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To what extent does local LGBT+ activism have impacts beyond its immediate surroundings? We offer a theoretical framework emphasizing how a combination of local movement visibility and LGBT+ cultural receptivity can account for disseminating influences of LGBT+ activism. We illustrate our framework in part through an analysis of the potential diffusion of LGBT+ support in Bosnia in the aftermath of the country's first-ever Pride. Our model explains why the 2019 Sarajevo Pride increased LGBT+ support locally but had no immediate effects on attitudes in greater Bosnia. It also explains why LGBT+ support has since expanded beyond the capital to Bosnia's surrounding regions in a follow-up 2021 study. Even when local LGBT+ visibility is low or nonexistent, underlying cultural receptivity can be conducive to the gradual diffusion of LGBT+ support. Moreover, the challenging circumstances of the pandemic did not undermine the expansion of LGBT+ tolerance across Bosnia. Our findings illustrate the persistent power as well as limitations of LGBT+ activism to usher in downstream cultural change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What drives the news coverage of social movements in the professional news media? We address this question by elaborating an institutional mediation model arguing that the news values, routines, and characteristics of the news media induce them to pay attention to movements depending on their characteristics and the political contexts in which they engage. The news-making characteristics of movements include their disruptive capacities and organizational strength, and the political contexts include a partisan regime in power, benefitting from national policies, and congressional investigations. To appraise these arguments, we analyze approximately 1 million news articles mentioning 29 social movements over the twentieth century, published in four national newspapers. We use negative binomial regression analyses and separate time-series analyses of the labor movement to assess the model's robustness across different movements, time periods, and news sources. In each analysis, the results support the hypotheses based on the institutional mediation model. More generally, we argue that the influence of social movements on institutions depends on the structure and operating procedures of those institutions. This insight has implications for future studies of the influence of movements on major social institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the concept of protest cycles has received much attention in the collective action literature, its empirical operationalization remains relatively crude compared to the rich theoretical discussion. Reimagining social movements as populations of interlinked protests, we demonstrate the advantages of analyzing protest event networks with a novel dataset related to South Korea's democracy movement. In our conceptualization, protest events play the role of network nodes and links were identified based on protesters citing prior events as sources of inspiration for mobilizing. Appropriating strategies for network analysis, we assess the types of events that were more likely to be cited as sources of inspiration and bridge otherwise disconnected events. Our analysis shows that protests that raised systemic versus local issues and events that were repressed by the state were more likely to occupy central positions in the democracy movement. By identifying the characteristics of events that contribute to movement inspiration and bridging, our novel approach to analyzing protest events sheds new light on dominant themes in social movement research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do online networks encourage political participation? Much research has theorized on how digital networks transmit mobilizing content, fewer studies examine the structure of online networks, and even fewer test how the structure of online networks affects participation for political behaviors with differing costs. From a structural network perspective, I highlight the puzzle: If according to recent literature, digital networks are loose with many weak ties, how can such a network configuration facilitate high-cost political behavior that requires multiple social reinforcements? I map the following relationships among 655 Twitter users who follow the Black Lives Matter Sacramento chapter and compare the structure of the digital network to three commonly observed ideal type networks. The results show that the digital network is structurally distinct from the ideal types, as it is characterized by an extremely dense cluster but also with many loosely connected components, which I describe as a "cluster-connective network." Results from computer experiments further show that paradoxically, this "cluster-connective" configuration benefits participation for high-cost behavior but hinders participation for low-cost behavior. The results illustrate how a structural network perspective helps scholars move from the question of whether digital networks facilitate participation to the conditions under which digital networks encourage participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We employ a unique sample of participants in the early 1960s Nashville civil rights movement to examine within-movement micromobilization processes. Rather than assuming movement micromobilization and participation is internally homogeneous, we extend the literature by identifying distinct types of pathways (entry and preparation) and distinct types (or modes) of movement participation. Pathways into the Nashville movement are largely structured a priori by race, by several distinct points of entry (politically pulled, directly recruited, or professionally pushed), and by prior experience or training in nonviolent direct action. Participation falls into a distinct division of movement labor characterized by several major modes of participation—core cadre, soldiers, and supporters. We demonstrate that pathways and modes of participation are systematically linked and that qualitatively distinct pathways contribute to understanding qualitative modes of movement participation. Specifically, all core cadre members were pulled into activism, soldiers were either pulled or recruited, and supporters were pulled, recruited, or pushed. Highly organized, disciplined, and intense workshop training proved to be integral in becoming a member of the core cadre but not for soldier or supporter roles. We