons are applicable anytime we teach the difficult literature of social movements within a democracy. Three primary issues are included in this discussion:1) pedagogy of the Civil Rights Movement; 2) pursuing real diversity in the classroom; and, 3) teaching the concepts of power and violence. All of this material is discussed within the context of the civil engagement literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the institutionalization of the female presence in the state structure. It is noted that for the advancement of the women's cause around the democratic world, the institutionalization of the female presence in the state structure matters a great deal. It is mentioned that overcoming a negative view of the state, which equated it to a quintessential patriarchal power structure is one of the key achievements of the "state feminism" phenomenon.

The article focuses on cause lawyers that take on difficult and unremunerative cases for bringing social change. It states the legal strategy of cause lawyers in same-sex marriage litigation. It further discusses role of cause lawyers in democratic society, conservative cause lawyers and conservative Christian cause lawyers and their goals.

Why are some newly empowered courts more likely than others to engage in progressive judicial activism? This paper addresses this question through an analysis of the origins and subsequent activism of the Colombian Constitutional Court towards rights in general, and the right to health in particular. My research suggests that ideational variables are the most effective in explaining this outcome. On the one hand, I argue that the Constitutional Court's behavior reflects the dominance within it of a particular set of ideas about the judicial role. On the other, I provide evidence that programmatic beliefs about the relationship between rule of law and market-driven economic growth led power holders to create the Court and to appoint judges of this orientation. The emergence of progressive judicial activism in Colombia, my analysis suggests, was the unexpected outcome of purposeful political choices made by proponents of neoliberal economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on legislative strategies for marriage equality as alternatives to litigation. Lessons from the quest for same-sex marriage in New York State are examined to understand the challenges inherent in legislative strategies. It was noted that legislative struggles for social change in favor of a small minority necessarily must involve large coalitions of sympathizers from the greater population.

