WHAT MAKES PROTEST POWERFUL? REINTRODUCING AND ELABORATING CHARLES TILLY'S WUNC CONCEPT.

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WHAT MAKES PROTEST POWERFUL?
REINTRODUCING AND ELABORATING CHARLES TILLY’S WUNC CONCEPT.
Ruud Wouters & Stefaan Walgrave
What makes protest powerful? Prevailing theoretical and empirical accounts of protest impact
stress the importance of a favorable context—an advantageous opportunity structure—to
explain social movement success. This study presents an alternative and complementary
theoretical perspective, stressing the agency of social movements in producing wanted
outcomes. We argue that protest matters in part because of the features it displays, altering
the calculations of observers of protest. The theoretical framework we put forward
reintroduces and elaborates Charles Tilly’s WUNC concept. Tilly’s idea is straightforward—
protestors who succeed to come across as worthy, united, numerous and committed are more
likely to exert influence. We integrate Tilly’s scattered writings on WUNC, embed the concept
in the broader social movement literature, explain why the WUNC components matter and
clarify how they relate to each other. We conclude this theoretical contribution by sketching
the contours of a research program that can empirically tackle the presented WUNC
framework. By more firmly grounding the WUNC concept, we aim to spur debate on how
movements matter.
This is a theoretical paper that was collecting dust in a drawer. In its current format we could
not get it through the peer review system (we tried two journals). We nevertheless think there
is some value in it. We hope the paper might inspire readers (if any) who are interested in the
impact of protest in general and WUNC more specifically. We want to thank several
reviewers for their insightful comments; they shaped our thinking about WUNC. We have
attached these reviews in Appendix. Feel free to contact us for further information or
feedback.
r.j.wouters@uva.nl
stefaan.walgrave@uantwerpen.be
After being for many years an uncomfortable lacuna in the field of social movement research
(see complaints by Giugni, 1998; Soule, McAdam, McCarthy, & Su, 1999; Tarrow, 1994), the
work on the impact of social movements has picked up quite some pace since the turn of the
century (Bosi & Uba, 2009). An increasing number of studies addresses why some protest
matters more than others (for a recent overview see Amenta, Caren, Chiarello, & Su, 2010).
In this starkly growing literature the prevailing theoretical approach looks at the context in
which a movement mobilizes to explain success. Uba (2009) identified 74 studies published
in main sociology journals (1990-2007) tackling the outcomes of movements from a
contextual perspective. Contextual studies’ key contention is that protest primarily matters
when there is a listening ear, a divided government, a political ally, support from public
opinion, or favorable media coverage—in short: an advantageous opportunity structure
(Agnone, 2007; Amenta, Caren, & Olasky, 2005; Cress & Snow, 2000; Johnson, Agnone, &
McCarthy, 2010; Soule & Olzak, 2004). Without such a context, protest efforts are in vain
and rarely lead to tangible consequences. While the contextual perspective has greatly
contributed to knowledge of why and especially when movements matter, it has shifted the
focus away from the agency of social movements (see Andrews & Gaby, 2015; Jasper, 2004;
Maney, Kutz-Flamenbaum, Rohlinger, & Goodwin, 2012; Morris, 2000 for similar

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arguments). Social movements have effects, contextualists implicitly argue, because the
context in which they operate is favorable or unfavorable and not because of what a
movement itself does or fails to do. Apart from the fact that contextualists’ answer to the
question when protest matters is disappointing from an activists’ perspective, we believe that
it also from a scholarly perspective solves only a part of the protest impact puzzle. If social
movements are a driving force of social change, then their impact cannot merely depend on
contextual factors but they must have some agency as social actors and be able to make a
difference by themselves.
This study puts forward an alternative and complementary perspective. The protest of
social movements, we argue, matters in part also because of who protests and how they
behave while protesting. We contend that features of protest can alter the calculations,
attitudes and ultimately even the behavior of those who observe protest—from movement
adversaries, political allies and opponents to bystanders publics. This way, movements can
put pressure on a given set of constraints, can alter the power distribution in which they
operate, and to some extent, be the agents of their own success. To be sure, we are not the first
to make such a claim. Andrews (2001) would label this approach as an “action-reaction”
perspective to protest impact. Such a perspective resonates with the seminal work of Lipsky
(1968) and views protest as a communicative act that seeks to persuade and activate ‘third
parties’ in ways favorable to the protestors. Especially early work—for instance the Gamson
data and its reanalyses (Frey, Dietz, & Kalof, 1992; Goldstone, 1980; Mirowsky & Ross,
1981)—has considered how characteristics of a protest signal or features of an organization
affect social movement outcomes.
An integrated theoretical framework of protest features and their potential consequences
is missing, however. To be fair, it is not entirely missing. From the 1970’s onwards the late
Charles Tilly, allegedly one of the most influential social movement scholars (Krinsky &
Mische, 2013), started developing a theoretical approach dealing with protest features.
Remarkably—Tilly maybe is the most widely cited student of social movements —his idea of
the ‘WUNCness’ of protest has never been picked up in empirical research nor has it been
used in theoretical studies. ‘WUNC’ is an acronym and stands for Worthiness, Unity,
Numbers and Commitment. The idea is simple: the more protest events have a high turnout
(numbers), gather an apparently unified (unity) and dignified (worthiness) crowd that really
cares about the issue (commitment), the higher the chance they produce a wanted outcome.
Such events are not only successful by organizing standards, Tilly expected them to be quite
potent in altering the perceptions of those who witness them as well. We can only speculate
about the reason for the strange neglect of Tilly’s WUNC idea (for exceptions see Bennett &
Segerberg, 2013; Rao, 2008), but we guess it has something to do with the dispersion of
Tilly’s thoughts on WUNC over his vast work. Moreover, Tilly never really bothered to
systematically elaborate the concept nor did he connect it to others’ work. He also failed to
operationalize and did not use it himself systematically in his empirical research.
The main argument of this study is that Tilly’s ideas about the WUNCness of protest
form a potentially powerful and compelling way to think about how protest features can affect
protest outcomes. Many impact studies imply that protest affects the calculations of those
involved in a struggle (Amenta et al., 2005: 519), yet an explicit account of how protest
exactly succeeds to do so is missing (Luders, 2006; Skrentny, 2006). We believe that a
coherent WUNC framework has the potential to fill this gap. For this potential to become
fully available, however, WUNC needs clarification and tidying up. The relationships
between the different components of the concept need to be explicated. And, the elements
need to be embedded in the broader social movement literature. This is what we plan to do
here. Drawing on Tilly’s original work, we reintroduce and theoretically further elaborate the
idea of WUNC. As such, we aim to offer an account of what it is that leads observers of
protest to actually listen to the protesters and to be affected.