conclude that social movement studies would do well to pay more attention to variability in structured pathways to, preparation for, and qualitative dimensions of movement participation. These dimensions are critical to further understanding the way movements and their participants move and add insights regarding an important chapter in the southern civil rights movement. The implications of our findings extend to modes of movement activism more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we develop an institutional movement logics approach to analyze the structure and dynamics of the US social movement field from 1960 to 1995. Using protest event data taken from the Dynamics of Collective Action dataset, we elicit the most salient combinations of issues, tactics, and targets reported to co-occur at protest events in four periods: 1960–1965, 1966–1972, 1973–1987, and 1988–1995. The analysis reveals the existence of six movement logics of varying breadth, flexibility, and stability. We also detect two important shifts in the overall structure of the field, one toward a broad and flexible form of state-centric politics and one toward several differentiated and narrowly defined forms of nonpolitical contention. We find support for two key premises of the institutional movement logics framework, limited diversity, and relative stability within and between logics while showing that a longer time frame offers a window on field dynamics not visible with shorter study time frames. We close by providing suggestions for further research seeking to build on the institutional movement logics approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses insider ethnographic and interview data to examine one of the largest sustained collective actions in the history of the United States--the Wisconsin Uprising of 2011. It finds that this event took a highly unusual form due to a social relation that I term escalating moral obligation, a sense of solidaristic duty that grows increasingly fervent as others struggle on behalf of a shared cause. Each of three active groups within the movement engaged in arduous and unconventional resistance to controversial legislation, and did so in a manner that induced moral debt among the other groups. Fervency of commitment to the cause increased as a result of allies taking risky or self-sacrificial actions. Each group felt obligated to continue difficult mobilization as long as others continued theirs. Escalating moral obligation develops a simultaneously emergent, endogenous, and cognitive dimension of social movements. It is a relational mechanism linking political opportunity with actual mobilization. The political opportunity in this case was a combination of several conditions: an elite cleavage over the desirability of public unions, a more local balance of power allowing dissident legislators to obstruct but not defeat legislation, and an immediate severe popular reaction. This mechanism is potentially generalizable to other risky or arduous protests. When activists are motivated by the sacrifice or risk-taking of allied activists, escalating moral obligation is present. The concept links group-level imperatives with individual-level motivations. Escalating moral obligation shows one way that individual subjectivities can change through group interrelations and emotionally intense interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extensive scholarship addresses whether and how social movements can have consequences for outcomes of interest to them. Though divided in its conclusions, existing research generally shares a focus on potential contributions of movements to the codification of rights and adoption of policies, rather than their actual implementation. Often, however, palpable enactment of the crystallized laws and policies that movements demand is far from guaranteed, raising salient questions about whether and how movements can matter for implementation outcomes as well. To address such questions, the article uses a mixed-methods analysis to examine consequences of subnational office-holding by "sanitarista" activists from the Sanitarist Movement--contemporary Brazil's most important health movement--for rates of primary public health coverage and childhood mortality. Before reviewing existing theories and conceptualizing movement office-holding, it briefly describes the movement's role in codifying Brazil's constitutional right to health and demanding new local democratic institutions for enacting that right. Then, Prais-Winsten regression analyses of all major Brazilian capitals between 1995 and 2014 show that sanitarista office-holding atop a key subnational institution was associated with broader health service coverage and lower mortality. Comparative case-study analysis illustrates that office-holding sanitaristas helped generate these improvements by leveraging new democratic offices to marshal support of subnational executives for the movement's modest but effective state-building project in the municipal health sector. Ultimately, theories of movement consequences benefit from considering how in certain democratic contexts, subnational office-holding can constitute an important standalone outcome with considerable promise to also improve policy implementation and social development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under which conditions do social movements receive coverage by the mainstream news media? News coverage matters for movements for political, cultural, and organizational reasons, but only rarely have scholars analyzed the coverage of movements comparatively and at the movement level. To address the question, we apply a political mediation model of the influence of movements to professional news media, using ideas from the social organization of the news perspective. From this model, we hypothesize four main multicausal paths to extensive coverage for movements. These involve the joint occurrence of two specific movement characteristics--disruptive capacities and extensive organization--and two specific political contexts--unified partisan regimes and enforced policies. Working from scholarship that argues that rightist movements have different determinants, we also devise hypotheses for their coverage. These hypotheses are appraised through qualitative comparative analyses on an updated Political Organizations in the News data set. The latter includes information on all the coverage of national US movement organizations in four major national newspapers across the twentieth century. These