The New Transnational Activism, first published in 2005, shows how even the most prosaic activities can assume broader political meanings when they provide ordinary people with the experience of crossing transnational space. This means that we cannot be satisfied with defining transnational activists through the ways they think. The defining feature of transnationalism in this book is relational, and not cognitive. This emphasis on activism's relational structure means that even as they make transnational claims, transnational activists draw on the resources, the networks, and the opportunities in which they are embedded, and only then - if at all - on more distant transnational links. But we can no more sharply draw a line between domestic and international politics in studying transnational activism than we could ignore local politics in studying its national equivalent. Understanding the processes that link the local, the national and the international is the major undertaking of the book.

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The New Transnational Activism

I review the development of the political opportunity or political process perspective, which has animated a great deal of research on social movements. The essential insight—that the context in which a movement emerges influences its development and potential impact—provides a fruitful analytic orientation for addressing numerous questions about social movements. Reviewing the development of the literature, however, I note that conceptualizations of political opportunity vary greatly, and scholars disagree on basic theories of how political opportunities affect movements. The relatively small number of studies testing political opportunity hypotheses against other explanations have generated mixed results, owing in part to the articulation of the theory and the specifications of variables employed. I examine conflicting specifications of the theory by considering the range of outcomes scholars address. By disaggregating outcomes and actors, I argue, we can reconcile some of the apparent contradictions an...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/29737688.pdf

Protest and Political Opportunities

Trust in Schools: A Core Resource for Improvement:

Studying collective action with newspaper accounts of protest events, rare only 20 years ago, has become commonplace in the past decade. A critical literature has accompanied the growth of protest event analysis. The literature has focused on selection bias—particularly which subset of events are covered—and description bias—notably, the veracity of the coverage. The “hard news” of the event, if it is reported, tends to be relatively accurate. However, a newspaper's decision to cover an event at all is influenced by the type of event, the news agency, and the issue involved. In this review, we discuss approaches to detecting bias, as well as ways to factor knowledge about bias into interpretations of protest event data.

The use of newspaper data in the study of collective action

This article reviews central problems in political opportunity theory and explores the implications of adopting certain conceptualizations of political opportunities for explaining the emergence, development, and influence of protest movements. Results from multivariate analyses of civil rights protest, organizational formation, and policy outcomes indicate significant variation depending on (1) whether the political opportunity structure is conceptualized broadly or narrowly, (2) the dependent variable concerned, and (3) the underlying assumptions about the mechanisms through which opportunities translate into action. We argue that the variation in results can best be understood by adopting a broader understanding of protest and the political process and that theory development requires more careful and more explicit — although not necessarily more uniform — conceptualization and specification of political opportunity variables and models.

Conceptualizing Political Opportunity

“Get up, Stand up”: Tactical Repertoires of Social Movements

In the 1990s, a widespread patriot/militia movement emerged in the United States. Although patriot/militia organizations exist in all 50 U.S. states, some states have higher levels of patriot/militia organization than do others. We examine the factors that account for this variation, including the possibility that mobilization occurs in response to threats produced by structural social changes. We conduct a negative binomial regression analysis of state-level counts of patriot/militia organizations and find support for the argument that structural transformations can spark the mobilization of reactive social movements. We show that economic restructuring, measured by a decline in manufacturing jobs and the decline of the family farm, influences the mobilization of patriot/militia groups in the U.S. in the mid-1990s. We confirm these state-level findings with an analysis of patriot/militia organization in 300 U.S. counties.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.1525/sp.2002.49.4.497.pdf

Structural Social Change and the Mobilizing Effect of Threat: Explaining Levels of Patriot and Militia Organizing in the United States

Staging events with a large number of participants is a central means by which collective action movements exercise power. Creating broad coalitions that cut across movement boundaries is one way to mobilize these large numbers. In spite of this fact, most studies of social movement coalitions focus on individual movements, analyzing them in isolation. This article explores the conditions under which organizations form alliances across movement boundaries, and examines whether these cross-movement coalition events are facilitated by the same factors that inspire coalition activity among organizations active within a single movement. I use event history methods to analyze data on 2,644 left-wing protest events that occurred on college campuses between 1930 and 1990. I find several differences between the factors that facilitate cross-movement and within-movement coalition events. The availability of resources is important to within-movement coalition events but not to cross-movement coalition formation. Local threats inspire within-movement coalition events, while larger threats that affect multiple constituencies or broadly defined identities inspire crossmovement coalition formation. The activity of multi-issue movement organizations is associated with higher levels of all forms of protest, including single and cross-movement coalition events. This research contributes to social movement theory by demonstrating that political threats sometimes inspire protest, and that organizational goals influence strategic action.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/sp.2003.50.2.226

Crossing movement boundaries: Factors that facilitate coalition protest by American college students, 1930-1990

Among students of social movements, the prevailing view is that, in Western democracies, most social movements target the state and its institutions. Recently scholars have questioned this definition of social movements, associated with the political process and contentious politics approaches, arguing that public protest is also used to shape public opinion, identities, and cultural practices and to pressure authorities in institutional arenas not directly linked to the state. In this paper, we take up this debate by examining the targets of recent social movements. Our analysis draws from data on 4,654 protest events that occurred in the United States between 1968 and 1975. The protest events in our dataset encompass a variety of tactics used by social movements organized around a number of different issues. We find that, although virtually all movements in the United States direct some public protest at the state, there is considerable variation in the targets of modern movements. During this period, environmental, peace, international human rights, single-policy, and ethnic movements were more likely to direct their appeals to the government, while the civil rights, gay and lesbian, and the women’s movement were more likely to target public opinion and other, non-state institutions. Our analysis calls into question excessively state-centered conceptions of social movements that view social movement activity as directed primarily at the formal political domain of social life.

The targets of social movements: beyond a focus on the state

Social movement scholars have long been skeptical of culture's impact on political change, perhaps for good reason, since little empirical research explicitly addresses this question. This article fills the void by examining the dynamics and the impact of the month-long 2004 same-sex wedding protest in San Francisco. We integrate insights of contentious politics approaches with social constructionist conceptions and identify three core features of cultural repertoires: contestation, intentionality, and collective identity. Our analyses, which draw on rich qualitative and quantitative data from interviews with participants and movement leaders and a random survey of participants, highlight these dimensions of cultural repertoires as well as the impact that the same-sex wedding protest had on subsequent activism. Same-sex weddings, as our multimethod analyses show, were an intentional episode of claim-making, with participants arriving with a history of activism in a variety of other social movements. Moreo...

Nella Van Dyke

Papers

“Get up, Stand up”: Tactical Repertoires of Social Movements

Structural Social Change and the Mobilizing Effect of Threat: Explaining Levels of Patriot and Militia Organizing in the United States

Crossing movement boundaries: Factors that facilitate coalition protest by American college students, 1930-1990

The targets of social movements: beyond a focus on the state

Culture and Mobilization: Tactical Repertoires, Same-Sex Weddings, and the Impact on Gay Activism: