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To Map Contentious Politics

Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly

Center for Studies of Social Change
February 1995

With due respect to Machiavelli, and Clausewitz, not all politics entails contention. People sometimes work in consensus, sometimes gather to celebrate shared memories, often institutionalize their political activities. Contention begins when people collectively make claims on other people, claims which if realized would affect those others' interests. Contention therefore depends on mobilization, on creation of means and capacities for collective interaction. In coming years, Mobilization will surely devote many pages to the issues we identify here, not because we speak of them now but because many scholars are coming to see them as crucial for the next round of theory and research. In a spirit of celebration -- and no doubt a little contention as well -- we here salute a new journal by laying out a program of inquiry into contentious politics.

We have adopted the term "contentious politics" rather than the familiar triad "social movements, revolutions and collective action," not simply for economy of language, but because each of these terms is closely identified with a specific subfield that represents only a part of the scholarly terrain this article traverses. We define contentious politics as collective activity on the part of unrepresented claimants -- or those who c/aim to represent them -- that relies at least in part on non-institutional interaction with elites, opponents or the state. As we hope to make clear below, we see social movements, cycles of protest and revolutions as interlocking forms of behavior within this range of phenomena. We argue that our broader canvas will help to relate these phenomena, both to one another, to institutional politics and to historical social change. In this early statement, we want to articulate our vision of a systematic effort at theoretical and empirical synthesis spanning the various subfields germane to the study of contentious politics. 1

I. Synthesizing Theory And Research On Contentious Politics

Two features of the contemporary social sciences militate against scholarly synthesis and the cumulation of knowledge: (1) the increasingly insular, subfield-specific nature of scholarship; and (2) the difficulties inherent in and the lack of professional rewards encouraging efforts at theoretical/empirical stock-taking. The result is a proliferation of specialized scholarship that may add lines to vitae but little to general knowledge.

More than most areas of research, the study of contentious politics suffers from this malaise. The past 25 years have seen a veritable explosion of work, both historical and contemporary, in this general area. But that work has devolved into a number of highly specialized literatures in parts of at least four disciplines -- sociology, history, political science and economics -- with few opportunities to synthesize theory and research across these increasingly distinct scholarly communities. In recent years, "culturaI studies" -- an emerging set of insights from anthropology, literary studies and cultural history -- has entered the fray as well. The result has been a degree of fragmentation, of scholars talking past one another, and of different languages being used in different subfields to describe quite similar phenomena.

Consider the study of revolution as it has developed in American historical sociology in the last two decades. "Great" revolutions have usually been studied sui generis, which makes it impossible to say how they differ from less great ones and from rebellions, social turmoil, riots and routine contention (Goodwin 1994, Tilly 1993). With the exception of a few studies, their relationship to social movements or to the political process has seldom been broached (But see Goldstone, Gurr and Moshiri 1991). The systematic study of "violence", which began in the wake of the ghetto riots of the 1 960s, has often been looked at in isolation from the study of peaceful protest. Likewise for movement organizations: they are often studied in isolation from the mass phenomena that are thought to produce them (but see Oliver 1989). The study of great historical "events" has often proceeded in blissful indifference to the significant strides that have been made by quantitatively-oriented sociologists studying event histories (Olzak, 1989; Tarrow 1995). Strikes and industrial conflicts have produced their own specialty area, with little attention paid to the intersection between labor insurgency and political struggle (but see Goldfield 1987; Perry 1993).

Recently, we and our colleagues have been offered an ideal vehicle with which to engage in the kind of systemic synthesis that has been lacking in the study of contentious politics. It involves an unprecedented and potentially creative partnership between the Mellon Foundation and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. The Foundation has granted funds under its program of seminars in international studies to organize a three year seminar series geared to surveying and synthesizing those literatures that are most germane to the study of contentious politics. For its part, the Center has agreed to serve as institutional sponsor and site for the series and to convene a Special Project on the topic to be housed there during the third year of the project. In combination, these generous resources will allow us to spend the first two years of the project intensively reviewing recent scholarship in the areas of social movements, comparative revolutions, nationalism, democratization, collective action, and related political processes. Year three will then be given over to writing projects aimed at summarizing and synthesizing what we think we have learned through our comparative survey of the relevant scholarship and through contacts with colleagues and dissertation writers in each of these areas.

More important than the vehicle itself is our programmatic vision for the project and the intellectual aims that will guide our effort. We find ourselves dismayed by the fragmented subfield structure that has come to characterize the study of contentious politics past and present. We think this malaise is particularly harmful to younger scholars, who frequently craft dissertations in isolation from others working in related terrain in other disciplines or under the influence of competing paradigms. Accordingly, we want to take the broad measure of the field by surveying and synthesizing work across that set of distinct literatures that bear on contentious politics. Specifically, our efforts will be guided by four broad scholarly goals:

First, we need to map the scope of contemporary scholarship relevant to an understanding of contentious politics. Practically speaking, this means identifying the set of subfields within history, sociology, political science and economics in which scholarship germane to our topic is being conducted.