analyses provide extensive support for the mediation model and support claims that rightist movements have separate and in some ways more difficult routes to extensive news coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the causes of movement and countermovement mobilization, focusing specifically on the effect that the national movements have on each other by responding directly to mobilization and indirectly through their policy successes. We discuss the mechanisms by which national movements respond to each other, and we examine the influence of political parties and social, political, and economic changes for women. We analyze these relationships using a Poisson Autoregressive (PAR(ρ)) estimator, which is uniquely designed to model both the time dependence and the count distributions, on quarterly time series of feminist, anti-feminist, pro-choice, and anti-abortion events. Results show that movements and countermovements respond to each other and that anti-feminist movements mobilize in response to national policy change and societal change. The results suggest that many quantitative analyses of women's movements may be misspecified and that feminist mobilization does not always abate during conservative backlash. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gaining attention in the mass media is a key goal of many social movement organizations (SMOs). The dominant explanation of media attention to SMOs is that the media act like a filter, selecting some types of SMOs and events for attention, and ignoring others based on characteristics of these SMOs, events, and their political environment. In contrast to this "bias model," I argue that some media attention to SMOs is characterized by positive feedback, or rich-get-richer processes: past media attention increases the likelihood of future media attention through its effect on the SMO and on other media outlets. Like other positive feedback systems, media attention can be path dependent, is routinely punctuated by large cascades of attention to previously obscure SMOs, and can be contingent on "accidents" of history: at critical junctures, individuals, organizations, and events have the potential to radically impact the extent of media attention to their movements and organizations. Media attention to SMOs can also become decoupled from the types of events that initially sparked their media attention, becoming spokes-organizations for their movements and receiving media attention for events and stories that they themselves are not involved. In support of this theory, I first show that media attention is, similar to other positive feedback processes, power-law distributed across SMOs using two national (US) data sets. I then illustrate the process of positive feedback in media attention through a case study of the Black Panther Party's rise to prominence in media attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary social movement researchers claim that legitimizing elements of social movements can counteract collective action problems and increase the likelihood that self-interested individuals take collective rather than individual action. Their work is insightful and informative, but it rarely uses general theory to describe the processes through which movement elements acquire legitimacy. Nor does it apply general theory to describe the mechanisms or processes through which legitimized elements influence collective action. The laboratory experiments reported in this article test hypotheses derived from a general theory—the multiple-sources, multiple-objects theory of legitimacy. The experiments examine the effects that legitimacy (measured as peer endorsement) and network size have on coalition formation, a form of collective action, and the countervailing of power. The research finds support for the legitimacy arguments. Low-power actors form coalitions more often in networks that highly endorse coalition formation and in smaller networks. Coalitions countervail power, and coalitions in the smallest networks reverse power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reflects on the impact of the article "Social Movement Organizations: Growth, Decay, and Change" by Mayer N. Zald and Roberta Ash in volume 44 of the periodical "Social Forces." Topics include the history of protest movements since 1966, the transformation of social movement organizations (SMOs), and the work of sociologists including Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly.

We propose a political reform theory, a political and historical institutionalist argument that holds that shifts in political structures, partisan regimes and policy greatly influence movements. We appraise this argument, along with resource mobilization, political opportunity and media alternatives, by analyzing 600,000 articles in the New York Times and Washington Post that mention national U.S. social movement organizations (SMOs) in the largest 34 SMO industries across the twentieth century. We provide multivariate analyses of industry-level article mentions of SMOs and detailed analyses of the historical trajectories of coverage across the century. Although we find some support for major theories of movements and media influences, the political reform theory is strongly supported and outperforms standard political opportunity models. We conclude with suggestions to synthesize theories and for research on movement and media outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research on the consequences of social movements typically aims to identify determinants of success or to draw attention to ways that social movements are able to secure new benefits for constituents by gaining concessions from political authorities. Yet social movements, even those that are ultimately defeated, may have an enduring impact on the communities in which they were once active. This impact may be far removed from the movement's stated goals and may be detrimental to constituents and to society at large. We identify an empirical relationship between Ku Klux Klan activism in the 1960s and increased numbers of homicides in southern U.S. counties in subsequent decades. We explain this finding by drawing attention to ways in which right-wing extremism can disrupt community cohesion, generate mistrust in legal authorities, and promote interpretations of conflict and conflict resolution that weaken constraints on violent behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Polish farmers became politically contentious after democratization in 1989, despite