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The structure of this article is as follows. First we present the origin of Tilly’s thinking
about WUNC. Next we embed each of the WUNC features in the broader social movement
literature. We also add a fifth source of protest power to the WUNC scorecard: diversity. In a
third section we theorize about the relationship between the different (d)WUNC components.
Finally, we sketch the contours of a research program that can measure WUNC empirically
and different strategies to measure and test the effects of the WUNCness of contentious
performances
TILLY ABOUT WUNC AS A DEFENITIONAL ELEMENT OF SOCIAL
MOVEMENTS
In his titanic work on social movements, Charles Tilly has been implicitly referring to what
later became his WUNC concept as early as from 1978 onwards. The first embryonic ideas
related to WUNC appeared in From Mobilization to Revolution (Tilly, 1978: 95; 167). The
first explicit reference in a formal publication appears in 1994. In Social Movements as
Historically Specific Clusters of Political Performances (Tilly, 1994), the concept is presented
without acronym, though, and reads as ‘numbers x commitment x unity x worthiness’. Over a
span of thirty years Tilly’s idea that protests should be WUNC to exert influence never took
fully center stage in his work (except in Tilly, 2006b) but was explicitly or implicitly present
in at least ten different publications (Tilly, 1978, 1994, 1995, 1999, 2003, 2004, 2006a,
2006b, 2008). We draw on this vast but scattered legacy to yield an integrated framework of
Tilly’s thoughts on WUNC.
The reason for Tilly’s long-term insistence on WUNC is simple: in his work it gradually
became one of the defining characteristics of what a social movement actually is. In 2006 he
defined a social movement as a campaign of contentious events displaying Worthiness, Unity,
Numbers and Commitment (WUNC)(Tilly, 2006a: 53). Thus, for Tilly, WUNC is much more
than what we consider it to be here. Instead of just being an element that contributes to protest
effectiveness, he considers it as a key definitional element of social movements. Historically,
Tilly argues, social movements emerged after 1750 from an innovative synthesis of three
elements. Movements became movements from as soon as they combined a certain repertoire
(contentious performances like vigils, demonstrations, rallies, meetings and so forth) that
displayed WUNCness (public representations of worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment)
within a campaign (a sustained, public and collective claims-making effort). Although each
defining element existed before, their unique combination created the social movement as a
distinct phenomenon(Tilly, 2006b). For Tilly (2004), this coming about of social movements
is intimately related to the process of democratization. The rise of a notion as ‘citizenship’,
with rights that protect freedom of expression and binding consultations in the form of
elections, promoted the foundation of social movements as a novel form of claims-making. In
the words of Tilly (Tilly, 1978: 167): “The legal umbrella raised to protect the electoral
process… has a ragged edge. There is shelter for others at the margins. The grant of legality to
an electoral association or an electoral assembly provides a claim to legality for associations
and assemblies which are not quite electoral, not only electoral or not now electoral.”
The centrality of WUNC in Tilly’s social movement concept directly relates to the above
quote and the process of democratization. WUNC is central for social movements because it
conveys information that is of crucial importance in democratic regimes. Specifically, WUNC
broadcasts a strong collective identity that makes an appeal to credibility, or even, popular
sovereignty (Tilly, 1994). A strong collective identity is paramount for social movements as
they are rarely effective in the short run. Indeed, the effectiveness of the program claims a
movement makes, depends in part on the effectiveness of prior cementing a strong collective
identity and creating an image of being a recognizable and credible actor. This is exactly what
the WUNC characteristics do: they convey the message that the protestors are serious
claimants who legitimately speak on behalf of (a segment of) society. The effectiveness of

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WUNC lies with the fact that all four components increase the plausibility that the movement
has the weight and is willing to use this weight ‘to enter, realign, or disrupt the existing polity’
(Tilly, 1999: 262). This strong collective identity does so directly, by signaling to power
holders the existence of a potential voting bloc that can influence the outcome of future
elections (Tilly, 2004: 141). Yet WUNCness also asserts itselves indirectly, by impressing
movement adversaries and appealing to the public at large, giving these third parties cues that
a credible actor has entered the scene.
It is important to state here that WUNC is not per definition mirroring reality. Rather it is
a matter of displaying WUNCness. Social movements put WUNC conspicuously on display,
even if their events may in reality be less WUNC than they try to be. This is, what Tilly calls,
the unavoidable ‘mystification’—and therefore manipulation—of WUNC (Tilly, 1999: 262).
For instance, the different WUNC components to some extent contradict each other—e.g.
maximizing numbers can decrease unity. And, maximizing the unity signal, for example,
always is a matter of compromise and patching together groups with slightly different stances
or different tactical preferences. The public representation of WUNC thus requires a good
deal of exaggeration and showmanship. Whether WUNC truly is a ‘mystification’ or not is of
less importance, it is the impression and perception of WUNCness that matters.
While protesters try to convey a high level of WUNCness, other groups, Tilly (2006b)
says, often explicitly challenge the WUNC image and highlight the mystification. Disputes
over protest and demonstrations often centre on the WUNC components (Tilly, 2006b: 291–
292). The police, for instance, tend to count less protestors than the organizers. Or, opponents
question whether protest participants all truly endorse the same claim (unity), whether the
mass is large enough to represent a constituency (numbers), whether participation is a
genuinely costly effort (commitment), or whether the organizers brought in disreputable
people in order to swell the numbers (worthiness). These debates indicate that the WUNC
components are as relevant for protesters as they are for their adversaries.
The four WUNC components are the result of a historical process of learning (Tilly,
2006a). People started to follow WUNC scripts because they felt while experimenting with
other performances that playing on these elements was effective. Movements learned by trial
and error to maintain the successful WUNC-traits of their protest as they found out that it
worked; as it enlarged the scope of conflict and succeeded to affect observers. It is precisely
because WUNC generates effects that it became an essential element of what social
movements are. So, in a sense, the WUNCness of their protests is a selection mechanism in
the survival of social movements.
In sum, Tilly attributed many aspects to WUNC displays. He considered them as inherent
to social movements’ existence—public claims that are supported by people acting with
many, thinking the same, caring about the cause and acting decently form a core element of
what a social movement is. Yet, a the same time and closely related, Tilly believed WUNC to
be an implicit scorecard against which the power of protest can be measured. He (2006b: 291)
writes: “W x U x N x C = Impact”. The rest of this paper focuses on the potential impact
consequences of WUNC. One does not have to share Tilly’s view of what social movements
are, to consider WUNC as a potentially powerful tool to analyze protest outcomes. media
attention is an important resource for movements seeking to influence the polity.
dWUNC: dIVERSITY, WORTHINESS, UNITY, NUMBERS AND COMMITMENT
“We are many, we are worthy and unjustly disadvantaged, we agree among ourselves, we are
committed, disciplined and legal.”(Tilly, 1994: 11). Tilly did not elaborate his four WUNC
components in great detail as his above typical quote shows. This section analytically
distinguishes the four components, adds diversity as a fifth distinct feature, and argues that
each WUNC element relates to a particular logic of influence.

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The WUNC components may seem randomly selected, but there is an underlying logic.
They all refer to features of the people participating in a protest or movement; they present
observers with informational cues about the kind and strength of the collective identity
backing up a certain claim. But there are substantial differences between the features: WUNC
is a matter of what protest participants do, what they think, and who they are. Worthiness
directly relates to protesters’ behavior during the event, unity and commitment regard the
protesters’ beliefs and attitudes, while numbers—and, as we will show: also diversity—rather
are a matter of who the protesters are. Of course, ultimately, all components are only
observable through participant behavior and all, even the ones who are not directly
observable, are put on display in protest events. Also note that the WUNC components only
indirectly relate to the substantive claim being made. Rather they capture features of the
participants and the event, which can amplify or cripple that substantive claim.
Note that the WUNC components are to a large extend unrelated to the actual protest
form that is chosen. Strikes can have a high or low WUNC character, for example, and so can
sit-ins or deeds of civil disobedience. Of course, certain action forms are better suited at
broadcasting specific components. A hunger strike sends a strong commitment signal while a
vigil primarily exhibits worthiness. Hence, action forms are deliberately chosen to
strategically emphasize specific WUNC components. The street demonstration occupies a
special position in movement’s action repertoire, however. Street demonstrations probably are
the most archetypical protest forms employed frequently in many different countries (Norris,
Walgrave, & Van Aelst, 2005). Tilly would say that this is not a coincidence, as a
demonstration lends itself excellently to display WUNC. In his words, demonstrations are
“like miniature social movements” that can “broadcast a multiple of numbers, unity,
worthiness and commitment”-claims (Tilly, 1995: 373). As such, demonstrations “nicely
encapsulate the distinctive features of social movement displays”(Tilly, 1999: 260) and are
even considered to have the highest capacity for movements to communicate WUNC (Tilly,
2008: 74). Therefore, we have the street demonstration in mind when discussing the
(d)WUNC components. Tilly never explicitly operationalized the WUNC elements beyond
exemplary descriptions (see for instance Tilly, 2004: 4; 2006: 291), nor did he connect the
individual WUNC elements to related strands of research. This is what we do below.
WORTHINESS — Worthiness is the component most directly related to how protesters
behave while protesting. Tilly describes worthy behavior as ‘eloquent’ (Tilly, 1994: 13),
‘disciplined’ (Tilly, 2008: 144) and not ‘disreputable’ (Tilly, 2006: 291). This suggests that
violent, disruptive behavior its worthiness’s flipside. Worthiness makes the response of social
movements to the injustice they challenge, civilized. Examples of worthiness are sober
demeanor, presence of dignitaries or mothers with children and neat clothing. As such,
displays of worthiness give cues about what kind of people protest. Instead of “sacking an
official’s house or hanging a minister” (Tilly, 1994: 13), movements present themselves as
groups of deserving citizens—an image of ‘deservingness’ has been found to greatly
contribute to favorable policy changes for groups more generally (Schneider & Ingram, 2005;
Steensland, 2006). Worthiness helps a movement to gain recognition as a respectable player
that should be listened to and interacted with. By showing restraint and controlling one’s
emotions and anger, protesters gain respect. According to Tilly, movements sacrifice the
advantages of violent action and choose to behave decently in order to attract larger audiences
and to realize a more continued presence on the public scene. Apart from gaining recognition
and turning protesters into deserving citizens, worthiness has a third function: it avoids
marginalization and criminalization. Indeed, while gradually more people find peaceful
protest legitimate, the opposite is true for violent means of contention (Meyer & Tarrow,
1996).
Although Tilly’s stance on non-violence is provocative and although the evidence
regarding the use of violence is mixed (for an overview see McAdam & Su, 2002) there is
some support for his position in the broader social movement literature. Violating the norm of

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the monopoly on the use of force by the state likely leads to polarization (Tarrow, 1994).
Therefore, under most conditions, violence is doomed to cripple social movement power.
Unless the movement succeeds to decouple and distance itself from (some of its) members’
illegitimate actions (Elsbach & Sutton, 1992) violence leads to repression and alienates
potential supporters (della Porta & Diani, 1999: 177-178). The 1999 WTO protest in Seattle—
the so-called ‘Battle of Seattle’—is a textbook example of such a successful decoupling
strategy (De Luca & Peeples, 2002; Rojecki, 2002) and illustrates how media coverage
constructed the deservedness of the protestors.
In contrast to a sizeable literature on violence, in the broad social movement literature,
only rare work deals with its positive worthiness flipside. Older work by Turner (1969) and
his students (Altheide & Gilmore, 1972) dealing with perceptions of protest comes closest to
Tilly’s worthiness argument. Instead of worthiness, Turner speaks about the ‘credibility’ of
protest. Weak groups, Tuner says, need to show their virtuousness—violence calls this
virtuousness into question. Remarkably, Turner considers the credibility of protest as crucial
for observers to perceive it as genuine social protest, and not as mayhem, deviance or crime.
This confirms the definitional aspect that Tilly assigned to the worthiness component. More
generally and implicitly, the aspect of worthiness can be seen as part of the rational and
organizational turn in the social movement research field. The arrival of the resource
mobilization theory (RMT) in the 1970s (McCarthy & Zald, 1977) matches the idea that
worthy behavior is an asset of protest. While collective behavior theories (Buechler, 2000)
considered protesters by definition as irrational, intellectually and morally degraded and thus,
by definition, unworthy, RMT turned them into rational, thoughtful, and carefully acting
individuals pursuing a well-defined cause making them worthy.
More than the other WUNC components, worthiness and worthy behavior are relative
phenomena. What is worthy or not largely depends on the cultural context. Burning a flag
may be a worthy, or at least not an unworthy, thing to do in some countries, while it may be
considered to be truly offensive and hostile elsewhere. In some countries, to give another
example, it appears that violent protest behavior is more tolerated than in others. Worthiness
is thus very much context-dependent and in some contexts even violent behavior may be an
understandable and even worthy means of expression. Also the concrete interaction between
protesters on the one hand and counter protesters or the police on the other, may affect
worthiness perceptions. Relatively peaceful protests who are met by brutal violence will
appear much more worthy then if the counter action had not been so aggressive. Finally, Tilly
suggests that worthiness is staged by movements as being a potentially temporary feature of
protest. WUNC displays can be considered as an implicit threat of turning next to non-WUNC
practices if the message goes unheard: ‘We behave because we want to, but listen to us or we
will stop behaving’.
UNITY — The second WUNC component refers to the agreement among the protesters.
Unity does not deal with the substantive message the protestors broadcast; it deals with the
extent to which the message is shared among the participants. Do they have a truly common
program or claim, shared by all? Unity can most of the time not be observed directly, it
occurs in the heads of the protesters. That is why protesters typically attempt to evoke their
unity visually and behaviorally. They wear or show common symbols or uniforms, dress in a
single color or wear matching badges, they march in ranks, link arms, perform a coordinated
choreography and chant similar slogans. The performance broadcasts the message that the
group is a homogeneous bloc capable of acting in unison. Unity always is a sort of
‘mystification’, to use Tilly’s word, as protest often implies a compromise about a set of
common goals between people with sometimes very different ideologies or preferences. If
these underlying cracks in the apparently monolithic bloc become visible, the strength of the
protest signal diminishes. In sum, an image of unity is a valuable asset for social movements.
It puts pressure on the protest target by suggesting that the protesters cannot be divided and

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that it makes no sense to try wedge the movement by, for example, compromising with its
moderate segments.
Within the field of social movement studies, the unity component is probably most
closely related to frame alignment (Benford & Snow, 2000; Snow, Burke Rochford, Worden,
& Benford, 1986). Frame alignment refers to “The linkage of individual and SMO
interpretative orientations, such that some set of individual interests, values and beliefs and
SMO activities, goals, and ideology are congruent and complementary.”(Snow et al., 1986:
464). The consequence of successful frame alignment is that individual protesters are unified.
Another classic approach that bears on the unity of protest is the work focusing on the
collective identity needed for protest mobilization to be successful (Dufour & Giraud, 2007;
Friedman & McAdam, 1992; Simon & Klandermans, 2001; Stryker, Owens, & White, 2000).
People need to identify with a(n) (aggrieved) collectivity—feel unified—before they are
willing to act.
The difference with these earlier approaches theorizing about the unity of protest, is that
WUNC does not deal with what protesters actually think, whether they really have a unified,
collective identity or not, but rather with to what extent protesters are successful in making
themselves appear as unified.
NUMBERS — Tilly’s account of the origin of social movements argues that social
movements emerged once the idea of democracy took root (Tilly, 1978). An essential element
of democracy is citizens’ equality and the idea that one person counts for one vote. Since
then, electoral democracy unavoidably is a numbers game and this fits the numbers
component in WUNC. Tilly says that demonstrations as a prime movement performance
prospered because of their resemblance to the electoral assembly and the electoral logic of
representative democracy. By displaying numbers movements could successfully claim public
sovereignty. Social movements are legitimate and matter partly as in so far as they can show
they are with many. The more people protest, the larger the chance that the protesters
represent a large, even a majoritarian, share of the population (Downs, 1957). In order not to
lose elections then, representatives may change their position to realign with their
constituency (della Porta & Diani, 1999: 175) and observers might jump on the bandwagon
(Noelle‐Neumann, 1974). Therefore, numbers probably is the most straightforward
component of WUNC—della Porta and Diani (1999) even speak about the ‘logic of numbers’.
Discussion about demonstrations often center on their turnout, with counts of police and
organizers, although both claiming to be able to count, differing dramatically (McPhail &
McCarthy, 2004). Mann (1974) reports how ‘hawk’ and ‘dove’ newspapers in the U.S.
differed in their estimates of demonstration headcounts during the Vietnam war. So, although
the size of a protest event seems to be an objective fact—a simple head count suffices—it still
is open to interpretation. The perception of the massiveness of a protest event can, for
example, be affected by staging the event on smaller squares or narrower streets, or by
emphasizing the number of participants compared to the number of people affected.
There is a sizable literature examining the effectivity of the size of protest. De Nardo
(1985) states that “power is in numbers”, as large demonstrations give targets, third parties
and plain citizens cues about the support the movement enjoys. Size not only cues the scope
of an eventual electoral threat, it also testifies of the organizational skill of the staging
organization(s). Lohmann (1993), in her ‘signaling model’ of collective action, holds that
politicians take demonstration size into account when making decisions (Burstein & Linton,
2002). Walgrave and Vliegenthart (2012) find that in Belgium especially demonstration size
and not so much demonstration frequency triggers attention from political elites. Earlier,
McAdam and Su (2002) found similar patterns in their study of Vietnam war protest and roll
call votes in the U.S. Congress. Size may not only directly affect decision-makers, there is a
good deal of protest event analysis research showing that protest size is one of the key
selection mechanisms making the protest to get coverage from the news media or not

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(McCarthy, McPhail, & Smith, 1996; Wouters, 2013). In sum, the numbers component of
WUNC is firmly embedded in the broader social movement literature.
COMMITMENT — The appeal or threat generated by a movement also depends on the
degree of commitment the protesters display. Do they really care? Can politicians expect them
to change their electoral behavior as a consequence of their dissatisfaction? Can we anticipate
them to back-off when met with resistance and denial of their claims? Or, are they even
prepared to resort to direct or violent actions in order to get what they want? Commitment is
the promise of a long term fight. It convinces outsiders that the event is not simply a craze or
a fluke but that it is deeply rooted and that activists will persist. In Tilly’s definition,
commitment is needed to turn a protest event into a sustained campaign and thus into a social
movement. Commitment refers to the salience of the underlying issue for the protesters; it
equals their determination.
Commitment is an attitude; it is a psychological phenomenon occurring in the minds of
participants. As such, it cannot be directly observed. Yet, protesters conspicuously display
their perseverance and willingness to persist in the future. They do this partly by opting for
costly and risky action forms, for example a demonstration instead of a petition, or a hunger
strike instead of a work strike. Some action forms inherently imply more self-inflicted costs or
risks than others. Yet also participation in non-costly protest event can show determination as
activists brave bad weather, risk police repression, or travel far to get to the protest venue.
Basically, commitment is displayed by overcoming (practical) barriers standing in between
potential and actual participation (Klandermans, 1997) and by behaving in a certain way at the
event.
Again, the fourth WUNC component can with no trouble be connected to the broader,
and older, social movement literature. A host of studies has studied commitment as a crucial
building block for social movements’ survival. Wilson (1973), in his classic Introduction to
Social Movements devotes a full chapter to what he calls ‘the problem of commitment’.
Commitment is the outcome of the balancing task between movement demands and personal
investments, he says (see also Becker, 1960; Kanter, 1968). Committed people follow a
consistent course of action and pursue their goal even at the expense of other potential
activities and interests (Hunt & Benford, 2004). Committed movement members may give up
careers, forgo educational opportunities, or expose themselves to physical hardships, and so
on (Wilson, 1973). The growing research on sustained activism focuses on the longitudinal
aspect of the commitment component (Downton & Wehr, 1998). Committed participants, the
literature says, are not only more loyal, long-term activists, there are good reasons to expect
they also are more active in recruiting other participants (Walgrave & Wouters, 2014) and as
such provide additional assets to a movement.
DIVERSITY — Apart from Tilly’s original WUNC foursome, we propose to add a fifth
feature to the scorecard: the diversity of the protesting crowd. We consider diversity as
relevant addition and we consider it to be sufficiently distinct from the other components. The
origin of the power of diversity is straightforward: diversity, just like numbers, increases the
democratic legitimacy of a movement. A group of people that not only consist of the usual
suspects but mirrors the diversity of the society on which behalf it claims to be speaking,
simply has more democratic legitimacy. Large numbers form a claim of representativity, but a
heterogeneous crowd conveys the same implicit message. Diversity is distinct from numbers
as it makes this claim based on a logic of support across categorically different entities
(diversity) instead of simply more of the same or more of something unspecified (numbers).
When people of all walks of life—conservatives and democrats, the young and the elderly,
trade unions and environmental organizations—participate, a more credible claim of outside
support can be made. Walgrave and Verhulst (2009) indeed showed that there is a strong link

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between public opinion support for a movement’s cause and the diversity of protest it
engenders.
In Tilly’s own work, diversity can be related to the CATNET concept, the combination of
dense networks and shared identities among (sets of) actors, conducive for collective action
(Krinsky & Crossley, 2014; Tilly, 1978). In Popular Contention in Great Britain, Tilly (1995)
directly touches upon diversity when discussing unity. Unity would be an ambivalent asset for
movements: sometimes movements gain from appearing homogenous (unity) whereas in
other circumstances, the fact that the grievance is shared across heterogeneous groups
(diversity) gives the protest strength. We argue that unity and diversity are conceptually
different. Unity refers to what people think, and hence relates to a shared attitude or belief.
Diversity, on the other hand, refers to who the people are that back up this shared belief. It
refers to the composition of the crowd. In technical terms, it deals with aspects like socio-
demographics (support from the young and/or the elderly) or organizational membership
(support from diverse organizational fields). Although Tilly explicitly recognized the virtues
of protest diversity, he did not promote it to a separate WUNC component, probably because
he (rightly) did not consider it to be a definitional element of a movement. We think there is
no good reason to not give diversity a spot on the protest scorecard. The presence of
references to issues of diversity in the broader social movement literature further warrants our
decision.
Indeed, such references are not hard to find. For one, when protest occurs, a signifying
battle about who the protesters are and to what extent they are diverse often breaks loose
between supporters and adversaries of the protest. The protesters’ attempt to convey a
message of diversity and representativity—see for example the Occupy slogan: ‘We are the
99%’—are countered by adversaries trying to label the protest as coming from a narrow and
specific segment of society that is populated by radical and by no means representative
extremists. In fact, the so-called ‘protest paradigm’ in media studies holds that one of the most
used frames to marginalize a social movement is by describing it as being not diverse but, as
deviant and very different from the public at large (McLeod & Hertog, 1992). A case study by
Entman and Rojecki (1993) on the US nuclear freeze movement exemplifies this case in point
by showing that while the movement was initially considered as a responsible main stream
movement with a very diverse constituency from across the socio-economic spectrum, it was
gradually depicted as an emotional outcry driven by extremists. Also literature on coalition
building speaks to the diversity characteristic of protest. Heaney and Rojas (2014), for
instance, found that ‘hybrid’ or diverse organizations occupy more central positions in social
movement networks, giving them access to more resources. Beamish and Luebbers (2009),
similarly, argue that cross-movement coalitions are associated with greater success (see also
Olzak & Ryo, 2007)
In sum, our discussion of the five components showed that all of them can be easily
grounded in the broader social movement literature. Yet, the dWUNC approach differs in two
crucial respects from these other accounts. First, it turns what other theories have been
considering as preconditions for protest into features of the protest itself—features that give
observers informational cues about the state of the movement. A second difference is that
Tilly considers dWUNC more as a matter of showmanship than as a matter of objective facts.
Movements are not more or less dWUNC—they may be, but that is not Tilly’s interest—yet,
some manage to communicate their alleged dWUNCness better than others.
FROM COMPONENTS TO A dWUNC THEORY
Isolated components do not form a theory. They need to be linked to each other in order to
turn them into an account that is able to hypothesize which social movements try to display
what kind of dWUNC to whom and what impact that may have on realizing a movements’