Second, having defined the relevant scholarly universe for our project, we hope to produce an initial synthesis of available theory and research across the various subfields germane to our concerns. At this preliminary stage of what is to be a collaborative and ongoing process, we are obviously not in a position to say anything definitive about this here. Instead, later in the paper, we will simply provide several illustrative examples of the kinds of synthetic lines of inquiry we hope to explore over the next few years with our colleagues in and outside the project.

Third, synthesis in hand, we will turn to the issue of the "scope conditions" for contentious politics: that is how effective this synthesis --envisioned as a broad set of analytic concepts rather than a theory per se --is in explaining the nature and dynamics of contentious politics in different times and places. We suspect that current theories of contentious politics hold up best when applied to those settings-- contemporary core democracies -- that have been most intensively studied by specialists in social movements, and that they apply less well to other eras and regimes. Accordingly, in reflecting on what we think we have learned about contentious politics, we want to remain attuned to variations in context and to their hypothetical effects on the dynamics of collective action.

Finally, having taken the measure of the study of contentious politics in a variety of historical eras and regime contexts, we want to give serious thought to how the forms and dynamics of popular protest are changing in the context of what some have called the age of "globalization." We make no assumptions about these processes. Indeed, we remain skeptical about the strongest versions of the theory of globalization, especially those which depict the nation-state withering away in short order. What seems to us more plausible -- and more intriguing -- is the growth of transnational political exchange and the possible rise of a kind of regional polity (the European Union being a salient current exemplar) in which nations increasingly share sovereignty with a host of trans-national and perhaps even sub-national institutions. The interesting and important question is: "what would contentious politics look like in the context of such a structure and how would it affect a crucial heritage of the consolidated nation-state --the national social movement?

So much for a summary statement of our four goals. In the paper's remainder, we take up these aims in turn, sketching our provisional thinking on each of them and providing brief examples rather than exhaustive theoretical analyses or empirical presentations. We do so both to clarify our own thinking on these matters and to invite critical feedback at this early juncture of our collaborative project. We begin with a preliminary attack on the fundamental task of cataloguing inquiries into contentious politics.

II. The Study Of Contentious Politics

Mapping the study of contentious politics could be done abstractly or epistemologically. If we took ontology as our mapping principle, for example, we could distinguish methodological individualism, with its reduction of social reality to the self-motivated actions of individual actors; phenomenological individualism, with its parallel reduction of social reality to the consciousness of actors -- individual or collective; systems theories, with collectivities -- including the great collectivity called society--following autonomous and compelling logics; and relational models, with transactions, interactions, or social ties becoming the starting-points of analysis. Each of these views has strong representatives among analysts of political contention.

We could also use epistemology (from skeptical to positivist) as our starting point; causal structure (from fields of intersecting variables to rational decision- making), analytic traditions (eg., Marxist or Weberian), or even the scale of social units (from individuals to civilizations) as our bases of classification. We prefer, however, to offer hypotheses concerning the clusters of mutual awareness that would show up if we actually catalogued all scholarly studies of political contention published during the last few decades, then traced the sharing of concepts, arguments, methods, sources and citations that resulted. We mean, that is, to map currently connected literatures around our core concept of contentious politics.

A Map of Contentious Politics

We imagine that such a map would have to contain four main clusters: 1) a huge, sprawling set of political histories grouped chiefly by time and place and bound by little explicit theorizing; 2 2) more self-consciously theoretical studies of local and regional social change in which contentious politics forms only one part of a larger causal matrix; 3) analyses of state-oriented politics as such; and 4) attempts to single out various forms of conflict and violence for explanation in their own terms. Within each of these clusters, here are names for likely subdivisions:

  1. political histories: local, regional and national monographs clustered chiefly by time, place and population group;
  2. local and regional social change: work, gender, household and neighborhood; race, ethnicity and religion; class formation, class conflict and class action; industrial conflict;
  3. state-oriented politics: social movements; social networks, interest groups, parties, elections and political influence; public life and authority; political identity, citizenship and nationalism; change in regimes, including democratization and state formation; revolution, rebellion, resistance and protest; war, military power, imperialism and international relations;
  4. conflict and violence per se: banditry, crime, policing and repression; violence, political and otherwise; collective action and contention in general.

Of course, such a map would resemble a galaxy more than a neat little solar system: instead of four well-defined planets, each with its coherent geography, we would find clouds of stars with streamers among them. Our taxonomy asserts only a scalar relationship within and between clusters: that, for example, students of war, military power, imperialism, and international relations share more concepts, arguments, methods, sources and citations with each other than with students of revolution, rebellion, resistance and protest, and than either of these share with those specialists in work, gender, household and neighborhood who happen to take up contentious politics as part of their subject.

These distances and distinctions, though a natural part of the scholarly division of labor, are inimical to the progress of interdisciplinary and general social theory. For example, within cluster two, under the heading "local and regional social change," we have placed "race, ethnicity and religion", a subject that has attracted increasing numbers of scholars in recent years as the breakup of empires has encouraged minority groups to agitate for autonomy and, at times, for the physical destruction of their neighbors. But even a brief glance at the categories in cluster three ("state-oriented politics") tells us that there are at least three subcategories with relevance to the study of ethnicity: "political identity, citizenship and nationalism , regime change --" especially relating to democratization --and most notably, "social movements."

