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The socializing nature of protest events. Consequences of the 15-M protests on participants’ political engagement over time
Social Movement Studies
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The configuration of protests as hybrid media events not only enables them to reach wider audiences but also favors the transformation of those audiences into active publics. In this increasingly common scenario, our study proposes a set of indicators to scrutinize how the public reacts during such hybrid media events, and to test such reactions in light of the mass protests that took place in Spain to mark the 2019 International Women’s Day (IWD). We analyze a nationally representative survey sample collected through daily tracking over 20 days before and after the 2019 IWD. Findings confirm the ability of hybrid media protests to broaden their audience, generate interest, spark conversations on gender inequality, and contribute to opinion conformation. They also reveal that some of these reactions were conditioned by prior exposure to similar events and by gender. Our study contributes to a recent line of research testing the influence of protests on the public and shows the possibilities of using rolling cross-sectional designs to capture those effects. The study also contributes to the discussion on the political significance of these mass protests as hybrid media events.
This article provides an overview of contentious politics in 21st century Spain using Protest Event Analysis (PEA) based on a large new database (n = 4,062). The analysis identifies different cycles of protest and discusses how they have changed and been continued in the action taken by social movements. While protest before the Great Recession often revolved around global conflicts, since then it has tended to be concentrated at the national and local level in terms of spaces, demands, and objectives. While political parties and trade unions are still important, their actions run in parallel to the emergence of new actors and the revitalisation of others in a movement/counter-movement dynamic. The article analyses these and other characteristics of protest cycles.
This paper aims to put contemporary political socialisation research in perspective. It offers a rapid overview of the crisis of the subfield after the 1970s and then shifts attention to post-crisis studies. Beginning with child political socialisation, it raises four issues: the use of theoretical frameworks derived from child psychology; the need to reconnect political socialisation to the sociology of family; the benefits of renewing methods for understanding the world of child politics; and a new account of social inequality in the process of political socialisation. It then explores lifelong political socialisation and how it has developed around four research dynamics: the study of civic and political socialisation of school-age adolescents and young adults; the generational renewal; the socialising effects of political mobilisation; and the processes and agents of the secondary political socialisation of adults. The final section raises the major question of what is political in political socialisation.
This article reconstructs the life trajectories of Portuguese radical left activists who mobilized against the Estado Novo authoritarian regime between the mid 1960s and the mid 1970s. It analyses the consequences of political engagement on the political and life trajectories of the activists across three different institutional settings: an authoritarian regime (until 1974), a revolutionary process (1974–1975) and a democracy (from 1976 onwards). The aim is to understand how the engagement and its consequences changed according to the changes at a political level. The underlying question is ‘what became of the radical activists who mobilized against the Portuguese dictatorship in the late 1960s’? To address this question, I adopt a longitudinal perspective, which contextualizes the present life of the former activists in a longer process, composed of different phases of engagement, activism, prison, disengagement, reconversion and life as former activists. I understand these phases as strictly interconnected to the organizational dynamics (groups and networks) and the political processes.
Popular uprisings, revolutions and other major movement waves are often explained as mechanistic or even spontaneous responses to new political openings or perceived threats. Yet while such explanations may account for when movements rise up, they are less useful for explaining why and how they rise up, and furthermore, what will occur in the course of a rising wave. To arrive at such explanations, I argue, social movement scholars must attend to those who do the work of movement building. We need research methods that understand activists as conscious producers both of movements and of knowledge about the movements they produce. Building from recent publications that argue for a scholarship of movements that at once assumes social complexity and valorizes agency, I show how bringing familiar approaches to social movement studies into constructive engagement with a longstanding scholarship of revolutions and praxis allows us to better explain where movement waves come from and what they produce. To do this, I specify movement elements, movement waves, periods and terrains of struggle; theorize movement building across dimensions of struggle; and articulate how these concepts may be used to analyze movement building as a process that produces history. As a demonstration of this method, I share findings from a study of the movement building process that produced the Wisconsin Uprising of 2011. I conclude with the observation that different sets of operative assumptions make various aspects of movements more or less visible, and that the advance of activist-centered scholarship is helpful in making movement building and other processes available for empirical research. I propose a series of methods made practicable by the epistemological approach advocated here and argue for a wider engagement by social movement scholars with an ontology of praxis.