their minimal involvement in the Solidarity movement. I test the effectiveness of social movement theories in explaining this phenomenon by examining frequency and intensity of protest from 1980-1995. I find that grievance models have little explanatory power, political opportunity accounts for the frequency of protest, and resource mobilization offers insight into both frequency and intensity of protests. Supplementing existing theories, I offer qualitative evidence that development programs designed to restructure agricultural cooperatives created mobilizing structures. The reforms were intended to help family farmers adapt to the new market economy, but because most protests targeted liberalization policies, I conclude that in their short-term success, development agencies inadvertently subsidized the cost of collection action against their long-term goals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How do social movements influence corporations? Recent work suggests that movements can inflict material damage on their targets and shape categories of evaluation in organizational fields. Extending these ideas, we examine the effects of anti-sweatshop campaigns on sales, stock performance, reputation and specialized ratings of U.S. firms, using fixed-effects regression models and event study methods. The analysis demonstrates that social movements can in some circumstances shape both the markets and fields that firms inhabit. Specifically, anti-sweatshop campaigns (1. had negative effects on sales (though only among certain types of firms), (2. influenced stock prices, and (3. shaped specialized ratings of corporate responsibility. They also diminished previously positive corporate reputations (to a modest degree) but did not radically alter reputational hierarchies in the business community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Why do some social movement leaders work harder than others? And, how does gender affect the patterns we uncover? Utilizing historical case study evidence of local chapters in the emerging movement opposing drinking and driving we are able to develop and test theoretical expectations about predictors of weekly effort among MADD and RID leaders. Taken together, our model explains 45 percent of the variation in leadership effort. We find bureaucratic complexity and victim support activities are more powerful predictors of effort than are individual leader characteristics, although all are important. Further analysis reveals that gender almost wholly conditions the strong effect of bureaucratic complexity on leadership effort so that increasingly complex chapter structures are associated with substantial increases in work hours for women but not men. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Formal organizations share a common set of characteristics that include identifiable operating principles and coordinating mechanisms as well as lines of authority and communication. However, some organizations -- especially those on the margins of institutional fields -- creatively combine institutional and anti-institutional characteristics. This tendency, which I call organizational liminality, represents a way in which certain groups resist the isomorphic tendencies of modern organizational life. By comparing a group called The Fellowship, a religious organization of national and world leaders, with peer organizations, I show how formalized liminality is an intentional organizational strategy and discuss how this produces unique resources and liabilities for the group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domestic violence continues to be a serious problem for women in the United States. As a result, the battered women's movement has been tireless in campaigning for greater awareness of the issue, tougher penalties against offenders, and public vigilance against potential batterers, including fathers from dissolving families. In reaction to this stance, a small but vocal countermovement composed of activists in the fathers' rights movement has argued that the BWM is guilty of what I term enemy boundary creep, a perception whereby these men maintain that they have been inappropriately targeted. Using 40 in-depth interviews with fathers' rights activists located across the country, this article details the narrative that these men have composed as to why the BWM is expanding the scope of its enemies, the tactics that the BWM is using in this campaign, and the insidious effects that these efforts are having on fathers across the country. This narrative formulates a boundary-push back response. This analysis thus articulates how an unlikely countermovement can use the accusation of enemy boundary creep by its social movement opponents in an effort to shift the political discourse on a significant public problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines the influence of types of protest activities, Congressional hearings and political characteristics on environmental legislation enacted from 1961-1990. We find that rates of environmental protest rise with increases in the amount of previous institutional activities, but extra-institutional activities do not raise the overall rate of protest. Protest has no direct effect on the passage of legislation, but institutional protest activities significantly raise the rate of Congressional hearings on the environment. When comparing all environmental laws to those designated as having a major impact, we find both similarities and differences. For example, prior legislative activity decreases both rates, but increases in criteria air pollutants and partisan characteristics of Congress significantly affect only the rates of major environmental legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study proposes a theoretical framework to understand how nations deal with collective memories of perpetration of severe human rights violations, which do not fit comfortably in any national master narrative but have become increasingly difficult to ignore. Building on studies of collective memory, the framework explicates how initial historical conditions of the nation, domestic social movements, and the degree of international pressures move the national discourse along two key dimensions - (1. acceptance of guilt and (2. international orientation of the discourse - which map out seven possible responses to collective trauma of perpetration. Through examination of the history of post-war Japan and content analyses of newspaper editorials and prime ministers' speeches from 1945 through 