Yet when we turn to the recent literature on ethnic conflict, we find much of it innocent of any grounding in social movement theory. Does this imply that ethnic conflict does not involve social movements? That social movement theory has little of use to say about ethnic conflict? Or (as we suspect) that scholarly specialization has left many ethnic conflict scholars largely ignorant of recent advances in social movement theory? Conversely, social movement theorists from the West have generally chosen more bounded, less volatile movements to study than those based on ethnicity and religion. Lack of proximity is no excuse; the definitions used by social movement scholars clearly include ethnic conflict, yet few if any social movement theorists have applied their theories to these movements. (Race, in the form of the American civil rights movement, being the major exception.) Connecting the clusters would have great potential both for keeping scholars of ethnicity and social movements from talking past one another as well as for building a more theoretically integrated social science of ethnic movements.

In the long run, we want to fashion ideas that will span these diverse clusters and literatures; in the shorter run, however, we seek opportunities to link two or three smaller literatures at a time, in the hope of adducing more general principles as we go. We cannot know in advance all the lines of inquiry that will eventually be taken up in our collaborative project, but we have already proposed a number of topics which the authors of this article know that they want jointly to explore. In the next three sections, we sketch three paired "within-cluster linkages" to illustrate the kinds of syntheses that we hope to effect across the many literatures concerned with some aspect of contentious politics: 1) connecting social movements, cycles, and revolutions; 2) relating collective identities and social networks; 3)linking politics and collective action.

III. Connecting Social Movements, Cycles And Revolutions

A social movement is a sustained interaction between mighty people and others lacking might: a continuing challenge to existing powerholders in the name of a population which feels itself to be unjustly suffering harm or threatened with such harm. Public actions within a movement couple collective claims on authorities with displays asserting that the population in question and/or its mobilized representatives are worthy, unified, numerous and committed. To some extent, numbers and commitment trade off with one another; displays of willingness to die or kill on behalf of a cause, for example, can make up for small numbers -- which is why the terrorist phases of some protest cycles usually arise towards the end of the cycle, when mass commitment has already declined (della Porta and Tarrow 1986).

In these broad terms, social movements have existed at least since the time, millennia ago, when dissident religious cults and tribal rebels first arose against empires and established churches. But as Western parliamentary regimes arose during the 19th century, a special variety of social movement--the national social movement--formed, generalized, and rapidly became a standard fixture of national political struggles. Beginning in Britain in the eighteenth century and spreading first to America and the continent, then through print, missionary work and colonialism to the Third World, the national social movement came to involve associations, symbolic displays, publications, meetings, marches, demonstrations, petitions, lobbying and threats to intervene directly in formal political life (Tilly 1995; Tarrow 1994). It still does today.

Participants in national movements make claims on authorities, but they also assert their own identities -- or those of the populations for which they claim to speak -- as worthy, weighty and solidary actors. Indeed, the effectiveness of social movements in demonstrating the presence of -- and shaping collective identities for -- neglected social actors helps make up for their notorious inefficiency as ways of forwarding specific programs and claims. Historically, after all, butchering the tax collector has usually ended collection of a hated impost more immediately and definitively than writing petitions objecting to it in principle. Reliance on social-movement strategies implies confidence that cumulative, largely nonviolent action will eventually make a political difference.

It only makes a difference, in fact, to the extent that it: a) forges alliances of conscience or interest with existing members of the polity; b) offers a credible threat of disrupting routine political processes, c) poses another credible threat of direct influence in the electoral arena and/or d) elicits pressure on authorities from external powerholders. Social-movement strategies therefore promise most where parliamentary politics, democratic institutions and durable political competition already exist.

Contrary to the opposition between "identity" and "interest" stressed by many interpreters of popular politics during the 1 970s and 1 980s, participants in national social movements have always asserted some sort of synthesis between identity and interest. From the labor theory of value's 1 9th century heyday onward, for example, organized workers have ordinarily claimed that their collective contribution to national production not only justified rights to proper treatment and fair returns from output, but also established their distinct -- and worthy -- identities. While some movements -- for example, the women's movement and the gay rights movement -- do "framing work" (Snow et al 1 986) towards the recognition or change of collective identities, this is not an invention of the "new" social movements of the 1 980s; on the contrary, we see "identity work" going on among many of the most interest oriented groups of the early nineteenth century (Calhoun 1994; D'anieri, Ernst and Kier 1990).

Cycles and Repertoires

Instead of occurring separately issue by issue, national social movements have frequently arrived in cycles of claim making, with more and more claimants jostling for recognition and response once "early risers" trigger the start of the cycle, up to a point of maximum intensity followed by a decline in the frequency, success and civility of claims and claimants (Koopmans 1993; Tarrow 1989 and 1995). Multiple claimants include rival representatives of the same interests, defenders of established interests threatened by the new claims, advocates of adjacent interests, and parties to unrelated interests responding to opportunities for alliances or for pressure on beleaguered authorities. As a result, social-movement activists spend much of their effort creating coalitions and attempting to fashion broader collective identities around them, battling for control of organizations, suppressing rival agendas, engineering expressions of unified support for their own programs and negotiating with authorities.