Political socialization describes the process by which citizens crystalize political identities, values and behavior that remain relatively persistent throughout later life. This chapter provides a comprehensive discussion of the scholarly debate on political socialization, posing a number of questions that arise in the study of political socialization and the making of citizens. First, what is it about early life experiences that makes them matter for political attitudes, political engagement, and political behavior? Second, what age is crucial in the development of citizens’ political outlook? Third, who and what influences political orientations and behavior in early life, and how are cohorts colored by the nature of time when they come of age? Fourth, how do political preferences and behavior develop after the impressionable years? The chapter further provides an outlook of the challenges and opportunities for the field of political socialization.
Based on theories of cycles of collective behavior, this piece establishes a periodization of the cycle of anti-austerity and anti-political status quo protests in the shadow of the Great Recession that Spain faced between 2007 and 2015. More specifically, it tries to explain why the peak of protests persist-ed for so long: radicalization was contained, institutionalization postponed and protesters' divisions avoid-ed. The crucial argument here, an innovation with regards to the classic theories of cycles, is that the high standards of mobilization persisted for a long time as the result of the issue specialization of a more gen-eral anti-austerity fight and the strategic alliances --with varying degrees of formality-- that new civil or-ganizations forged with the unions. For illustrating the longitudinal dynamics of the cycle of protests, we use original protest event data.
Most research on activist participation has aimed to explain motives to engage in protest and collective action or becoming an activist. The outcomes, for the individual, have been neglected. Therefore we set out to systematically document and organize the psychological and behavioural changes associated with activism into a typology of change. The review contains 57 papers describing changes. Psychological changes identified in the literature can be classified into 19 main forms: marital status, children, relationship ties, work-life/career, extended involvement, consumer behaviour, identity, empowerment, radicalization/politicization, legitimacy, sustained commitment, self-esteem, general well-being, ‘traits’, self-confidence, religion, organizing, knowledge, and home skills. Our analysis highlights the lack of analysis of the relation between type of protest and type of change, and lack of research into the processes behind the various psychological changes. What is needed now is more precise investigation of the relationship between types of protests, social and psychological processes, and psychological outcomes. Further, more longitudinal studies are required to explore the relationship.
In follow-up studies of activists, activism has been observed to have long-term positive effect on political participation. However, little attention has been paid to the conditions under which the theory applies. I examine how the personal consequences of participation in three different protest movements in Sweden depended upon movement success and procedural justice. The results support previous findings suggesting that activism has positive long-term effects on individual political participation. However, several of the activists interviewed did not follow this general pattern, especially those who suffered unfair and discriminatory treatment from the authorities. The results imply that the effect of activism on political participation is determined by the perceived procedural justice, whereas reaching the preferred policy outcome is of less importance. External political efficacy is indicated to be a potential mechanism explaining the relation between activism and long-term political participation.
Protest surveys are increasingly used to tackle questions related to participation in social movements. However, it is unclear whether they generate useful and valid data. This study puts the protest survey design to the test by relying on data of 51 demonstrations (2009-2011) in seven European countries. We use data on 15,000 protest participants combined with screener questionnaires and extensive debriefing records of the interviewer teams. We account for noncontact (fieldwork problems), immediate and delayed refusal, and refusal bias. Results show that fieldwork problems are frequent, that immediate refusal is low, and that delayed refusal is considerable. Systematic refusal bias is only found for age and education. Differences between countries and protest issues are small but the issue determines the composition of an event which, in turn, leads to higher or lower refusal. Researchers should be cautious when using protest survey data to compare protest events across issues. The paper pleads for standardization and constant monitoring of the data-gathering process.
The current political context in Spain is intriguing for those who study participation and political parties. The emergence of citizen activism, expressed mainly through the 15M Movement, and the political crisis of the two major political parties has led to a new and complex situation where new political parties flourish out of citizen initiatives. This paper analyses the nature and characteristics of these new political parties, and considers the impact that the proliferation of these parties is having on current democracies. The work is based on content analysis and field interviews involving almost a hundred activists and party members from three different Spanish cities.
Over the past two decades, various policy initiatives have been proposed to solve the perceived problem of youth disengagement
from politics. This article examines the impact of one such policy initiative—namely the introduction of activities that seek
to teach ‘education through citizenship’ at school. In short, ‘education through citizenship’ involves formal and informal learning opportunities that enable students to acquire civic skills and knowledge
through hands-on experiences. School councils, debate teams and/or mock elections are some of the most common ‘education through
citizenship’ activities in schools in England, and drawing on data from the Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study this article shows that such activities can indeed have an effect, not just in the short-term (as previous studies in England
have shown), but also in the medium-term (by encouraging political engagement once the students have left the confines of
the school). This article thus argues that school activities can have a lasting and independent impact on youth political
engagement and provides support for the continuation of education through citizenship, as well as about citizenship.
This chapter explores the relationship between the indignados movement in Madrid and other mobilizations that have arisen at the local level in recent years. It suggests the existence of a learning process which on the basis of certain collective experiences, both failed and successful, links past mobilizations with the construction of an inclusive frame, the respect for a deliberative process of decision-taking and the strategic use of humor at the heart of the new movement. The analysis of this process aims to contribute to a better understanding of the early success of the indignados in terms of social support and participation.
Political efficacy has been studied extensively since the 1950s, but analysts have never been fully satisfied with its measurement. After considerable testing, four new questions tapping internal political efficacy were added to the 1988 National Election Study. Our investigation shows that inter-item correlations among these questions indicate high internal consistency, that by both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis the items measure a single concept distinct from external efficacy and political trust, that the measurement model is robust across major subgroups, and that the overall scale is externally valid and provides a good distribution of efficacy scores across the population. Further, the results of an order experiment in the survey suggest that responses are unaffected by mode of presentation. In short, the four new questions constitute the most satisfactory measure of internal political efficacy to date.
Street demonstrations have received the lion's share of scholarly attention to collective action. This paper, starts by returning to this research in order to raise some methodological questions about how to collect data on demonstrations and the validity of the results gathered. Next and based on my own research on demonstrations, I suggest some questions that deserve to be analyzed. In particular, I argue that we should work more on the psychological effects of participation in demonstrations. One potential line of investigation would be to explore more systematically the socializing effects of political events. Indeed, vivid political events should be important catalysts because they can have traumatic effects. Events may have an impact at any age but depending on one's position in the life-cycle, the socializing effects will differ, from strenghening and substantiation for older people to conversion and alternation for youngsters. I hypothesize, in line with the impressionable years model of socialization research (Karl Mannheim), that people should especially recall events as important if they happened in their adolescence or early adulthood.
This article investigates the recent so-called Spanish Revolution of 2011 with a view to understanding what it reveals about the current relationship between protest and electoral modes of participation. Theories of “disaffeccted radicalism” that grew up following the 1960s period of civil unrest strongly advocated the view that protest activity boosted electoral abstention. More recent work on protest, however, has pointed to its “normalization” and linkage to more conventional modes of participation. The Spanish case of 15M constitutes a useful new test of the two theories given that it mixed an explicit rejection of the choices voters faced with a criticism of political apathy. I examine the validity of each argument using a four-wave online panel survey and fixed-effects model to unravel how engagement in the 15M protest activity affected Spaniards' attitudes towards voting. The results provide fresh support for the normalization argument about a convergence of electoral and non-electoral types of activity. What is more, protest here seems to have a socialization effect that leads people to look at elections in a more positive manner.
Numerous studies raise the problems of dimensionality in the original conceptualization and measurement of "sense of political efficacy." Although the distinction between "internal" and "external" efficacy now is widely employed, serious problems result when the six-item CPS efficacy battery is used to measure both dimensions. We contend that the CPS approach may create problems of interpretation as serious as those caused by a failure to recognize the internal-external distinction. Internal efficacy cannot be operationalized adequately using the standard six-item index, and we propose an alternative measure.