2004, the empirical analysis applies the framework to the Japanese case. The analysis reveals that arguments for apologies to Asian victims have gained ground due to the intensification of domestic social movements, international pressures from neighboring countries, and global human rights influence. It also shows that arguments that evade the ugly past have persisted because of the initial conditions immediately after 1945, overwhelming emphasis on Japanese victims in the ensuing decades, and recent appropriation of human rights language by proponents of the defensive arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite great interest in the role of social networks as channels of political mobilization, few studies have examined which types of social networks work more effectively in recruiting political activists. Using the Citizen Participation Study data, this study shows that contrary to the conventional wisdom in the literature, there is little evidence that strong ties are more effective than weak ties in recruiting activists. Ties formed in civic associations, however, are more effective than other ties in recruiting protest participants. Neighborhood ties are more effective in recruiting community activists, but not in other types of activity. I conclude that the contents of relationships and the identities shared by two people, rather than tie strength, form the basis of interpersonal influence in political activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many social movement researchers question the usefulness of political opportunity as a concept. However, others argue that it can be refined by disaggregating different opportunities for actors and outcomes to understand the underlying mechanisms that influence each. This research extends this analysis by asking "political opportunity for whom?" Looking at Canadian Aboriginal mobilization, it assesses how different opportunities influence a broad range of movement actors and organizations. Using data from a 50-year period it assesses how contemporaneous, lagged and change regression modeling of opportunities affect results. The article finds that structural opportunities around resources robustly influence a wide range of mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research regarding the impact of repression on social movements has yielded conflicting findings; some argue that repression decreases the total quantity of protest events while others argue that it motivates protest. To move beyond this impasse, various scholars have suggested exploring how repression influences the quality of social movements. This study assesses the impact repression had on the information of alliances between different social groups participating in South Korea's democracy movement. Results from negative binomial regression analyses show that repression facilitated the formation of alliances between movement actors at a time when the overall number of protest events decreased. This study contributes to the literature on coercion and mobilization by pointing to the possibility of movement development during low levels of a protest cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on social movements and public policy has expanded tremendously in recent years, yet little of this work considers the role of movement opponents in the political process or how the movement-countermovement dynamic is influential in contests over policy. This historical study begins to fill this void by analyzing the contestation between employers and labor movement actors in relation to two critical right-to-work campaigns in the industrial Midwest in the 1950s. I find that actors who balance formal, professionalized organization with a more localized presence on the ground are in a better position to pursue multiple mechanisms of influence and to shape policy, while internal divisions severely limit their prospects. Event structure analyses of right-to-work campaigns advance this discussion, revealing how social movement organizational characteristics matter to the extent that they enable opposing movements to counter each other's actions in unfolding political processes. I conclude by discussing the implications of the findings for perspectives on social movements and politics, and for research dealing specifically with the U.S. labor movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In what way do movements move? What do we mean by the movement of movements? While still a rather unconventional stance, I advance the argument that social movements are, at root, culture production agents. Regardless of whatever else they may accomplish, movements produce new cultural forms in the course of struggle; they often change and augment cultural stock in the process, and sometimes live on for generations in collective memory. My answer to the query follows a movement-centered production and circulation of culture template organized around several major moments of culture moves: moving across space, moving emotions, moving social-cultural conditions and moving through memory. I illustrate culture moves in these four moments using sociological and historical studies of the long civil rights movement, suggesting a variety of research agendas along the way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the effect of segregationist murders, in conjunction with black protest, on federal passage of black voting-rights policies. Using time-series regression techniques, I find that white violence diminished federal responsiveness to black protest from the '30s through the end of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration. But by President Lyndon B. Johnson's administration and the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, violence stimulated government response to black protest. I argue that the historically contingent nature of the violence effect is attributable to the changing nature of the audience. Segregationist violence seems to have helped the movement win Southern suffrage only when the audience was attentive, sympathetic and involved in the policy conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1960s and 70s the United States environmental movement experienced dramatic growth in both absolute size and in the diversity of organizational structures and issues represented within the movement. We assess the importance of change in movement size and compositional diversity on two important stages within the legislative process. Findings indicate that U.S. environmental movement size is positively