10
goals. We suggest some tentative lines of enquiry and general expectations that may later be
tackled empirically.
Tilly himself speculated about the relationship between worthiness, unity, numbers and
commitment and formulated several, what he called, ‘mechanisms’ referring to these
relationships (see for the most elaborated account Tilly, 1999: 261-263). Besides the
mentioned mystification mechanism, we elaborate on maximization, nullification and
compensation as dWUNC mechanisms.
To start with, as all components are assets to a movement, movements try to maximize
their score on all elements. The strength of a movement is a function of the dWUNC
components, Tilly says. The more an event comes across as dWUNC, the more likely wanted
outcomes will be achieved. But the resulting dWUNC score of all a movements’
maximization efforts is not a simple addition of the separate scores of each component.
Extremely low scores on one component may nullify the effect of the others. Imagine a case
with completely unworthy or totally uncommitted participants (Tilly [2006b: 291] gives an
example of five thousand drunken dancers in a public plaza). No matter how many, diverse or
unified they are, the protest action is disqualified and loses impact. Adversaries can
effortlessly marginalize and disqualify a movement that scores extremely low on one of the
components. So, movements cannot let each of the components fall below a critical threshold;
the effect of the components can be expected to be curvilinear with very low or very high
scores having a disproportional effect on the overall outcome.
Yet on the other hand, higher scores can also compensate for lower scores on other
components. For instance, a hunger strike may be conducted by only a few (low in numbers)
but because the high risk and the hardship these activists endure (high commitment) such
actions can nonetheless convey high dWUNCness. Underperformance on some component
thus can be balanced by ‘overperformance’ on another. This compensation mechanism makes
that dWUNC is a flexible instrument of social movements; they can deliberately try to
counterbalance low scores on a component by putting more effort in showing off the
components they are particularly good at.
Not only can components nullify or compensate each other, to some extent they
contradict each other and form a trade-off; it is almost sheer impossible to maximize them all
at the same time. This is what the mystification mechanism is about. Drawing more people to
an action (numbers) almost inevitably increases the chance of attracting less committed and
unified activists, whose intentions are not by definition good and who may not behave
worthy. Very diverse protests in terms of the people who show up may lead to less unity.
Unity and diversity in this way can therefore be seen as the opposite sides of the same coin:
the more diverse a crowd, the more important pretending unity may become. Also, extremely
committed people who care very deeply about a problem most likely do not always behave
very worthy. Being very angry, their feelings are observable and they do not display sober
demeanor. In sum, we expect there to be empirical dimensions among the five components
with some components clustering together in subgroups.
We already argued that thinking in terms of dWUNC restores the agency in the study of
protest outcomes. dWUNC is a feature of the protest itself; it can be staged and manipulated
by organizers and participants. Yet, there are clear limits to the control protest organizers have
over the perceived dWUNCness of their events. First of all, protest organizers do not fully
control who shows up and how these people behave during the protest event. Only when
movements stage so-called pseudo-events, which are strictly scripted and carried out by
professional activists, they have full control (Ericson, Baranek, & Chan, 1987). More in
general, protest-staging movements are most of the time seriously constrained in their
capacity to strategically manipulate dWUNC. They may not have numerous supporters, their
constituents are visibly homogenous and not diverse, etc. The strength of the dWUNC
framework is that even under those detrimental circumstances, organizers may attempt to
compensate and mystify to try to gain some leverage.

11
A second level of constraints deals with the news media. As master forum of public
discourse (Ferree, Gamson, Gerhards, & Rucht, 2002), the mass media is the principal
interface between movements and the outside world. Mass media cover protest events and
describe them as dWUNC or not, and it are these signals that reach most observers, not the
actual signals sent out on the streets (Koopmans, 2004). Journalists often ignore the average
protester and focus on the weird, exceptional activist (Entman & Rojecky, 1993), however.
Gamson (2004) calls this the dilemma of weak control. This brings up the question of
whether the signaling power of protest stems from the protestors or from the media? We
suspect it to be both. Movements with strong infrastructures (Andrews, 2004) that know how
to mobilize and organize (Han, 2014) are more likely to stage events that are and can come
across as dWUNC. Simulaneously, mass media not only diffuse the dWUNCness of protest
but also describe it and this framing can play up or down the dWUNCness of any given
action. In our view, it is exactly this interaction between the strategic tactical choices of
protest organizers and the molding and broadcasting functions of mass media, that generates
the protest signals that may shape the calculations of observers (McAdam, 1982, 1996).
Therefore, the prime venue in which protestors would want to broadcast dWUNC, and
scholars would want to measure and study it, is the mass media arena.
Finally, a full dWUNC theory would contain propositions as to which outside group is
most or least affected by which of the five components. The ultimate goal of dWUNC
displays are decision makers but, as Gamson (2004, p. 250) says, protest, and thus dWUNC
performances, are often and simultaneously aimed at different ‘intermediary targets’:
bystanders, public opinion and the media, to name a few. It is to be expected that these
different intermediary targets react differently on the varying dWUNC components and this
may create a dilemma for organizers. Public opinion may be more impressed with worthiness,
for example, but media attention is attracted by just the opposite, namely aggressive and
violent behavior.
TOWARDS A dWUNC RESEARCH PROGRAM
In the previous sections, we theoretically elaborated Tilly’s dWUNC concept. A logical
next step would be to actually use the dWUNC framework in empirical research, but this goes
beyond the scope of this paper. This section sketches the contours of a potential dWUNC
research program. Such a program would consist of three steps: (1) operationalization, (2)
measurement, and (3) gauging effects.
In order to develop a dWUNC research program the concept has to be operationalized to
be made measurable in the real world. Given the centrality of the media forum, this entails
turning the components into indicators that can be observed in media text. Movement scholars
have often turned to content analysis of mass media to gather information on their subject—
see methods like protest event analysis, frame analysis and political claims analysis.
Especially the studies about ‘protest description’ in the field of communication studies seem
helpful in this respect (McLeod & Hertog, 1992; Dardis, 2006). We briefly suggest some
potential indicators for content analysis that, as one can notice, form common ways of how
the media covers protest. For worthiness, for example, coverage of property damage as a
consequence of protest and whether protesters were arrested due to rowdy behavior may be
indicators, as are reporting of respectful silences, or reception of delegations of protestors by
power holders. Unity may be measured both as a matter of having a shared objective—a
common program or claim—and the capacity to act together—collective marching, singing,
applauding, wearing common symbols or colors. Protesters behaving differently from their
colleagues are indicators of disunity. When it comes to numbers not only the actual numerical
turnout could be coded, but also how the turnout is evaluated—for example: were there more
or less participants than expected. Commitment could be operationalized as the costs
participants make in order to be present: do they come from far, do they brave bad weather, is
there risk of repression, have they demonstrated before? Diversity, finally, taps into the