Like collective contention in general, social-movement actions take the form of repertoires: limited numbers of historically-established alternative performances linking claimants to objects of claims (Tilly 1 978; 1994; McAdam 1983). Major performances have included creation of special-interest associations or parties, public meetings, demonstrations, marches, electoral campaigns, petition drives, lobbying, forcible occupation of premises, publication programs, formation of public-service institutions and barricade construction (Traugott 1994). These days, social-movement activists can also create hotlines, appear on television programs, and organize electronic mail forums -- often across national boundaries.

Repertoires are not simply a property of movement actors; they are an expression of the historical and contemporary interaction between them and their opponents. Thus, the public demonstration -- repressed as a threat to order as late as 1 848 in Britain -- had been accepted and regulated by police practice by the end of the nineteenth century. And in the shorter run, the tactics practiced by the American civil rights movement in the 1 950s and 1 960s reflected the tug of war between repression and facilitation, as well as the strength of the movement and its strategic and tactical vision. Authorities respond to the diffusion of a new repertoire by repression, facilitation and, in many cases, by developing strategies of social control (McCarthy, Britt and Wolfson 1991; delIa Porta 1995).

Reflecting their very different instrumental and expressive logics, existing repertoires embody a creative tension between innovation and persistence. The instrumental efficacy of a repertoire derives largely from its novelty, its ability to temporarily catch opponents or authorities off-guard and to precipitate instances of public disorder costly to established interests. Repeated use of the same repertoire diminishes its instrumental effectiveness and thus encourages tactical innovation. This is the major reason for the escalation and radicalization of tactics in many movement campaigns, which has led more than one movement to make concessions to their most radical fringes, condemning them to be successfully painted as "extremist" by their opponents and by the media.

But repertoires serve an expressive function as well whose logic encourages persistence rather than change. The expressive logic of the repertoire has rarely been acknowledged, but helps to explain why signature repertoires persist despite the instrumental premium on innovation. Especially during the early stages of a protest cycle, the tactical choices made by challenging groups express their identification with the earliest risers and signal a more inclusive and broader definition of the emerging struggle. In retrospect, scholars may see a cycle -- especially a reform cycle -- as a cluster of 6, 7, 8... n discrete movements, but this view almost invariably distorts the perspective shared by participants at the time. In their view, they are but a part of a broad and rapidly expanding political-cultural community fighting the same fight on a number of related fronts. And a significant part of what links and defines these various groups as a coherent community is their persistent reliance on the same modular forms (Tarrow 1994: ch. 2; Tilly 1995).

Movement cycles and repertoires are related in other ways as well. First, within a given cycle, themes, symbols and tactical innovations of individual actions and groups influence one another, as when American students borrowed the sit-in and other collective action frames from civil rights activists during the 1960s (Mcadam 1988). Second, the intense interaction of a cycle generates opportunities and incentives to innovate that appear much more rarely and with greater risk outside such cycles. Third, the very movement of a cycle from an expansive to a contracting phase alters the strategic situations of all participants, thereby changing the relative attractiveness of different forms of interaction, not to mention the relative salience of other actors as models, enemies, rivals or allies. Fourth, forms of action associated with successful garnering of support, gaining of publicity or pressing of demands tend to generalize and become long-term additions to collective-action repertoires, while those associated repeatedly and visibly with failure tend to disappear.

Social movements unfold within limits set by prevailing political opportunity structures; the formal organizations of government and public politics, authorities' facilitation and repression of claim-makings by challenging groups, and the presence of potential allies, rivals or enemies significantly affect any polity's patterns of contention. Social movement organizations, for example, commonly create structures paralleling those of the powerholders at whom they are aiming their demands; on average, a highly centralized state generates more centralized movement organizations than a fragmented federal state (Knesi et al. 1995). Yet in the longer run, social-movement action also alters opportunity structures, notably by contributing to changes in recognized modes of claim-making, in forms of repression and facilitation by authorities and in established political identities.

From Movements to Revolutions

These regularities in social movements suggest surprising parallels to revolutions. A revolution is a rapid, forcible, durable shift in collective control over a state that includes a passage through openly contested sovereignty. We can conveniently distinguish between revolutionary situations (moments of deep fragmentation in state power) and revolutionary outcomes (transfers of state power to new actors), designating as a full-fledged revolution any extensive combination of the two (Tilly 1 993). The forms and themes of revolution vary significantly with political opportunity structures, for example, a) featuring dynastic contenders where dynastic succession normally supplies new rulers and b) taking nationalist forms where the system of rule already operates through populations that claim distinct national identities.

Revolutionary situations resemble extreme cases of social-movement cycles: as the split within a polity widens, all rights and identities come to be contested, the possibility of remaining neutral disappears and the state's vulnerability becomes more visible to all parties. Just as successful mobilization of one social-movement contender stimulates claim-making among both rivals and allies, revolutionary claimants on state power incite offensive or defensive mobilizations by previously-inactive groups. One group's actual seizure of some portion of state power, furthermore, immediately alters the prospects for laggard actors, who must immediately choose among alliance, assault, self-defense, flight, and demobilization. Consequently, rivalries, coalition-making, demand-making and defensive action all spiral rapidly upward. Because of their penchant for seeing social movements and revolutions as separate genres, each with its own immutable laws, students of contention have not yet begun to explore these parallels and intersections between movements, protest cycles and revolutions (but see Goldstone 1994).