This paper investigates the connection between the external policy environment and organization-level consequences by focusing on how incremental gains and losses--those outcomes that stop short of total victory or ultimate defeat--affect social movement organizations. This focus reverses the typical causal arrow found in much of the social movement literature that attempts to use organization-level factors to account for policy outcomes, and interrogates instead how outcomes affect organizations. Given that for most movements, a win or a loss on an individual point of policy is usually the result of a single battle in a larger war, and that interactions between movements and policy makers are protracted and iterative, it becomes important to understand how small-scale outcomes might cumulatively affect an organization's ability to engage in future contentious activity by making it harder or easier to access resources or by affecting its level of public support.Drawing on a dataset of 65 anti-death penalty organizations and their activities between 1996-2006, I find that incremental outcomes have different effects on organizational attributes. For overall resource levels, group characteristics are by themselves strong predictors of the overall availability of funds and donations, though resource endowments are also sensitive to changes in the overall level of public support for the death penalty and changes in the general political environment. Policy changes, whether formal or informal, matter less for this particular variable. On the other hand, incremental outcomes matter a great deal when explaining the proportion of organizational support and funding that comes from members of the general public. As informal gains are made against capital punishment, public support for ADP groups tends to increase. But formal, statutory outcomes, like judicial decisions, display a curvilinear relationship to public support that is convex in shape rather than the expected concave function--a highly counter-intuitive finding. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A broad range of indicators suggest that China has become much more globally active in recent years. Existing research has indentified a number of economic and strategic motivations behind China's increased diplomatic and economic activism. Yet there have been no efforts to systematically test the relative importance of different drivers of China's diplomatic priorities. What factors lead China to focus attention on relations with one country instead of another? Are economic or geostrategic factors more important, and are Chinese priorities changing over time? We argue that Chinese leadership travel abroad offers a useful, if imperfect, indicator of China's diplomatic priorities. Using a unique, newly compiled dataset, we analyze quantitatively the correlates of travel abroad by top Chinese leaders from 1998 to 2006. We find that geo-strategic factors appear to have been the primary drivers of travel decisions early on (while Jiang Zemin was president), but that economic factors appear paramount later (under the presidency of Hu Jintao). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the dynamic roles played by young people in social and political transformations, both past and present. Youth are seen as crucial "engines" of social change, but seldom its primary "drivers". Focus here is on the structure of incentives that mobilize young people to participate in militant and violent socio-political networks as well as institutions that support peace-building, development, and civic engagement. Descriptive global case studies are combined with insights from an original system dynamics model (under development) - to demonstrate how youth marginalization can be linked with demographic stressors to catalyze or exacerbate conflicts usually couched in terms of class, ethnicity, and/or social anarchy. The paper then explores alternative responses from the many young people who resist conflict and attempt to build bridges across communal friction points. This comparative analysis grounds a series of broad youth policy recommendations to empower at-risk youth and create incentives for their productive civic and economic participation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Familes are at the center of a number of important,contentious public debates in the United States. The ideas that a significant link exists between the state of families and the state of the natian, and that strong, healthy families undergird a strong nation, are animating a number of social movements as well as governmental efforts to strengthen families. A common premise of all these efforts is that the weakening of families both reflects and leads to moral and civic decline and imposes significant costs on' society. Diagnoses of America's moral and civic health warn that, although families historically have played a prominent role as "seedbeds of civic virtue" and generators of "social capital," their current condition hampers them in doing so. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a model of social movement emergence and political change that is not critically dependent on either active elite support or limited rationality. Social movements involve, rather, strategic interactions among movement actors as they are impacted by exogenous shocks---such as those experienced during a financial crisis---and moderated by the social relationship effects that exist in participating groups. We introduce two separate mechanisms involved in driving social change: Social movement emergence premised on inter-group formation under a political entrepreneur, and intra-group dynamics based on a system of endogenous contract enforcement. Our framework is also flexible enough to incorporate multiple contracting mechanisms, informational imperfections, as well as potential interactions with elites.We then consider the historical validity of the model with case studies of Indonesia during the crisis and conflict in the Congo. These studies suggest that features that we highlight in our model, such as strategic interaction among movement actors, the importance of exogenous shocks, as well as the existence of political entrepreneurs, were both necessary and important in the genesis and perpetuation of these social movements. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movements reflect the attempt of a challenging group within society to affect change and achieve goals in a variety of ways, some of which include protest, petition, violence, and pressure techniques outside traditional political channels. The social movement must not only motivate and mobilize a significant segment of society under a common cause or identity but also force or convince those in power to remedy the problem that drives the challenging group. This requires a strong understanding of political opportunity. In this paper, I explore the importance of opportunity and its relationship to common views of strategies used by social movements as discussed in the literature. Strategy reflects the attempts by a movement to circumvent established barriers in political institutions or in the social norms of the political community at large to achieve its objectives. In this context, opportunity creation is defined as strategic action taken by a social movement to reshape those norms and established power alignments by modifying institutional constraints to its own advantage. These constraints are not fixed; they are instead created and subject to constant change. I propose that social movements can effectively build opportunities for themselves by forming alliances within the existing power structure and attempting to function within the institutional constraints instead of challenging them as political outsiders. In this way, they are not dependent on the government, external alliance shifts, or a changing political climate to gain the opportunity needed to press their claims. To illustrate this general claim regarding social movements, I will employ content-analysis of cartoons, leaflets, and broadsides to examine the choices of the woman suffrage movement in America from 1850 to 1919 as it evolved from an ideologically based appeal for woman’s political participation in earlier years to a pragmatic and expediency-driven strategy to gain voting rights during the later years of the movement. The course of this social movement clearly reflects the successes and advantages that stem from a strategy of opportunity creation, including increased leverage over those in positions of social and political influence and a broader base of popular support. Finally, I draw some broader conclusions regarding the impact of opportunity creation on social movements in general and suggest that a movement need not present a challenging framework to achieve results; a policy of frame expansion can be equally if not more effective when combined with opportunity. I also note that successful opportunity structures point to the eventual death of a movement, highlighting the temporal nature of the social movement as a form of political action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comparative survey of activist mobilizing to secure recognition of gay and lesbian relationships in Canada and the United States, and of the extent to which public policy, law, and institutional policy among private employers has moved in directions sought by such activism. Such movement as has occurred depends on developments at national, regional, and local levels of government, as well as in the courts. Shifts toward equity have come faster and more uniformly in Canada than in the U.S.. A few American states and several localities have seen marked progress, but are hampered by the relative absence of change at the federal level. Variation in outcome depends on constitutional, legal, and institutional context, on party configerations, on labour union support, and to some extent on public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the potential that the new computing and communications technologies offer for promoting social change. These technologies do offer space for resistance, but this does not ensure a liberating result. We need to avoid technological determinism. We must explore the impact of the new technologies in various contexts and increase our body of case studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last forty years has witnessed a remarkable resurgence in the populist phenomenon known as social movements as well as the launching of powerful counter-movements. Alongside this rise in movement growth, there have been vast policy changes. Understudied in the literature is a connection between these two phenomena. When do social movements decide to pressure governmental institutions for change? Under what conditions are social movements able to successful in their efforts? In this paper, it is argued that a rational, strategic interaction framework should be used to study the policy outcomes of social movement-government interaction. Hypotheses are then developed for strategic interaction variables for explaining social movement-legislative outcomes. Further, social movement life-cycle theories (resource mobilization and political process) are reconsidered from a strategic interaction framework to derive additional hypotheses of outcomes of social movement-legislative interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effectively taking the credit for some desirable outcome is an essential element of politics, and the stakes for successfully claiming credit are similarly high for social protest movements. While popular narratives of some issue areas, particularly civil rights, assign movements a critical role in social change, other movements are more poorly positioned to claim their victories. In this paper, I explore the disparities in success at claiming credit, with the intent of explaining why some challengers end up deriving credit, both in the short and long term, for their efforts, while others don’t. I begin by looking at the question of the outcomes of social movements, briefly reviewing the relevant literature, which focuses predominantly on public policy. I then move to the literature on public policy, examining the difficulties in assessing success or failure of policies. Using Deborah Stone’s (1997) insights on causal narratives, I focus on the construction of dominant stories, suggesting why certain kinds of movements may be better positioned than others to win support for their version of the story. I then identify a number of variables, including goals, political positioning, coalition politics, and constituencies, that explain why some movements have a harder time claiming credit than others. I conclude by suggesting that the positioning of institutional actors, and the degree of their identification with a social movement, is critical to the movement’s capacity to claim success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]