12
composition of the crowd: is the claim backed up by categorically different groups? Are
diverse constituencies present?
Scholars might also take a step back from media coverage, and aim to operationalize
dWUNC aspects by engaging in on-the-site observations that catalog the variety of ways
protestors express dWUNC. The work of Clarck McPhail and collaborators (McPhail, 1991;
McPhail & Wohlstein, 1983; Schweingruber & McPhail, 1999) likely is an instructive starting
point in this regard. These observations then can feed the media content analysis.
This leads us to the second step of the research program: applying the operationalizations
and measuring dWUNCness. The mere description of protest in terms of dWUNC most likely
leads to interesting findings. To what extent is protest generally covered in terms of dWUNC?
Are some elements of the scorecard more prominent than others? How do the dWUNC
components correlate with each other? Under which conditions do movements succeed to
maximize their dWUNC score? Additionally, one can study tactical variation between social
movement organizations within a movement; or the ebb and flow of dWUNC displays across
protest waves. Moreover, possessing on the site information would allow scholars to examine
how and when journalists distort dWUNC displays on the street to the cues conveyed in their
news reports. In sum, such descriptive analyses would allow for scrutinizing to what extent
there is variation in media’s coverage of dWUNC displays across movements, organizations,
events, and time periods.
This brings us to the core of the dWUNC research program: Does dWUNC affect the
observers of protest; their beliefs, attitudes, calculations and ultimately, their behavior? One
can imagine tackling this causal question relying on, for instance, a time series analysis that
assesses to what extent parliamentary or other elite action increases or decreases after protest
with a high or low dWUNC score. Social media, and especially the presence of politicians,
interest groups and experts on twitter, provides a contemprary arena to trace responses of
“third parties” to protest and varying degrees of dWUNCness as well. Such large scale
content analyses are the dominant approach in protest impact studies today. Yet probably the
dWUNC framework can be expected to make a more novel contribution if it is applied more
at the individual level, with attitudes and perception as the outcome measures. For instance,
one can try to disentangle how differential dWUNC protests affect the priorities and
preferences of the general public by targeted and well-timed surveys (see the work of the
following political scientists for such an approach: Branton, Martinez‐Ebers, Carey, &
Matsubayashi, 2015; Wallace, Zepeda‐Millán, & Jones‐Correa, 2014). The most promising
way to assess dWUNC’s effects in our opinion, however, is experimentally. It is not
impossible to carefully manipulate the dWUNCness of media coverage of (imaginary) protest
actions and present edited news items to citizens or politicians in a survey or lab experiment.
The subjects could then subsequently rate the extent to which they consider the covered
protest event to be important, the extent to which they agree with the claim put forward, and
the extent to which they would act upon that information. Such a design would allow to test a
host of hypotheses about the persuasive impact of the different dWUNC components. For
instance, high numbers and commitment might be likely to affect the perceived salience of a
problem among those exposed to the dWUNC stimulus. And, high worthiness probably
allows people to identify with the protestors leading to more agreement with the protest’s
goals.
In sum, the dWUNC framework we proposed in this paper not only makes a potential
theoretical contribution. We believe that dWUNC can guide empirical research as well,
introducing new methods to the toolbox of social movement impact scholars. By focusing on
assessable features of protest itself it offers a measurable and testable framework that may
push systematic empirical research on the outcome of protest in a new direction while
reinstating aspects of social movement agency in outcome research.

13
CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION
Does protest matter? The currently most popular accounts hold that protest has impact
when it happens in the right context. When the circumstances are right, protest may exert
influence on the public or even on power holders. This paper reintroduced Charles Tilly’s
WUNC concept presenting an alternative account: protest matters not only because the
context is right but also because it sometimes displays certain features that can alter or update
the calculations and perceptions of its observers (see Luders, 2006; Skrentny, 2006 for a
similar argument). Tilly said that protest should be worthy, united, numerous and
committed—we added diverse—for it to exert such an influence. But Tilly’s work on
dWUNC remained scattered and unsystematic, and it was unconnected to the rest of the
outcome literature or even the social movement literature more broadly. In this study, we tried
to fix that. We presented an integrated account of dWUNC, explained why dWUNC may be
powerful, grounded the components in the social movement literature, theorized the
relationship between the components, and we proposed a research program to start tackling
dWUNC empirically.
Integrating and elaborating Tilly’s dWUNC concept was necessary not merely because of
its thin theoretical foundation, but also because the concept to the best of our knowledge has
not spurred any systematic debate nor empirical research. As a consequence, we simply do
not know whether, how and to what extent movements actually broadcast dWUNC, nor do we
know whether, how and to what extent dWUNC performances are in effect more persuasive
or powerful than other performances. We believe that fielding a dWUNC research program
along the lines spelled out above can make a meaningful contribution to research on protest
outcomes. It can stimulate reflection about social movement agency in a predominantly
structurally oriented field. We think dWUNC as a theoretical framework may add weight to
the claim that, by the kind of action they stage, movements, to some extent, can be the agents
of their own success and can create their own opportunities to exert political influence, putting
pressure on the broader structure of constraints. This claim, however, to use the master’s own
words for one last time, requires “empirical verification, modification or falsification”. We
hope that this paper spurs “skeptical analysts of contentious politics to bring their own
evidence” to the table and expect that “the study of contentious politics can only benefit from
the crossfire” (Tilly, 2008: xiv).
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APPENDIX: REVIEWS
Theory & Society; Reviewer 1:
This article is interesting and innovative. However, it has some problems that the author needs
to work on.
First, the research question is not clear: is it “why some protest matters more than others” as it
is stated at page 1, or is it how protests contribute to produce a wanted outcome (see page 2)?
Second, the definition of dWUNC is not clear. Does dWUNC have to do with agency or with
features of protests? Sometimes the A. refers to this as agency: for instance, the A. argues
(page 2) that “dominant contextual perspective has greatly contributed to our knowledge of
why and especially when social movements matter, it has shifted the focus away from the
agency of social movements”. In addition, it is argued at page 4 “Movements deliberately
display WUNC”. Again, at page 4: “By displaying WUNC, movements choose for[…]”.
Other times, the A. explicitly argues that WUNC are features, at page 6: “All components
refer to features of the actual people participating in a protest or movement but there are
substantial differences between those features”. Page 7: “WUNC is a feature of the people
showing up”. The A. states WUNC simply reflect an aggregate of protests’ characteristics and
features (page 2, lower part).