IV.Collective Identities And Social Networks

A second pair of sub-categories from our initial map will illustrate the problem of unrealized connections and the urgency of bringing together different perspectives on contentious politics -- collective identities and social networks. Spurred by constructivist and cultural approaches, the role of collective identity formation in social movements has recently become an important aspect of theorizing about contentious politics. 3 This emphasis was long overdue, given the distinctive character of modern life identified by countless social analysts (see for example, Berger and Luckman 1967: 64).

In premodern society, these two authors argue, social life was tightly circumscribed by a decided lack of geographic and social mobility. The practical effect of these constraints was to create a strong structural equivalence between the individual and the group. Indeed, in most times and places, the individual experienced life as a cradle-to-grave embedding in a single tribe or similarly insular group. As moderns we no doubt shudder at the thought of such a life. As well we should. The experiential limits of such a life would be anathema to us. And yet, for all the obvious deficits associated with such an existence, a lack of meaning and identity would probably not be counted among them.

All of this, argue Berger and Luckman, began to change with the rapid rupture of the tight structural equivalence between the individual and the collective that characterized premodern society. Fueled by three trends -- the spread of industrial capitalism, urbanization, and the rise of the modern nation-state -- this transformation began in early modern Europe and accelerated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Analysts have long noted the timing and significance of these trends and the role they played in transforming political and economic life. Less often noted, however, are what might be termed the "ontological" changes occasioned by them. Quite simply, "modernity," as that cluster of trends that "liberated" the individual from the insularity of pre-modern society, fundamentally altered the ontological structure and dynamics of social life. Meaning and identity became less a structural endowment of some stable "lifeworld", than a collaborative social accomplishment.

What has this to do with contentious politics? With the shift from premodern to modern life, popular politics became one of the principal sources for the construction of meaning and identity in social life. This, we take it, is the often-forgotten but enduring lesson of E. P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class (1964). By bringing it to light, Thompson liberated class analysis from its productivist cage; but he left aside non-class forms of collective identity formation and left unspecified the specific relationship between collective action and collective identity.

But what agencies create new identities? As scholars of social movements, collective action and revolutions, we have yet to fashion a truly relational micro-foundation for the formation of new and transformed collective identities. Some scholars have looked at the face-to-face interaction of small groups to find this process of collective identity building -- what Melucci (1988) calls the "negotiation" of collective identities. But this micro-perspective isolates the face-to-face group from the larger movement of which it is a part and from its relationship to antagonists, allies and the broader cultural frames that constrain and animate collective action (Snow and Benford 1992; Snow et al., 1986). Over the course of our project, we hope to make the relational formation of collective identities one of the prime goals for conceptual synthesis. Two current approaches provide clues.

Rational Choice and Network Analysis

Proponents of the rational choice perspective are correct to stress the importance of incentives to the study of individual activism. Where they fall short, in our view, is in their extremely narrow -- and generally materialist -- conception of incentives and their often anomic portrait of the individual. The image one emerges with is of an isolated outsider deciding whether or not to affiliate with a given instance of collective action "offered" by an entrepreneur of some sort. What this view misses is the degree to which individuals are already embedded and ontologically invested in various kinds of social structures and practices.

The failure to acknowledge and investigate this embeddedness of collective action distorted the process of recruitment and aggregation and left scholars insensitive to a whole class of incentives that would appear to be decisive in most instances. More recent theorists have recognized that there are different collective action problems and difference solutions to it. The "rebel's dilemma, points out Mark Irving Lichbach, is not the same as that of the authorities the rebel faces (1995: xii). Lichbach's collective action approach uses the same framework to explain "how both the state (i.e., cooperation) and dissident groups (i.e.,conflict) arise (p. xiii). Among the solutions he envisages to the rebel's dilemma are markets, communities, contracts and hierarchies.

For their part, network analysts of contentious politics have stressed social embeddedness and have marshaled impressive evidence of its role in mediating recruitment and aggregation into activism (Gould 1991, 1993; McAdam 1 986). But they have been "generally silent on the basic sociological dynamics that account for the reported findings . . . in most cases, no theory is offered to explain the observed effects" (McAdam and Paulsen 1 993: 641). One is left with the disquieting image of the individual as structural automaton, compelled to act by the force of this or that social embedding.

Network analysts of social movements will never fully account for the impressive effects their models predict without explicitly confronting the issue of incentives, motivations and collective identities. Progress can be made along these lines. Our earlier characterization of people "embedded and ontologically invested in various kinds of social structures and practices" suggests the tack we intend to take. Most people can be expected to take part in collective action which is rooted in those communities from which they derive meanings and identities critical to their lives and well-being. In offering this proposition, we make no assumption of conscious calculation on the individual's part. Even without consciously weighing costs and benefits, people can be expected to act to confirm or safeguard the central sources of meaning and identity in their lives, especially when models are available in the form of repertoires and claims embedded in the history of the group.

