Sidney Tarrow

• PhD
• Cornell University

Legal and social movement scholars have long puzzled over the role of movements in moving, being moved by, and changing the meanings of the law. But for decades, these two strands of scholarship only dovetailed at their edges, in the work of a few far-seeing scholars. The fields began to more productively merge before and after the turn of the cent...

This paper considers some reasons why there have been few comparisons between European and American social movements. It then considers some of the advantages from a comparative approach, offers examples in which comparative research can help to improve analysis and interpretation, and outlines some problems faced by students of comparative social...

An intellectual movement has been gaining ground in the social sciences around the adoption of mechanism‐based explanations, as complements to, or even substitutes for, variable‐based explanations. In sociology, Arthur Stinchcombe emphasized studying causal mechanisms as part of a larger repertoire of methods of sociological research. Peter Hedströ...

“Contentious politics” means episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claims and their objects when: (i) at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the claims, and (ii) the claims would, if realized, affect the interests of at least one of the claimants or objects of claims . Roughly translated, the de...

Was the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 an insurrection by an uncontrolled mob or the result of a carefully planned plot by an outgoing president? This entry argues that it was a combination of both – made possible by the transformation of the Republican Party over several decades into a “movement‐party.” Donald Trump did not initiate th...

Many political scientists regard Donald Trump as a particularly unusual type of politician, but this entry argues that he is the charismatic leader of a social movement, one that is the latest in a long line of extreme right‐wing movements in America. Trumpism, it will be argued, resembles classical authoritarian movements like Italian fascism, but...

Movements and parties have given rise to two largely separates specialties in the social sciences. This Element is an effort to link the two literatures, using evidence from American political development. It identifies five relational mechanisms governing movement/party relations: two of them short term, two intermediate term, and one long-term. I...

Descriptive or ethnographic studies were once the stock-in-trade of the comparative politics of non-Western areas and illiberal states. The last few decades have seen a dramatic growth in quantitative—or at least systematic—studies of these systems. This marks real progress, but, in the process, some of the advantages of ethnographic and “unit-cont...

Scholars have long found profound normative and structural differences between the privacy movements of Europe and the United States, alongside incompatible regimes of regulation. After 9/11, both Europe and the U.S. adopted increasingly intrusive digital security measures, which impinged on the privacy of commercial and personal data. Both the ove...

Scholars have long found profound normative and structural differences between the privacy movements of Europe and the United States, alongside incompatible regimes of regulation. After 9/11, both Europe and the US adopted increasingly intrusive digital security measures, which impinged on the privacy of commercial and personal data. Both the overl...

Over the course of five decades, a social scientist can register many achievements – but can make many mistakes as well. This paper details some of those achievements but also admits to some of those mistakes and explains what can be learned from them over a career spent studying social movements, local politics, political parties, and contentious...

Social movements are an inherently complex, multifaceted set of phenomena, permitting any number of viable analytic perspectives. In the 1950s and the 1960s, scholars of contentious politics took the relations between social movements and their social and economic contexts seriously: Politics, for these early specialists, was part of the transmissi...

The relationship among war, peace, and social movements is complicated by three paradoxes. The first is that since democratic states have to work hard to build support for war, they try to increase their legitimacy, which can lead to both democratization and to greater social benefits. This leads to a second paradox: both the pressures of war makin...

Not long after the completion of Michael Mann’s “quadrilogy” on The Sources of Social Power (1986–2012), social scientists began to interrogate the meaning of his concepts of “despotic” and “infrastructural” power. While we know that the former is the most evident sign of danger in times of war, less well understood is the role of infrastructural p...

Constitutional law, technological innovations, and the rise of a cultural “right to know” have recently combined to yield “fake news,” as illustrated by an anti-abortion citizen-journalist sting operation that scammed Planned Parenthood. We find that the First Amendment, as construed by the Supreme Court, offers scant protection for activist journa...