associated with the incidence of Congressional environmental agenda-setting activities, but not the passage of environmental laws. An increased diversity of issue representation within the movement is consistently and positively associated with the incidence of agenda setting and law-passage activity. The growth of EMOs attending simultaneously to both traditional conservation and "new" quality of life issues, in particular, is associated with elevated rates of policy activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although past research has failed to establish a link between protest and policy change, we reexamine the relationship at the agenda-setting stage of policymaking. We assert that protestors compete for attention among lawmakers at the agenda-setting stage. An issue receives more attention when the frequency of protest activity around a particular issue is sufficiently high for that issue to stand out within the field of competing issues. We examine this process by analyzing the factors associated with increasing and fluctuating attention to rights-related issues in Congress. We find that protest, issue legitimacy and issue competition account for variation in the number of congressional hearings granted to rights issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article illustrates two conceptual and methodological problems that interfere with the accurate identification and measurement of religious mobilization in global civil society. First, data used to study the organizational composition of global culture contain a selection bias that favors organizations within an elite stratum of the world polity, to the neglect of organizations in the lower strata, where religious mobilization is likely to be more prevalent. Second, religious mobilization is measured as if religion were a distinct sector of social life, not allowing for any overlap with other sectors. Through a comparison of data sources and methods, this article illustrates both the selection bias and prevalence of religious mobilization in human rights, an arena that is often assumed to be secular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time-series data from 1960-1998 is used to test hypotheses regarding the impact of protest and public opinion on the passage of U.S. environmental legislation. An amplification model of policy impact is introduced which posits that protest affects legislative action independent of public opinion as suggested by protest event theorists, whereas the impact of public opinion on legislative action is greater depending on the level of protest. Evidence is found for the existence of an amplification mechanism between environmental movement protest and public opinion, where public opinion affects policy above and beyond its independent effect when protest raises the salience of the issue to legislators. These findings point to the need to restructure analyses of the impact of social movements on public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists often assert, but rarely test, the claim that organizational diversity benefits social movements by invigorating movement vitality and facilitating success. Our analysis of black civil rights organizations shows that goal and tactical diversity of a social movement is largely a function of organizational density, level of resources available to the movement, and the number of protests initiated by the movement. Goal diversity increases the rate of protest, whereas tactical diversity increases the likelihood of achieving a desired policy outcome. These findings advance our understanding of social movements and organizations by illuminating how organizational dynamics of a social movement might change over time, and in turn how this change might affect the vitality and desired outcomes of social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robert Michels' famous "iron law of oligarchy" has come under criticism from scholars that question assumptions regarding the concentration of power within social movement organizations (SMOs). Despite such concerns, Michels' broader interests in organizational structure and power continue to be relevant for analyzing the goals and strategies of SMOs. The recent revitalization of the American labor movement presents a unique opportunity to explore these topics within the context of union organizing efforts. Findings based on the organizing activities of 70 local unions measured from 1990-2001 indicate that the distribution of authority has clear effects on the allocation of resources for organizing, the type of repertoire selected to recruit new members, and, to a lesser extent, the outcome of the organizing drive. Although the analysis provides insight into unions today, the conceptualization of authority and outcomes explored have wider implications for research on formal organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the reasons behind a historic shift in the language couching the wage demands of two North American labor movements during the last twenty years of the 19th century -- the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor. We trace how the once dominant imagery of "wage slavery" lost its connection to producerist labor ideology and eventually was replaced by the more progmatic symbolism of "wage work." This linguistic shift is of particular scholarly importance because it occurred during a time when producerist labor politics, with its emphasis on a radical reorganization of work and private property, lost significant ground to a more consumerist/economistic version of labor politics. We show that this pivotal rhetorical shift was linked to changes in tire cultural opportunity structure. These were, in turn, shaped through movement sector dynamics and through changes in the empirical referents which add meaning and resonance to social movement claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a 1995 national survey of 2,870 Chinese private entrepreneurs, this article examines collaboration between private business and government in times of economic transition. Much as in the late 18th century situation in France as described by Tocqueville, special moments occur when a newly emerging business class offers monetary payments for charity and for honorary offices. In exchange, the government, desperate for new sources of revenue, provides social recognition and political access. The data suggest that into at least the 19905 Chinese private entrepreneurs donated generously to government welfare projects, and in exchange gained political access and social status via appointment to political councils. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses social movement framing, generally, and within contemporary animal rights movements specifically by conducting focus group analyses of a non-activist population. This contrasts with previous studies of recruitment that have examined the conversion process retroactively, culling data from those already involved in a cause. By soliciting the thoughts of non-activists, the efficacy of recruitment efforts and resonance of movement frames can be gauged through the reactions of those whom the movement is attempting to reach: the uninitiated. Ultimately, the question is raised: is it preferable to get noticed in a negative way or not at all? The findings constitute a cautionary tale for social movement organizations that employ incendiary language or images in their recruitment efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a theoretical framework to analyze global dimensions of contemporary social movements and attempts to answer the empirical question: why did the social movement for former comfort women emerge in the late 1980s after more than 40 years of silence? The theoretical framework integrates the world polity approach into social movement theory to argue that global political and cultural transformations in recent years have expanded political opportunities at the global level and intensified international flows of mobilizational resources and discursive frames, increasing the potential for social movements on globally legitimated issues such as human rights. The empirical analysis on the rise and development of the comfort women movement shows that these global factors have been crucial in the emergence and success of the movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper applies a Boolean approach to examine the social background of movements for linguistic human rights. Predictive determinants to explain the occurrence of LHRs movements in this study included linguistic diversity within a country, literacy rate, population size, national income as an index of affluence, and the existence of a constitution supporting those rights. Data for 159 countries were collected and analyzed using a Boolean analysis. The result of the analysis shows that there are four combinations of economic and linguistic conditions that cause LHRs movements in a country. A further analysis with varying cutoff values reveals that the combination GD (higher gross income AND linguistic diversity) is the "strongest" condition for LHRs movements in the four combinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement research suggests that protest is effective because it de-legitimizes existing policies and imposes costs on power holders. I test this hypothesis with data on African-American student protest and the creation of departments of African-American Studies. I find that non-disruptive protest, such as rallies and demonstrations, has a positive effect on the probability that a university will create a Department of African-American Studies. Disruptive protest, such as sit-ins and vandalism, has no significant effect. I argue that non-disruptive protests are successful because they allow sympathetic administrators to act on behalf of political challengers, while disruptive protests deprive administrators of the legitimacy needed to enact change. I also find limited evidence of intra-university mimicry as a factor in the creation of African-American Studies programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we develop a quadripartite classification of social movement participants based on the participants' levels of interest in a movement goal and the amount of resources that the participants contribute to the movement. We use the latent class model to determine the percentage of participants in each of the four categories in our classification system for the case of the 1999 anti-U.S. student demonstrations in Beijing in the aftermath of the Belgrade Embassy bombing. Finally, we apply the multinomial logit regression to investigate the mechanisms behind the mobilization of different types of participants during the anti-U.S. demonstrations. Our analysis and empirical findings not only show the importance of studying movement mobilization based on a classification of movement participants, but also reveal much about the nature of the 1999 anti-U.S. demonstrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe a theory of legislative logic. This logic is based on the observation that each succeeding stage of the legislative process has increasingly stringent rules and becomes more consequential. This logic unevenly distributes the influence of social movements across the legislative process. Social movements should have less influence at later stages where stringent requirements are more likely to exhaust limited resources and where the consequentiality of action will cause legislators to revoke their support. We apply the theory to a study of state-level woman suffrage legislation. We find that legislators responded to suffragists by bringing the issue of woman suffrage to the legislative forum, but once suffrage bills reached the voting stage, differences in social movement tactics and organization did not have as great an impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1980s, homeless people formed social movement organizations and mobilized collective action events in cities across the U.S. From the vantage point of social movement theories and scholarship on homelessness, it is surprising that homeless protest was so prevalent in the 1980s. Yet we find evidence of homeless protest events across no fewer than 50 U.S. cities in the 1980--90 period. Drawing on social movement theories about the precipitants of mobilization, we examine the extent to which city-level contextual factors, and their change over time, affect variation in the frequency of homeless mobilization across 17 of these cities. Our findings reveal that a mix of factors congruent with strain and resource mobilization theories helps to account for variation in the frequency of homeless protest across U.S. cities in the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on social movements shows why the Japanese American reparations movement was successful, while the African American reparations movement has had far less success. How the claim is framed is extremely important for a reparations movement. Even though treatment of African Americans in the past violated