The 15M demonstration (the origin of the indignados movement in Spain and the seed of the occupy mobilizations) presents some outstanding characteristics that defy the established principles of the collective action paradigm. This article develops some observable implications of the concept of connective action and tests them against the case of the 15M demonstration. Cases of self-organized connective action networks are expected to be different from traditional collective action cases with regard to the characteristics of the organizations involved, the prevalent mobilization channels and the characteristics of participants. Based on a comparative analysis of data gathered from participants and organizations in nine demonstrations held in Spain between 2010 and 2011, relevant and significant differences were found in the characteristics of the 15M staging organizations (recently created, without formal membership and mainly online presence), the main mobilization channels (personal contact and online social networks rather than co-members or broadcast media), and participants (younger, more educated and less politically involved). These findings help to understand the large turnout figures of this movement and have important implications for the mobilization potential of social networks, particularly as it can affect the political participation of the less-involved citizens.
Published in Books & Ideas, Dossier: Debates en torno al 15M, 18-11-2011. Este artículo trata de situar al movimiento conocido como 15M en el debate en torno a los movimientos sociales como agentes de democratización (en el sentido de avance y perfeccionamiento de la democracia). Nuestra intención es incorporar a la discusión abierta en este dossier los hallazgos de investigaciones que desde el campo de los movimientos sociales han analizado las prácticas de democracia deliberativa dentro del movimiento por una justicia global surgido a finales del siglo XX. Centrados en lo ocurrido en Madrid, nos preguntaremos de qué forma el movimiento 15M se conecta con dichas prácticas.
This article seeks to analyze the mobilizations that are currently taking place in Spain as a result of the multidimensional crisis unleashed in 2008. The authors study the ‘15M movement,’ or that of the Spanish indignados, by focusing on three analytical axes: the cognitive, emotional, and relational processes feeding the construction of a social movement identity. First, the article refers to the diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational framing tasks performed by 15M participants to define the problematic situation and attribute blame, articulate a solution to the problem and devise strategies to achieve that end, and motivate participants to sustain their engagement and remedy the situation. Second, the article concentrates on the emotions that were ‘mobilized’ by social movement organizations linked to the 15M (e.g. outrage or indignation), and those emotions that emerged spontaneously during the ‘encounters’ that took place in the public space: joy, efficacy, and empowerment. Finally, the article addresses the relational aspects entailed in the process of identity construction, that is, the activation and de-activation of both ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ ties between 15M members and previous and/or current political and social collectives within the ‘progressive field.’ In following this triple objective, the article describes the process of identity-synchronization that has allowed people with no previous political participation and with different and oftentimes opposing politico-ideological trajectories to feel part of the movement. The data come from 17 in-depth interviews and eight focus groups with key activists, ethnographic observations in camps and assemblies in both Bilbao and Madrid during the summer of 2011, and visual materials displayed in web pages and Facebook accounts associated to the 15M.
This profile looks at the emergence of the 15M Movement in Spain. It analyses the role played by social networks in the movement's formation and identifies the grievances that mobilised a broad coalition of groups and individuals including dissatisfaction with the two-party political system, the venality of political and economic elites, widespread corruption, the economic crisis and the politics of austerity. The profile also looks at the action repertoire employed by the movement and its organisational structure. In terms of the former, it focuses attention on the role played by protest camps and assemblies in giving a voice to the excluded and building the bonds of solidarity necessary to sustain activists through protest. In terms of organisation, it describes a structure that is highly decentralised, has been influenced by protest movements in other parts of the world such as Latin America and has marked regional differences. It concludes with observations about what the 15M means for Spanish politics and the direction it might take in its struggle against the political and economic elites that have dominated Spain since the transition to democracy in the 1970s.
Shows how social change affects political mobilization indirectly through the restructuring of existing power relations, comparing the impact of the ecology, gay rights, peace, and women's movements in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Of interest to students and researchers in political science and sociology.
In this article we revisit and re‐analyse data from the 1999 IEA CIVED transnational study to examine the factors associated with the ways in which young people learn positive attitudes towards participation in, and knowledge and skills about democracy. Less formal learning, wherever it takes place, has recently been conceptualised as a process of social participation, and we explore its effects using Lave and Wenger’s and Wenger’s understanding of learning through communities of practice. This is then contrasted with the effect of the volume of civic education. The analysis shows that learning through social participation, both inside and outside school, and in particular through meaning‐making activities shows a strong positive relationship with citizenship knowledge, skills and dispositions across a wide range of countries. Moreover, it demonstrates the usefulness of situated learning theory in the field of civic learning, and its applicability in large‐scale, quantitative studies.
This article examines the biographical consequences of participation in 15 M by following the trajectories, from May 2011 to November 2019, of individuals who took part in the movement in Madrid. Based on a field study combining observations and repeat interviews, this follow-up of the trajectories of forty Indignados (22 in the period 2013–15 and 18 to 2019) reveals considerable biographical impacts on both representations and individual practices in the political, personal and professional spheres. These impacts were particularly salient among those who had experienced biographical disruptions, whether in relation to political socialization or a drop in social status, and those who had mobilized in an intense and lasting way. However, 15 M had also had a profound influence on the biographies of those with an activist background and those who had been less involved in the movement. This microsociological approach gives us a better understanding of the biographical trajectories of the Indignados and provides an account of the transformations in collective action in Madrid over the past ten years. The main legacy of 15 M is therefore that it created a new generation of activists who are now involved in a multitude of activist microspheres and institutional settings.
Both policymakers and scholars disagree about the effects and suitability of citizenship education standalone courses. Extant evidence about their effects is mixed and inconclusive. This article exploits the discontinuities generated by changes in Spanish education policies to identify the long-term effects of civic education on multiple outputs usually set as the policy goals of these courses: political engagement, institutional support and political values. In 2007, a new standalone citizenship education subject was introduced in the Spanish school curricula. This subject was then progressively removed from the curricula until its disappearance in 2017. These changes gave rise to exogenous variation in exposure to civic education between young individuals born in different years. In this article these policy changes are exploited to identify the effects of citizenship education through a regression discontinuity design that draws on a 12-wave panel survey. The results point to the emergence of a generation of critical – yet passive – citizens as a result of the implementation of a standalone citizenship education subject in Spanish schools.
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1917153 .
‘This is an impressive book that makes both theoretical and empirical contributions. Based on a variety of micro- and macro-level data and sophisticated statistical analyses, it provides a quite original message: in the depth of the Spanish economic crisis, it was not economic grievances that motivated Spaniards of different walks of life to participate massively in protests. Instead, it was political grievances that were motivating them and that eventually led them to support new challenger parties.’
– Hanspeter Kriesi, European University Institute, Italy
‘The important new book provides readers with a fascinating contribution to our general theoretical analysis of social movement mobilizations and our specific understanding of the Spanish case. Making use of his wide-ranging multi-method research and the rigorous examination of various types of data, Portos engages insightfully with existing theorizations and improves on them in various ways. The result is a major in-depth contribution that will be required reading both for those who follow social movement studies and those who care about contemporary Spain and southern Europe.’
– Robert Fishman, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
This book sheds light on the role that grievances play for mobilization dynamics in a context of material deprivation. Why do people protest? Do grievances account for the varying size of protest events over time? Covering different levels of analysis, the author argues that effects of socioeconomic aspects on protest are mediated by political attitudes, especially political dissatisfaction. The book develops a framework to account for the trajectory of the cycle of contention that unfolded in Spain under the Great Recession, contributing to the field of social movement studies and our broader understanding of European politics, political sociology, political economy and economic sociology.
Martín Portos is Research Fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy. He won the Juan Linz Best Dissertation Award in Political Science and the ISA’s Worldwide Competition for Junior Sociologists. His research focuses on political participation, social movements, inequalities, and nationalism.
This article focuses on the Indignado protesters in the city of Valladolid (Spain) as a case study, drawing on retrospective qualitative interview research six years after the ‘hype’. Our analysis explores how forms of interaction and participation during the events could have had an important influence not only on the motives of the participants’ political engagement, but also the long-term durability of such engagement. The findings offer insights on the different forms of sociality present in the various types of activism and how these contribute to forming diverse understandings of collective action. Consequently, activists show tendencies for diverse forms of long-term engagement that appear to follow patterns that align with their experienced type of sociality and how it is remembered.