In his vast body of social scientific work, Charles Tilly made two fundamental contributions to our understanding of the development of the modern state. First, rather than developing naturally out of collective life or as the result of constitution making, Tilly argued that states grew out of war and preparations for war. In a second part of his w...

In his scientific production, Charles Tilly broke new ground in two major areas: the study of war and state-building and the study of contentious politics and social movements. Many scholars followed him and elaborated on each of these strands, but few—including Tilly—attempted to link them together. Both in the historical war and state-building an...

In his scientific output, Charles Tilly broke new ground in two major areas: the study of war and state-building, and the study of contentious politics and social movements. Many scholars followed and elaborated on each of these strands, but few - including Tilly - attempted to link them to one another. Both in the historical study of war and state...

Response to W. Lance Bennett’s review of The Language of Contention: Revolutions in Words, 1688–2012. - Volume 12 Issue 2 - Sidney Tarrow

Since the 1980s, social movement scholars have investigated the dynamic of movement/countermovement interaction. Most of these studies posit movements as initiators, with countermovements reacting to their challenges. Yet sometimes a movement supports an agenda in response to a countermovement that engages in what we call “anticipatory countermobil...

The 1981 APSA Annual Meeting Program: Some Thoughts and Suggestions - Volume 13 Issue 4 - Theodore J. Lowi, Sidney G. Tarrow

“Contentious politics” means episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claims and their objects when: (a) at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the claims, and (b) the claims would, if realized, affect the interests of at least one of the claimants or objects of claims. Roughly translated, the defi...

This book examines the relations between the material and political bases of contentious politics and the construction, diffusion, and endurance of contentious language. Beginning with the language of revolution developed from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, it examines contentious language at work, in gender and race relations and in...

This book contains the products of work carried out over four decades of research in Italy, France and the United States, and in the intellectual territory between social movements, comparative politics, and historical sociology. Using a variety of methods ranging from statistical analysis to historical case studies to linguistic analysis, the book...

In this article, the authors focus attention on a poorly understood aspect of contentious politics: the interaction between the transnational diffusion of new forms of protest behavior and police practices in response to them. Studies of diffusion are usually limited to the diffusion of one kind of innovation by one set of actors to another, as in...

As war clouds gathered over Europe and Asia in the early 1940s, Harold Lasswell feared the coming of a garrison state, "a world in which the specialists on violence are the most powerful group in society." Lasswell worried that as state power expanded to prepare for and fight wars, technology tied to militarism would pose a threat to democracy. The...

Why do two cognate literatures - social movements and electoral studies -travel along parallel paths with little conversation between them? And what can be done to connect them in the future? Drawing ontheir work with the late Charles Tilly on Dynamics of Contention (2001), Doug McAdam and Sidney Tarrow examine the reciprocal links between movement...

In this chapter, Tilly’s work on revolutions and state-building are connected to each other to show how state building and contentious mechanisms combined to produce both the terror and the foundation for the people’s army and other foundations for mass politics.

Ten years from the publication of Dynamics of Contention, written with Charles Tilly, the editors of Mobilization have asked us to identify work that reflects on the perspectives presented in that book. Dynamics of Contention attempted too many things: accounts of contention in Western and non-Western societies; consideration of a variety of forms...

Social movements have an elusive power but one that is altogether real. From the French and American revolutions to the post-Soviet, ethnic, and terrorist movements of today, contentious politics exercises a fleeting but powerful influence on politics, society, and international relations. This study surveys the modern history of the modern social...

Post-Imperial Democracies: Ideologies and Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia. By Hanson Stephen E.. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 274p. $90.00 cloth, $26.99 paper. - Volume 8 Issue 4 - Sidney Tarrow

What are the pathways through which a new form of collective action, a new collective action frame, or a new social movement spreads? Do such collective phenomena diffuse autonomously, or in response to the institutional practices to which they are directed? Under what conditions does the horizontal diffusion of contention give way to broader confi...