Examples are common in the recent historical literature on contentious politics. For example, it would be hard to account for the rapid mobilization and diffusion of the American civil rights movement without recognizing how firmly it came to be embedded in two institutions -- the black churches and colleges -- central to the lives and identities of black southerners (McAdam 1982:129 - 31). In France, Roger Gould's (1990, 1991) findings regarding the high levels of neighborhood participation in the Paris Commune can be interpreted in much the same light. By tapping into the structural sources of meaning and identity in people's lives, leaders of the insurrection that produced the Commune went a long way to insuring popular support for their cause.

Moreover (and here we turn to the identity-constructing potential of contentious politics), identities were forever changed by the two sets of events described above. While the American civil rights movement declined in the late 1 960s, it fundamentally changed the meaning of being African-American. Similarly, although the Paris Commune was ruthlessly destroyed, it left behind it a new and more collectivist meaning for the term "republican", producing a deeper embedding of these ideas in the lower classes of Paris. And when Lenin's Bolsheviks adopted the name "Communists", the heritage of the Commune became international. These examples contradict the traditional rational choice imagery of isolated individuals choosing -- or defecting from -- collective action, and help to explain why the vaunted free-rider problem may not be so problematic after all. Most movements do not arise because "outsiders" are induced to join the struggle; rather they are aggregated out of the solidary and ontological commitments of the movement's primary mobilizing structures, which are in turn linked to communities of identity communicated through social networks.

V. Linking Politics And Collective Action

Our insistence in Part Three on the continuities between movements, cycles and revolutions and, in Part Four, on the embeddedness of collective action in communities and social networks both underscore a more basic claim: that there is no fundamental discontinuity between what used to be called "collective behavior" and institutional politics. This is because --together with most recent students of the subject -- we reject the assumption that collective action is irrational, and because of our assumption that contentious politics is a way of making claims on behalf of those who are, or feel themselves to be unrepresented. When these claims lock the unrepresented into a sustained process of interaction with mighty opponents, we enter the presence of a social movement; when these claimants gain regular access to power and adapt to it through a commitment to institutional processes, the outcome is an interest group; but when contentious interaction concentrates in moments of deep fragmentation in state power, revolutionary situations occur. All three levels have in common with institutional politics that they are based on collective claims against others, on the formation of coalitions leading to broader collective identities, and on the strategic choice of tactics and collective action frames.

Two questions follow from our assumption of continuity: first, what are the similarities and differences between contentious politics and institutional politics; and second, what are the relations between the two? In what follows we no more than scratch the surface of these fundamental issues in the study of contentious politics, comparing only social movements with political parties and ignoring many of the other actors both outside of and within institutional politics.

Similarities and Differences between Movements and Parties

In his contribution to the recent volume The Politics of Social Protest, Craig Jenkins observes the following differences between social movements and political parties:

    Social movements rely on face-to-face interaction and emphasize the formation of new solidarities and identities...Political parties, by contrast, are primarily concerned with controlling public office and hence resort to different tactics, using media images and formalized communications and tapping into existing loyalties.
He adds that the logic of electoral competition also pressures party leaders to adopt an inclusive definition of their constituency and that -- at least in liberal democratic contexts -- "this leads to different logics of mobilization" (1995: 21).

Jenkins' conceptualization implicitly regards movements as groups comparable to parties. But this both begs the question of the relationship between movements and social movement organizations and oversimplifies the question of the relationship between movements and institutional politics. For if social movements are a kind of group, then what is the difference between movements and interest groups? And if there is no essential difference between movements and interest groups, what justifies the specialization of large numbers of scholars on movements?

Our focus on "contentious politics" subsumes the category of social movements within a collective action -- and not an organizational --framework: that of collective activity by or in the name of unrepresented claimants relying at least in part on non-institutionalized forms of political action against opponents, elites or the state. Not all contentious politics results in social movement. When the contentious interaction is sustained, we call that a social movement; if and when it tips towards institutional access and commitments, we see it as interest group behavior; and when this leads to organized efforts to win elections and control public office, the result is political parties.

To put empirical flesh on our perspective, compare how Jenkins' framework and our own would make of a party like the French National Front. The FN. is certainly a party that contests elections, puts forward policy proposals and seeks to control public office. But it also reflects the diffuse presence of millions of French people who feel themselves deprived of representation and whose identity-in-formation as an anti-immigration movement is all too evident, both from the frequent physical attacks on immigrants and from the growing support for anti-immigrant policies recorded in surveys. If we conceptualized movements as concrete groups that were equivalent to parties, we would be forced to choose an identity for the Front national that ignored its dual face as movement and party.

Our conceptualization of movements as sustained interactions may resolve the conceptual difficulty, for it makes the "groupness" inherent in Jenkins' conception of a movement contingent and variable. For us, the Front national is a party seeking office and a movement organization claiming to represent the inchoate claims of the semi-formed, unorganized anti-immigrant constituency in France, one which is neither mutually exclusive with the organization nor forecloses the possibility that other organizations could attempt the same representation. If by some chance it went out of existence tomorrow, the interaction between the French anti-immigrant movement and the French state would no doubt change (among other things, it might well become more violent), but it would not disappear.

