Insurgent Tactics and Institutional Actors: Explaining the Growth of Grassroots Lobbying.

Along with the increasing institutionalization of social movements in the West, agents who typically operate within political and economic institutions have adopted strategies normally associated with insurgent social movements, and are increasingly likely to employ such tactics as protest, petitioning, and community organizing. This analysis builds from the idea that a two-sided diffusion process has taken place that entails both the institutionalization of insurgent activity and the adoption of insurgent tactics by those within dominant institutions. The emphasis of this paper is on the latter side of the process: the widening adoption of insurgent tactics by institutional actors. The proposed research is based on a unique set of listings for "grassroots lobbying" firms provided by the magazine Campaigns & Elections between the years 1990-2004. These sources are supplemented using a triangulated method including a number of print and online directories. Together, these listings will provide a variety of measures, including a listing of each organization's client base, its size and founding date, its fee income, and the full range of tactical methods it offers. Initial conclusions will be drawn with respect to the historical and environmental factors that shaped the development of the organizational field of grassroots lobbying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]