Why do two cognate literatures—social movements and electoral studies—travel along parallel paths with little conversation between them? And what can be done to connect them in the future? Drawing on their work with the late Charles Tilly on Dynamics of Contention (2001), Doug McAdam and Sidney Tarrow examine two important studies that approach (bu...

Paired comparison is a strategy of political analysis that has been widely used but seldom theorized. This is because it is often assimilated to single-case studies or regarded as a degenerate form of multicase analysis. This article argues that paired comparison is a distinct strategy of comparative analysis with advantages that both single-case a...

Charles Tilly, who passed away in April 2008, left a rich heritage of contributions to both history and the social sciences – and, in particular, to historical social science on France Among his most enduring contributions was one that grew out of his last book on France, La France conteste: the concept of the “repertoire of conflict.” This cultura...

Since the 1990s, observers have seen globalization impairing labor’s rights. We take Charles Tilly as an exemplar of this view, subjecting his 1995 article to critical appreciation. We argue that Tilly, known for his work on the National Social Movement, overlooked the fact that some unions under pressure from global neo-liberalism can employ a pro...

Many have argued that the success of European integration is predicated on reinforcing market structures and some have gone further to state that the creation of a transnational market results in a decoupling of markets from their national political and social frameworks, thus threatening to unravel historical social bargains. Drawing on the work o...

The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics offers a critical survey of the field of empirical political science through the collection of a set of articles written by forty-seven scholars in the discipline of comparative politics. Part I includes articles surveying the key research methodologies employed in comparative politics (the comparative me...

“Is the traditional divide between domestic and international politics breaking down?” and, if so, with what effects on transnational human rights activism? This paper argues that small and focused transnational campaigns can have dramatic short-term results that its large-scale and bureaucratic cousins are too slow-moving to effect; it illustrates...

Será que o crescimento de uma sociedade civil global é um processo cumulativo, ou estamos apenas presenciando o afloramento transnacional de uma série de Estados? Colocando essa pergunta de forma mais geral: "Será que a tradicional divisão entre políticas nacionais e internacionais está se decompondo?" Grande parte do futuro do ativismo social e tr...

In the mid-1990s, the study of nonroutine, or contentious, politics had become a thriving but fragmented interdisciplinary field of study, with expertise divided across a confusing patchwork of disciplinary boundaries, geographic areas, historical eras, and nominally different types of contention (revolutions, peasant rebellions, strikes, social mo...

Not many years ago both anthropology and political science experienced internal disputes—in the first case over the publication of a book accusing a noted anthropologist of endangering indigenous subjects and in the second over the nature of the field. While the first led to polarization, the second produced a partial convergence and modest reforms...

Most authors sooner or later have the experience of writing something and finding that reviewers read a completely different piece than what they thought they had written. At other times, reviewers read your work, all right, but virtually vivisect it. But there are times when reviewers not only grasp the kernel of what authors have tried to say, bu...

A substantial intellectual movement has been growing in the social sciences around the adoption of mechanism- and process-based explanations as complements to variable-based explanations, or even as substitutes for them. But once we have recognized the validity and dignity of studying mechanisms and processes, what is the next step? Recently, both...

Charles Tilly developed the concept of the repertoire of contention over a long and distinguished career. It wasn't easy and it wasn't quick. In addition to being easily distracted, Tilly also needed to develop the analytical tools with which to study repertoires and performances and complete his transformation from what he called "an old structura...

Different forms of contentious politics such as social movements, revolutions, ethnic mobilizations, and cycles of protest share a number of causal properties, but disciplinary fragmentation has obscured their similarities. Recent works and this new journal - Mobilization - provide opportunities for comparison and synthesis. A network of researcher...

Peter Katzenstein is a prodigiously productive scholar. As a comparativist, a student of international relations, an historian, and one who has successfully bridged the qualitative and quantitative divide in our discipline, he has made signal contributions to general international relations, political economy, security studies, European and German...

s (MTT) Dynamics of Contention is a major achievement in conflict studies and indeed the social sciences. Their goal is to "treat social interaction, social ties, communication, and conversation not merely as expressions of structure, rationality, consciousness, or culture but as active sites of creation and change. We have come to think of interpe...

