Small Victories in the Fight Against Capital Punishment: How Incremental Progress Affects Social Movement Organizations.

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 ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]