What students of social movements need to accomplish is to develop ways of characterizing and studying the interaction between collective actors and their opponents more formally and more empirically than has been done in the past. This involves, among other things, paying more attention to the players on the other side of the "sustained interaction" --powerholders and, in the case of national social movements, the state. In our empirical work, we have been moving in this direction, but we cannot claim to have established firm and consistent parameters for its study. Jenkins' and Klandermans' recent Politics and Social Movements makes strides in this direction, as do Aminzade's Ballots and Barricades (1993), Knesi et al.'s Politics of New Social Movements (1995) and della Porta's Social Movements Political Violence and the State (1995).

Relations between Movements and Institutional Politics

Nearly two decades ago, William Gamson (1975) coined the terms "challengers" and polity "members" to characterize those who make claims on behalf of unrepresented constituencies and those whose claims are institutionally represented. It was then observed that while social movements have usually been seen as anti-institutional actors, challengers are frequently involved in coalitions with members of the polity (Tilly 1 978: 53).

Such coalitions across polity boundaries may be purely "objective" --that is, lacking concerted strategies and joint actions between challengers and members -- and may therefore insulate the former from the enticements of institutional politics. In other cases, movement organizations -- in tried and true Michelsian fashion -- evolve into parties and interest groups. They also -- and we see this more and more -- build coalitions across the frontiers of the polity with some of its members. Challengers to the polity, that is, often relate to members in non-antagonistic and even cooperative ways. It follows from this not only that contentious politics often resembles coalition formation, but also that -- like Jenkins' political parties --movements "adopt an inclusive definition of their constituency" in order to broaden their appeal and increase their bargaining weight with institutional elites (cf. Jenkins 1995: 21). In other cases, parts of a movement give rise to political party strategies while other parts resemble our conception of social movement organizations (see, for example, Aminzade 1993; Tarrow 1989: ch. 11).

In this relationship across polity boundaries, political parties are not always inert players, waiting supinely to be outflanked by challengers. First, because parties often have their origin in movements, they are not unaware of the potential appeals of challengers and are capable of adjusting their programs to outflank those of their competitors. But, second, political parties are often active proponents of the claims that movements place on the agenda and, in fact, they frequently provide the opportunities for movements to form around policies that they themselves initiate. This was certainly the case of the American women's movement in the 1 960s and 1 970s (Freeman 1 973; Costain 1 992). Parties, rather than bit players in the dramas in which social movements are often the main performers on the stage, are often the phantom at the opera.

What this means for researchers is that studies which focus on movements only as internally-oriented actors and ignore their relations with parties, interest groups and states, cannot easily grasp their shifts in support, tactics and goals, for each of these is profoundly affected by the other players in the movements' "conflict system" and "alliance system" (Klandermans 1989; Knesi et al, 1995). It may be objected that some movements are not "instrumentally-oriented" but are "identity-oriented" or oriented towards the cultivation of internal goals. But in the presence of active, influential states, even self-regarding movements encounter state power at some points and adjust their strategies in response to state influence -- if only because identities must be recognized to be validated, and states and their institutional appendages are the most symbolically powerful agencies of such recognition (Calhoun 1994: 21).

VI.Two Closing Conundra:

It may have occurred to the reader (it long ago occurred to the authors!) that much of the thinking that has gone into this paper thus far is based on the experiences of western parliamentary democracies in the age of the national social movement. But does this mean that the concepts we use here are only part of the real estate of the advanced industrial democracies of the West? Or only that they have not been systematically specified and operationalized for other periods or types of regime or for movements that transcend the nation state? Unfortunately, the fragmentation of the field of contentious politics is such that we are not yet in a position to propose even tentative answers to this question, but we would like to close by posing these questions more completely.

Scope Conditions in Contentious Politics

Following reasonable intuitions about precipitating conditions for different sorts of contentious politics, students of coups d'etat have concentrated their attention on countries in which military organizations enjoy considerable political autonomy; students of revolution on capitalizing, industrializing agrarian regions; students of social movements on western parliamentary democracies; and so on through a variety of connections between themes and cases. Overall, nevertheless, availability of evidence and locations of scholars have imparted a strong bias of existing work on political contention toward contemporary Western Europe and North America.

These locational and thematic linkages may be no more than an accident of where resources are concentrated or research problems happen to be observed, but in principle, such phenomena as revolutions or social movements could vary so significantly in their actual operation from time to time and place to place that no empirical regularities would deserve extrapolation. Two questions bedevil scope conditions: 1) to what extent do regularities in contentious politics vary by time and place, 2) to what extent does the disproportionate attention to Western Europe and North America in the literature produce misleading generalizations about various forms of contention? Specialists in, say, Somalia, Bosnia, China or Afghanistan must therefore ask which generalizations from previous work they can safely import into their own regions. Which conclusions depend so heavily on the peculiar cultures, histories and political reforms of contemporary capitalist democracies that they will collapse outside their zones of origin?