This article sets out to chart the evolving institutional structure of the EU, in the context of theories about forms of state. 'Forms of state' are taken to be conceptually possible expressions of political authority organized at the national and transnational levels, here dealt with as emphases and qualities to be accented rather than phenomena t...

Schmitter for helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper. Our efforts were joined thanks to the intellectual brokerage of Liesbet Hooghe. The order of the authors' names reflects nothing more than alphabetical accident.

This article focuses on a seemingly paradoxical sequel to the 1999 Seattle WTO protests: the weakening of the global justice movement in the United States. While the movement has flourished in Europe, it seems largely to have stagnated in the American context. This outcome cannot be explained by either American exceptionalism or by a general declin...

Understanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis. Edited by Paul Collier and Nicholas Sambanis. 2 vols. Washington, DC: World Bank Publications, 2003. 800p. $60.00; $40.00 Vol. 1, $40.00 Vol. 2. The Logic of Violence in Civil War. By Stathis Kalyvas. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 508p. $70.00 cloth, $27.99 paper. Inside Rebellion: The P...

In this article, the authors examine the potential for concerted collective action in the societies that emerged from state socialism in East-Central Europe after 1989. Although scholars have found strong individual-level evidence that protest potential is weaker here than in other parts of the world, the authors question whether individual-level d...

S HORTLY after the third wave of democratization, Francis Fuku-yama's "The End of History" and Lucian Pye's "Political Science and the Crisis of Authoritarianism" became oft-quoted readings for political scientists, alongside the existing core of regime transition lit-erature. 1 For a brief moment, it seemed as if it were just a matter of time befo...

The article focuses on the cycle of protest that developed in Italy during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some hypotheses on the evolution of the repertoires of action are tested with the aim of explaining the emergence of political violence during a cycle of protest. Newspaper-based data are presented on the proportional presence of violent forms...

As Jane and Peter Schneider's work has shifted over the past three decades, from the Mafia in a Sicilian village to the antimafia movement in Palermo, their epistemology has changed too, from a world systems approach influenced by Wallerstein, to a more political process-centered approach that shows their ethnographic skills to best advantage. Wher...

Beginning his career as a structurally oriented area specialist in Italy in the mid-1960s, Sidney Tarrow moved on to a paired comparison of France and Italy, then to more process-oriented work on social movements and contentious politics, and finally to European and transnational contention. In this article, he traces his theoretical development as...

From labor organizers to immigrant activists, from environmentalists to human rights campaigners, from global justice protesters to Islamic militants, this book shows how ordinary people gain new perspectives, experiment with new forms of action, and sometimes emerge with new identities through their contacts across borders. It asks to what extent...

In much of the political economy literature, social democratic governments are assumed to defend the interests of labor. The main thrust of this article is that labor is divided into those with secure employment (insiders) and those without (outsiders). I argue that the goals of social democratic parties are often best served by pursuing policies t...

International protests against global capitalism have focused scholars' attention on the highly visible activities of transnational activists and advocates; but the tough, incremental, and deeply embedded work of grassroots social movements has too often been sublimated under the slogan: "Think globally; act locally!" Are transnational activists is...

On February 27, 1997, the president of the ailing French firm Renault announced the imminent closure of the company’s plant in Vilvorde, Belgium. Closing Vilvorde was but a prelude to politically more risky cuts, because the French state is Renault’s largest shareholder, and an election was coming up in France. But the mainly Flemish and heavily un...

Many explanations have been offered for why the dominant city-states of Italy declined, giving way to the larger, national states of Western Europe. Some, like World Systems theorists, have seen the decline of the Italian city-states as the result of the shift of trade from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, while others, like Richard Lachmann, hav...

Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. By Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. 381 pages.

Research on social movements in both political science and sociology was radically renewed by the movements of the 1960s. The 1970s saw the growth in the United States of the resource mobilization approach and in Western Europe of the study of “new movements.” Although political factors were present in both approaches, the connections between polit...

The first part of this chapter examines the four main types of political contention outlined in the introduction to it: expressive contention, reformist contention, integral contention and communal contention. The second section looks at how contentious political movements change; the four types frequently intersect, combine and transmute from one...

Der Protest von Lastwagenfahrern, Landwirten und Fischern ge­gen die hohen Kraftstoffpreise im Herbst des Jahres 2000 lähmte die Volkswirtschaften und stellte für die Regierungen Westeuropas eine ernsthafte Bedrohung dar. Das Druckmittel der Demonstran­ten war einfach, aber effektiv: Sie schnitten die Benzinversorgung für Unternehmen ebenso wie für...

The aim of this book is to highlight and begin to give 'voice' to some of the notable 'silences' evident in recent years in the study of contentious politics. The seven co-authors take up seven specific topics in the volume: the relationship between emotions and contention; temporality in the study of contention; the spatial dimensions of contentio...

In recent decades the study of social movements, revolution, democratization and other non-routine politics has flourished. And yet research on the topic remains highly fragmented, reflecting the influence of at least three traditional divisions. The first of these reflects the view that various forms of contention are distinct and should be studie...

Studies of the European Community typically reach for global explanations "intergovernmentalism" and "supranationalism" being the two main contenders - and mainly revolve around the Brussels core of Europe. But as Europe «europeanizes", we need to find ways of understanding the cleavages and alignments developing between and among Europe's levels a...

Recent scholars have broadened the study of transnational relations, once limited to political economy, to include contentious international politics. This is a refreshing trend, but most of them leap directly from globalization or some other such process to transnational social movements and thence to a global civil society. In addition, they have...

Attempts were made by the first two governments of the Second Spanish Republic in exile to overthrow Franco's dictatorship by pressurising the Francoist secret services. The documents consulted for this article shed new and surprising light on Republican cabinet policy between 1946 and 1947. The discussions between Republican emissaries and high-ra...

European-level government presents new opportunities and constraints for domestic social actors. But barriers remain to contentious action in the transnational realm. Most individuals have difficulty ascribing the sources of their grievances to the EU, transaction costs impede their efforts to coordinate collective action across national boundaries...

Tarrow initially provides a synopsis of Putnam’s widely heralded Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (1993 and with Leonardi and Nanetti). He is encouraging about Putnam’s early narrower project (see Putnam with Leonardi and Nanetti 1988), which shows how a 1970s central political reform was realized quite differently in the dis...

Paradigm warfare is a well-worn way of engaging in the polemics of research, but it frequently reduces paradigms to caricatures and turns complex reports of empirical research into cartoons. This is illustrated by two one-sided accounts of the Chiapas rebellion: one based on a simplistic political opportunity cartoon and the other on a foreshortene...

Chapter 1 A Movement Society: Contentious Politics for a New Century Chapter 2 The Structure and Culture of Collective Protest in Germany since 1950 Chapter 3 Are the Times A-Changin'? Assessing the Acceptance of Protest in Western Democracies Chapter 4 The Institutionalization of Protest in the United States Chapter 5 Policing Protest in France an...

The town of Shoreham is a sleepy ferry port on the south coast of England. But in January 1995, it was the catalyst for a nationwide campaign against the export of live calves to the European continent, where they are slaughtered after gruelling journeys and weeks in wooden crates. After an earlier campaign in the early 1990s, the practice of ‘in-c...

To Map Contentious Politics. Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, Charles Tilly [7-32]. Different forms of contentious politics such as social movements, revolutions, ethnic mobilizations, and cycles of protest share a number of causal properties, but disciplinary fragmentation has obscured their similarities. Recent work provide opportunities for compariso...