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Other points:
- The A. should provide more exactly the citations and pages so that the reader can
directly refer to Tilly’s writing. Currently, citations are vague. This is needed especially when
the A. writes: “Tilly says…”
- Also, some sentences need to be nuanced: page 7: “Movements organize events to
deliberately show off their WUNCness or at least to pretend to have high levels of WUNC”.
The A. needs to admit that this is not the only objective related to the organizations of events
as the first aim is to achieve some kind of social or political change.
- Also at page 15 “it is the image of commitment that matters, not the actual
commitment of protesters”. I think that the last sentence is an overly strong statement , in
contradiction with the fact that commitment actually leads to solidarity and shared collective
identities, and implies the actual commitment of protesters.
The discussion of diversity need to be introduced earlier in the paper, as the impression in the
current text is that it comes out of nowhere.
- The discussion of unity and commitment needs some engagement with the
relational perspective as both are related to interactions and relationships. Tilly himself
advanced the concept of CATNET.
- Some sentences need more clarification. For instance, at page 4: “WUNC is central
for social movements because it conveys information that is of crucial importance in
democratic regimes.” The A. should discuss why WUNC is problematic in repressive
contexts.
Theory & Society; Reviewer 2:
This is not an easy paper to review. On the one hand, it is very pleasant to read, the author
shows deep knowledge of the social movement literature, and there is little in it that is
incorrect. On the other hand, however, I am not convinced by its argument and it does not
really contribute to the literature on the consequences of social movements. The debate it
refers to is an old one in the literature, spurred by, among others, Gamson’s Strategy of Social
Protest and the reanalyses of his data made by other scholars. So, in the end, this paper does
not do much more than go back to that debate, starting from the assumption that recent work
has stressed the importance of a favorable context for social movement success, which is only
partly true.
The most promising parts in terms of contributing to the literature are the discussion of
mechanisms and the research program. So, in order for the paper really to add to the existing
literature, it should reduce the description of WUNC and each of its components and develop
instead the discussion of the mechanisms as well as the research program presented at the end
of the paper. However, I see some problems here as well. On the one hand, concerning the
discussion of mechanisms, it is unclear what it is meant by “mechanisms.” This term can take
different meanings, such as referring to mediating variables or going from the macro to the
micro level, and so forth. Here there is no definition of mechanisms. Moreover, the suggested
mechanisms are not convincing as one cannot see how they can be put to use in research. On
the other hand, concerning the research program, many of the aspects of WUNC cannot be
measured though media reports.
I also think the discussion is too broad and unspecified. The author speaks of “consequences”
without specifying which kind of consequences. I assume political consequences are at stake
here, but this should be made clear since the beginning as the factors favoring political
outcomes might not be the same that are at play for other types of consequences.

19
The aspect relating to strategy and tactics are treated separately from WUNC. In my view,
this can be subsumed under the aspect concerning commitment. Similarly, diversity may go
with unity or numbers.
The discussion about credibility might be related to some work in the framing perspective,
most notably the work by David Snow and his collaborators, who speak of credibility as a
main feature of successful collective action frames. This aspect is mentioned in relation to
unity, but this is most closely related to worthiness.
Finally, at times there are statements that would need to be backed up with empirical
evidence. For example, whether “movements are the true masters of their own success” is an
empirical question.$
Theory & Society; Reviewer 3:
This is a delightful paper to read. It brings in important new ideas on protest research. It is
refreshing. Although WUNC was briefly introduced briefly in writing by one of the founding
fathers, it is brave and admirable to take on this essential insight and attempt to make it
benefit a broader research agenda.
Any protest observer has to marvel at Tilly’s insight known as WUNC. Put up a picture of a
protest crowd, and you can explain the on-site behavior very productively by following this
scheme. If you are an organizer, at the end of day you measure your event’s “success” by
taking stock of W, U, N, and C. Furthermore, as this paper suggests, these ideas may not be
limited to accounting for on-the-site behavior; they may also guide us to understand a
movement in its entirety—its making and its perception by others. Even its outcomes .
My main complaint with the paper is the absence of an empirical component to showcase the
usefulness of the proposed theoretical ideas. The explication is fine, but it reads thin without
further empirical considerations. I understand “Theory and Society” to be a journal with a
tradition of publishing important papers that include discussion of empirical practice and
basis.
I have the following additional comments, and in some cases, criticisms and suggestions:
1. The abstract and the opening of the paper dangerously confuse two different concepts of
“success.” One refers to the success of a protest event—how many people attend, whether it
puts on a good show, whether it garners media coverage and so on. In Tilly’s original
formulation, WUNC is a measure of , or motivational considerations for, success of this kind.
I may call it “on-the-site” success. The “movement outcome” research refers to success of the
other kind—whether a protest or a movement changes power relations or generates new
benefits. I may call this “policy success.” A successful event has implications for, but does
not necessarily lead to, a policy success. Hence to me, it is not particularly effective to open
the paper by complaining that current outcome research focuses too much on the social and
political context.
2. Relatedly, to discuss WUNC, it will be essential to distinguish “a protest event” (one time
event) and “a social movement” (a sustained existence with encompassing multiple events).
Tilly’s original is for the former. This paper seems to imply it can also apply to the latter. I
tend to agree. But it should be done more judiciously on two different levels. On the

20
“movement level,” it WUNC means very differently from the “protest” level. A separate
section of discussion of this is called for.
3. I am not convinced by the wisdom of adding d to WUNC. First, WUNC is both
encompassing and parsimonious. It would be a pity if one can just add or subtract elements.
Second, “d” is already somewhat implied by “N.” Numerous persons, numerous groups,
numerous types? A reinterpretation of N may just do the trick. Third, the call for “d” may
have a tinge of a left/liberal ideology in it. The authors may prefer it; while it not true that
most movements aspire for it. Do you see menacing (and hence effective) marches by KKK
members? Or Mao’s Red Guard crowds? They are so “uniform” without diversity. Who says
they are not social movement events?
4. The last parts of paper attempt some considerations for empirical research. Its current main
thrust, though, is treating WUNC as some sort of index that can be “operationalized.” That
may be only one of the directions to go , not necessarily the most promising one. I would be
fascinated by 1) the descriptive accounts of on-the-site observations that catalog the variety of
ways to achieve WUNC by protesters , 2) how successful one can achieve WUNC goals as
measured by the perceiver (media, government, public and so on); 3) how WUNC can be
applied on the movement level, movement sector level and so on; 4) how policy success may
differ when WUNC seen as “independent variables.”
Mobilization; Reviewer 1:
A. has taken on a major issue – how to read Tilly’s contribution to movement studies, baded
in his acronym “WUNC”. This is worth doing, but the ms has major problems:
1. Tilly regarded movements as only one variant of contentious politics, with specific
properties. He cannot br understood as if CP was just another word for social movements.
2. Tilly defined his work as relational – neither structural nor agentic. This makes a major
difference for how WUNC is read.
3. A. adds diversity to WUNC with no apparent justification. This is in sine ways orthogonal
to unity—a major component of WUNC. This would need to be justified.
4. The proposed measurements are inadequate, and lean too heavily on media with no
apparent understanding of media systems’ own incentives an values.
Mobilization; Reviewer 2:
This paper seeks to devise a theory of the political influence of protest, jumping off from
Charles Tilly’s writings regarding WUNC (worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment) and
adding the authors’ own ideas. These amendments address how these characteristics manifest
themselves in protest rather than in movements as whole or movement organizations, add
diversity to the main four characteristics, focus on the influence of protest on politics, provide
some mechanisms as to why protest with these characteristics should be influential, and
sketch out a research program using the theoretical ideas. In the authors’ view, these five
characteristics are assumed to work in a kind of interactive way to lead to influence. The
authors pull together Tilly’s writings surrounding WUNC, make sense of it, and add to it.
Then they conceptualize it in a way that makes it is possible to operationalize it and appraise
the argument they make. The authors seek to challenge the literature on the influence of
movements, which they see as not being focused enough on movements themselves and too
focused on the contexts in which movements engage.

21
Although much of this discussion might be valuable in a book length treatment of the subject,
I do not think there is enough here of interest as it stands to warrant an article in Mobilization.
For that to happen, I think some discussions should be cut way back and much additional
discussion provided to specify, operationalize and show the value of the concepts and the
theory the authors derive from them. First, I would cut back both the sections on Tilly’s
discussion of WUNC and seeking to locate these components in the social movement
literature. I do not think there is that much interest in detailing Tilly’s history with the idea,
especially given that it is somewhat unclear, and in any case the authors have their own views
of what it is and what is expected to do, and even add a new component. In addition, it would
be more important to locate these components in the consequences of movements literature, to
which this paper seeks to contribute, but which does not have as much to say about them. As
the authors note, their argument “turns what other theories have been considering as
preconditions for protest into features of the protest itself—features that give observers
informational cues about the state of the movement,” which in turn is supposed to influence
them. These sections would better be replaced with a brief discussion of the different
elements, along with the authors’ augmentation, and the argued multiplicative effect. There is
probably about five pages’ worth of article material here, but the paper plays them out until p.
19. Also there are various problems with the concept and theory, as the authors note, but
which they should spend more time addressing.
The authors propose a theory of movement influence by way of protest working through the
news media. They should spell out how this is expected to work exactly and again not so
much about how it conforms to Tilly’s thinking, given how much the authors have modified
it, or how it is connected to scholarship on determinants of mobilization. That is, they have
changed it from a partial argument about the impact of movements on politics generally, to a
more complete argument about the impact of protest on politics in democracies, working in
large part through news media.
The theory itself needs to be spelled out more. As the authors note, WUNC is not something
that inheres in a movement or a protest. It is something that is projected and there may be
slippage among how movements seek to project it, how participants carry it out, and how the
media translates this projection. They argue that well manipulated WUNC broadcasts a strong
“sense of collective identity” that will influence politicians in democracies. But movement
leaders do not control it altogether and it needs to be projected through the news media, and
so a movement or protest could be high in WUNC, but just not project WUNC, or if it
projects WUNC, it may not be captured by the news media. As the authors show as well,
aside from numbers, each of the concepts have many different things going on with them and
may be difficult to operationalize. The worthiness component seems the most problematic, as
it is the least internal to protest or under their control of protest leaders, and it includes a lot of
possible components, including whether worthy-seeming people participate, whether the
cause and goals are mainstream, or resonate with some of the other possible determinants of
policy, including public opinion, the views of current officeholders, and maybe the values of
the country as a whole. Yet it seems to come down in the discussion to the protest being not
violent. It seems that worthiness could be dropped, or simply be considered a goal of protest,
and non-violence could be added to “commitment.” But however that is treated, I think that
the interactions between the components need to be addressed further. The authors suggest
there is a multiplicative effect, and so presumably, a violent protest would score zero on
dWUNC? But then there is also a suggestion that some components could make up for or
possibly be functional substitutes for another, such as with diversity and worthiness. This
seems to have different implications for how the theory works. A zero score on one
component could mean zero dWUNC or it might not if there is some substitution effect, but it
is not clear what these substitutions might be.

22
And so I think the last part needs to be augmented greatly and probably also supplemented.
There is probably not enough room to add new research, but there should be at least a
discussion of the previous work and preferably some complete illustrations of the potential
value of the theory. How would the authors redo the impact of protest research, such as it
stands? For instance, there are many studies on the consequences of movements using the
McAdam, McCarthy, Olzak, Soule data set, and protest is operationalized in a number of
different ways by them. There is also the book by Gillion on the impact of protest on the civil
rights movement. How would they do any of this differently? If so, how exactly, and with
what implications for already published as well as future research? Along these lines, the
authors may want to examine the work by Biggs on the influence of the size of protest in
Sociological Methods and Research, who suggests that the number of protests is unlikely to
be influential.
Also, I was not convinced by the setup. There has been a turn away from movement-only
explanations of political influence, including from movement-associated scholars like
McAdam among others, and for good reason, as many empirical projects have found them
wanting or at best incomplete. Even scholars who focus on what movements do, like
McCammon or Andrews, argue that they are influential largely because of strategies aside
from protest. It is quite possible that large protest mainly happens in situations where
movements are unlikely to have much influence. And then there is Lipsky, who, despite the
authors’ citation, argues that protest is not a particularly powerful political resource, because
about five improbable things have to go right for it to work. All the same, the scholars in this
most recent turn do not deny movement agency, but simply suggest that it needs to be situated
in a larger field of contestation for anyone to make sense of its influence. Many scholars in
the Amenta et al. review theorize the various actions and structures of movements in
combination with the contexts in which they contend, arguing that different strategies may be
needed indifferent contexts. I wanted to see more about how the authors thought their
arguments fit, if at all, with this turn in the literature. If they do not want to do that, they
should maybe say instead that the theorizing among the movement-centered scholars is
inadequate and why their arguments are an improvement over those of Andrews and
McCammon, etc. (There is a brief discussion of Andrews, but although the authors argue that
their model is consistent, what is the value added?) Or how they would change our
understanding of the literature surrounding the impact of protest, which is extensive.
Small Points:
And if this is Tilly’s model, why does the D come first? And if the D is as important as the
others why does it take the lower case?
Is “catnet” a Harrison White term?
Mobilization; Reviewer 3:
I like the idea of bringing WUNC into more social movement analysis. However, I am not
sure that this argument really adds much to what Tilly already said. Perhaps a better strategy
would be to work through a serious case study showing how these dimensions of WUNC help
explain things that other approaches to mobilization do not.
In reading through the essay, there are a number of places where the argument is not clear. I
point out some of them below.
On page 2 you say that context is not the only factor affecting impact of movements. You say
that they must have agency and must make a difference by themselves. It is not clear how
these factors can be separated from context – particularly how they can make a difference by

23
themselves. Also, it is not clear that this is the best way to set up the argument about Tilly.
Why not just say that movement organizational properties can be better defined and brought
into an opportunity structure analysis?
The discussion on p 5 about movements and elections is not clear. There have been lots of
movements outside of electoral democracy and lots of movements that have operated in
democracies without pressing on electoral targets.
The discussion of how movements display WUNC is not clear (pp 6-7) – many movements go
through different stages – gaining or losing unity for example. It is often difficult to just make
WUNC happen. Unity may be a goal, but divisions often push against it.
And not much of the first 6 pages helps me understand the claim by Tilly that WUNC =
impact. My sense is that he was arguing that WUNC is a necessary condition of impact, but
not always sufficient (meaning that contextual factors need to be considered as well).
The next section of the paper is basically a review of how Tilly defined the 4 elements of
WUNC. It is not clear what this adds to his original essay.
The addition of diversity is questionable. Some movements may benefit from diversity and
some may not. Identity movements may do well simply mobilizing numbers of similar
individuals around a particular identity claim.
The following section that integrates the dimensions of WUNC makes several good points –
for example, that some kinds of protests may have impact even if particular elements are
weak or absent. However, Tilly’s general argument involved large public protests, and in
those cases, he argued that all elements need to be present to maximize impact.
The section on measurement is too general to offer much guidance about ways of measuring
these concepts.
In the end, it is not clear that this essay goes much beyond Tilly’s original formulation. It
would be better to do a serious case study that illustrates these points in more depth.