Social movement research has shed light on the relationship between processes of alliance building and multiple factors related to political opportunities, framing, identities, networks and resource mobilization. However, less is known about the impact of eventful protests on coalition building dynamics. Drawing on a paired comparison between the Portuguese and Spanish cycles of protest under the Great Recession, we aim at accounting for social movement alliances over time. While these countries present parallel protest dynamics until 2011, after that point two eventful protests lead each country into different trajectories. While the cycle in Portugal was marked by intermittent large protest events dominated by institutional actors, in Spain the peak of mobilization was consistently high between 2011 and 2013. When comparing these cases two factors stand out: the mobilization capacity and the autonomy of new emerging actors vis-à-vis institutional ones. Eventful protests were a key factor in articulating these elements. In Spain, the strength and autonomy of 15M assemblies and anti-austerity actors facilitated the formation of strategic alliances with trade unions. In Portugal, transversal initiatives and sustained alliances did not follow after the Geração à Rasca events. These emerged only later in the cycle, however were nonetheless hampered by overlapping membership and a lack of autonomy from institutional actors. Two original protest event analysis datasets are used to illustrate these arguments.
Introduction
Studying the outcomes of social movements is important if we want to elucidate the role of collective action in society. While most works have addressed aggregate-level political outcomes such as changes in laws or new policies, a relatively small but substantial body of literature deals with the personal and biographical consequences of social movements at the micro-level, that is, effects on the life-course of individuals who have participated in movement activities, due at least in part to involvement in those activities (see Giugni 2004 for a review). In general, these studies converge in suggesting that activism has a strong effect both on the political and personal lives of the subjects. Most of the existing studies, however, share a number of features that limit the scope of their findings. First, they focus on a specific kind of movement participants, namely movement activists, most often New Left activists, who are strongly committed to the cause. Yet, as suggested by McAdam (1999a), not more than between 2% and 4% of the American population took part in New Left activism of the 1960s. As a result, we cannot directly generalize from these findings to the biographical impact of participation in social movements by less strongly committed people who, in addition, might belong to other ideological areas, not necessarily to the New Left. Second, they use only a limited number of subjects and often do not analyze non-activists. The possibility of generalizing the findings is therefore very limited due to the small samples used and the lack of a control group of non-activists. Third, they look at a specific geographical and area and historical period, namely the United States (or often even more circumscribed geographical areas) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As such, we do not know from these studies how movement participation may affect the lives of people more generally. Thus, overall, in spite of the crucial insights that these works provided, they have little to say about the effects of more “routine” forms of participation.
In this chapter we try to go beyond the traditional focus on highly committed New Left activism to investigate the impact of protest participation on political life-course patterns amongst the general population. Our main research question is the following: Does participation in social movement activities, such as participation in protest activities, have an enduring impact on the subsequent political life of individuals?
Mainstream social movement studies have developed a useful kit of concepts and theories, well adapted to understanding social movements in core capitalist countries at the peak of growth of the welfare state. Widespread assumptions about the role of political opportunities, resource mobilization and framing processes need to be updated to make sense of contentious global politics in the 2000s, in particular, adding a focus on the socio-economic conditions for protests. In order to illuminate research results about the social basis of anti-austerity protests, the article critically reviews some recent contributions to political economy. In particular, some of the most influential contributions within Marxist and post-Marxist approaches to relevant capitalist transformations are discussed, with reflections on different temporalities in capitalist transformations.
Social movement research has developed a rich tradition of using data on collective action and protest events (hereafter “events”) that is culled from various sources (e.g., news reports, police records). Event data has been used by scholars to answer questions about the causes of ethnic violence and collective action (Olzak 1992), citizen protest of various types (Soule & Davenport 2009), and strikes (Biggs 2005). Event data has also been used to analyze the outcomes of social movements (Soule et al. 1999; Olzak & Soule 2009), including the policing of protest (Soule & Davenport 2009). A major benefit of this type of data is that it facilitates both comparative and historical research (Tarrow 1996), while also allowing for quantitative research on social movements (Olzak 1989). Additionally, there is often no better alternative (Franzosi 1987).
