Small Victories and Social Movements: How Incremental Progress Affects Movement Support and Strategy.

Though most social movements form in order to press for significant social change, unequivocal policy success is rare and difficult to achieve. Instead, movements may win incremental victories--increased public attention or media coverage, Congressional hearings, judicial rulings in lower courts--that stop short of the movement's ultimate goals. Drawing on data collected from different anti-death penalty organizations around the United States, this paper investigates how such partial success affects the subsequent level of support and resource endowments of movement organizations. In so doing, this paper contributes to a larger body of work that studies movement outcomes, while reorienting the focus to how movements react to lesser gains. Ultimately, I argue, the impact of small victories is curvilinear: movements initially benefit from incremental advances both in terms of support and income levels. However, continued success produces an eventual tipping point where gains actually contribute to sharp declines in support and resources. Overall, small gains or setbacks in formal institutional arenas--legislatures and courts--have more of an impact than more informal changes in behavior, attitudes, and practices. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]