Claiming Credit: The Social Construction of Movement Success.

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]