In acknowledging, though not stressing, my disciplinary identity as a sociologist, I will present and reflect on several challenges that we are confronted with when analysing social movements. Among the many more challenges that exist, five of these will be identified, discussed and partly illustrated in what follows: defining the subject of research, asking relevant questions, theorizing social movements, choosing adequate methods and sources, and interpreting and contextualizing findings.
Conventional accounts of protest cycles posit a demonstration effect-successful protests incite other constituencies to activism. I offer an alternative theory that builds on population ecology models of organizational behavior. I argue that the expansion of social movement organizations, or organizational density, is also an essential component of protest cycles. Multivariate analyses of the effects of civil rights protest and organizational growth on feminist protest and organizational foundings between 1955 and 1985 demonstrate that organizational density promotes the diffusion of protest. Protest also engenders activism by others, but only under favorable political conditions. This implies that an enduring organizational niche and political allies in power are necessary for protest to spread beyond single movements and create protest opportunities for other challengers.
Cette etude interroge la place tenue par l’observation des comportements collectifs dans les demonstrations du caractere integrateur des rassemblements de masse. Depuis Durkheim et sa notion d’effervescence sociale, celles-ci reposent en effet sur une operation de pensee d’apparence evidente mais qui pose d’importants problemes dans le cadre de l’analyse de foules. Cette logique interpretative consiste a assigner aux emotions observables les croyances qui doivent leur correspondre pour que les individus aient adopte les comportements observes. En la matiere, le commentaire savant ne se distingue pas du discours profane, qu’il soit politique, policier ou journalistique. A partir de ce constat, les deux caracteres essentiels de l’operation (sa naturalite et son reductionnisme) sont discutes : l’etude conclut que bien que ce glissement interpretatif des corps aux etats d’esprit nous soit profondement naturel (ce qui explique l’extraordinaire efficacite sociale de l’operation dans les processus de construction d’agregats sociaux), il est necessaire de rejeter ce principe explicatif : en effet, fournir la preuve du lien causal entre etats d’esprit et comportements est, en matiere de comportements collectifs observes a distance, tout a fait illusoire puisqu’on peut multiplier a l’infini les conditions sous lesquelles la proposition « un homme qui applaudit croit » est valide.
Multi-issue activists are sorely understudied, despite their acknowledged importance as bridges between social movements and issue domains. In this article we explore multi-issue activism, beginning with a large sample of AIDS activists and charting the degree and nature of overlapping issue involvement, the key role of “initiator” issues, and individual characteristics that promote multi-issue activism. We demonstrate that the great majority of these AIDS activists had sizable prior and ongoing participation histories in other issues, suggesting that movement across issue areas may be the norm rather than the exception. We also show that involvement in specific past issues served as gateways to later involvement in AIDS, that psychological engagement in politics prompted cross-issue activism even among these already activated individuals, and that unique personal characteristics (in this case gender and sexual orientation) led to more issue interconnectedness.
This paper reframes our inquiry into voter turnout by making aging the lens through which the traditional resource and cost measures of previous turnout research are viewed, thereby making three related contributions. (1) I offer a developmental theory of turnout. This framework follows from the observation that most citizens are habitual voters or habitual nonvoters (they display inertia). Most young citizens start their political lives as habitual nonvoters but they vary in how long it takes to develop into habitual voters. With this transition at the core of the framework, previous findings concerning costs and resources can easily be integrated into developmental theory. (2) I make a methodological contribution by applying latent growth curve models to panel data. (3) Finally, the empirical analyses provide the developmental theory with strong support and also provide a better understanding of the roles of aging, parenthood, partisanship, and geographic mobility.
Personal, Biographical, and Other Consequences of Social MovementsFollow-up Studies of New Left ActivistsBeyond New Left ActivismSocial Movements and Aggregate-Level ChangeMethodological IssuesSummary and Prospective Look