key contemporary precepts such as the importance of bodily integrity, the ideal of equality, and the sanctity of private property, African American claimants encounter several problems. Victims of direct harms are dead, perpetrators are diffuse, some of the actual harms were legal at the time they were committed, and the causal chain of harm is long and complex. Some estimates of reparations due would also impose unreasonable burdens on government and American citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how structural conditions and social movement frames interact to influence mobilization and political consequences of social movements. Mobilization efforts benefit when movement framing is congruent with local structural conditions. This mobilization, in turn, produces political leverage for the movement through its capacity to deliver support of its members and adherents. Its political advantage may be offset, however, if another of its key framing activities, the construction of collective identity boundaries, alienates the broader population and stimulates a backlash. Such backlash is also intimately connected to structural conditions because its potential is a function of the characteristics of the local population -- specifically, the proportion of the population alienated by the movement's boundary construction. We apply these arguments to the case of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and show that while the Klan's diagnostic and prognostic framing may have resonated structurally and facilitated the Klan's mobilization efforts, its exclusionary boundaries frustrated its attempts to secure broader political gains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social capital plays a central role in facilitating the mobilization of social movement organizations (SMOs). Do the initial mobilization advantages of social capital persist, however, as movement organizations evolve? And do the strategies pursued by social movement organizations affect these advantages? We investigate these questions through a broad empirical analysis of factors affecting the short-term persistence of local chapters of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). Reasoning that multiple forms of social capital would each have a positive impact on survival, we assess the independent effect of several indicators of social capital with mixed results. Consistent with prior research, we find that access to patronage at founding and a greater stock of weak ties in the community confer survival advantages. Yet SMOs that emerged from preexisting groups and those with leaders previously tied to one another through civic engagement were less likely to persist, raising a first cautionary flag about the generality of advantages of resource co-optation and "bloc recruitment." The effect of preexisting, strong ties among group leaders varies by how much emphasis the group placed on victim aid activities. Those ties conferred expected survival advantages on groups that did not strongly emphasize victim aid activities. The implications of these results are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine patterns of citizen participation in the global human rights movement through memberships in human rights international nongovernmental organizations (HRINGOs). After showing enormous growth in the number of HRINGOs in recent decades, we investigate country level characteristics leading to greater participation in the international human rights movement. Drawing on the social movement literature and world society theory, we employ multivariate regression analyses to explain HRINGO memberships in 1978, 1988 and 1998. To understand changes over time, we also use panel analyses for 1978-88 and 1988-98. The strongest predictors of memberships in HRINGOs are found to be embeddedness in global civil society and international flows of human resources. The effects of these international factors grew stronger over time while domestic factors became less important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizational resources and group solidarity are central foci in literature on social movements generally and worker insurgency specifically. Research, however, seldom deals with both simultaneously and their potential interrelations. In this article, we examine the complex relationships between union organization and worker solidarity relative to strike action. We draw on a data set of 133 content-coded workplace ethnographies and use a combination of qualitative comparative analysis and more standard statistical techniques. Consistent with expectations, results suggest union presence and worker solidarity, in and of themselves, have little meaningful association with strikes. Rather, it is their co-presence that bolsters strike likelihood. Conversely, a lack of union presence in combination with a lack of collective mobilization history diminishes overall strike potential. We conclude by discussing the implications of our argument and findings for more general social movement perspectives as well as prior work dealing specifically with unions, solidarity, and collective resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the social movement literature recognizes the interactive nature of collective action, models almost uniformly focus on protestors themselves. Consequently, we know a great deal about how social movement organizations recruit participants, mobilize resources, and initiate activity, but have considerably less understanding of how authorities allocate repression in response to (and sometimes in anticipation of) protest events. Here, I use memos from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) counter intelligence program (COINTELPRO) against the New Left between 1968 and 1971 to understand the patterning of repression against protest groups. COINTELPRO is a unique data source; the program was autonomous from other government agencies and was organized solely to covertly "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the activities of FBI targets. The level of tangible threat proxied by New Left groups' size, level of activity, or propensity for violence did not directly structure FBI activity. Instead, these target group characteristics were mediated by organizational processes endogenous to the FBI itself Specifically, central actors in the FBI allocated organizational controls that ensured that visible (i.e., nonlocal) targets were repressed independent of the targets' local activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]