This query calls up three answers:

First, we do not know the scope conditions for most current generalizations about political contention, and can only learn them through deliberate, careful comparison across time and space. (But we will surely not learn them by assuming a priori that non-western countries are inherently and unalterably different than the West, thereby resolving the "scope conditions" question by culturalist proclamation). We might suppose that models of social movements and class conflict based on Western European experience and its extensions will break down when applied outside the range of relatively centralized, bureaucratized and parliamentarized states, but we can only find out by testing them comparatively against models that have grown out of non-western experience (Boudreau 1 995).

Second, sound causal analyses of political contention offer the promise of discovering principles not of uniformity but of variation -- which is one of the reasons we do comparative work (Tilly 1 984b). If, for example, we discover that both the precipitants and the forms of war depend on the prevailing organization of military power within each state and on relations between the dominant classes of potentially belligerent states, this finding challenges us to stipulate how different prevailing military organizations and international class relations than the ones we observe should affect the precipitants and forms of war. Findings concerning the impact of variable political opportunity structure on the character of social movements invite extrapolation and testing outside the parliamentary democracies on which they are currently based (Brockett 1991). In short, the counterfactuals we inevitably employ in exploring phenomena whose variation we observe ineluctably suggest explanations whose scope could easily surpass the range of our current observations. Once again, we can only try.

Third, both scope conditions and our current knowledge of them surely vary for different kinds of phenomena. Interest groups, parties, elections and political influence-peddling almost certainly operate differently in Cambodia or Zaire than they do in Canada or the United Kingdom. Hence, exporting conclusions based on Anglo-Canadian experience elsewhere runs a double risk. But when it comes to political identity, citizenship and nationalism, it is at least possible that these phenomena depend sufficiently on worldwide conditions to permit cautious generalization across continents, if not across historical epochs. And this takes us to our concluding conundrum -- the "globalization" of movements.

Globalizing World and Transnational Movements?

Not only does much of our knowledge of contentious politics come from the industrialized West: it comes from the last two hundred years --the heyday of what we have called the national social movement. We recognize (and have written about) the differences between this set of phenomena and what preceded it in Western history (Tilly 1983, 1984a, 1995, Tarrow 1994), but we have only begun to consider, together with other specialists, the implications for contentious politics of what some are calling the "globalization" of politics.

This is not the place to detail the various versions and properties of the thesis of globalization. In its strong form, 4 it makes five claims:

  1. The dominant economic trends of the late twentieth century have been towards international economic interdependence.

  2. Economic growth of the 1 970s and 1 980s has brought citizens of the North and West and those of the East and South closer together, making the latter more aware of their inequality.

  3. Global economic interdependence and international relative deprivation have contributed to spurring massive shifts of population from the South and East to the North and West. But because immigrants no longer lose touch with their country of origin and cannot hope for citizenship, they remain forever foreign.

  4. Global communications structures are emerging that weave closer ties between core and periphery of the world system. Decentralized and private communications technologies such as computer networking have accelerated the growth of global interdependent communications structures.

  5. These structural changes have a cultural concomitant: that we live in a culturally more unified universe, one in which young people dress the same, ride the same skateboards, play the same computer games and listen to the same rock music.

These changes result in the stronger version of the transnational social movement thesis, which has the following general characteristics:

  1. The national political opportunity structures that used to exclusively structure collective action -- and constrain it -- may be giving way. The national state -- incubator and fulcrum of social movements in the past -- may no longer be the sole constraint or stimulant to movements. This is especially true where national polities have agreed to share sovereignty -- as in the European Community -- with emerging transnational (and, on occasion, subnational) political and economic institutions (Marks and McAdam, 1996).

  2. The second putative effect is on the declining capacity of governments to exert control over the national polity. "The increasing fluidity of capital, labor, commodities, money and cultural practices undermines the capacity of any particular state to control events within its boundaries" (Tilly 1992:1).

  3. The capacity to mount new forms of collective action is probably increasing too. Where electronic communication becomes a means for the propagation of movement information, there is an increased capacity for low-risk empowerment of people all over the world --what might be termed "easy riding on the internet" (Tarrow 1995).

Peaceful and virtually institutionalized forms of transnational collective action have accompanied this shift: from the student movement of the 1960s (McAdam and Rucht 1993) to the peace campaigns that spread across Europe and America in the 1980s (Rochon 1988) to the global environmental movement which links Green parties and movements across national boundaries (Dalton 1994) to non-governmental associations which provide resources to protect the rights and publicize the wrongs against indigenous peoples from Australia to Latin America (Brysk 1993; Yashar n.d.). These transnational groups are increasingly relevant to foreign policy and international politics (Keck and Sikkink 1994, Pagnucco and Smith 1993).

But the rapid spread of information, immigration and even militancy may not be enough to produce global movements. Both history and social movement theory suggest some caution. The historical reasons to be cautious about the strong version of the transnational thesis can be summarized in two points: In the first place, the integration of the world economy is not exactly new. 5 And in the second place, the spread of capitalism, communications, and the waves of immigration that resulted diffused movements in very similar form and with similar goals around the world. It is enough to think of the Eastern European roots of the clothing workers' movement created in sweatshops on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1 890s; or of the socialist and anarchist movements that were created by Italian immigrants in Chile and Argentina.

This takes us to the insights of social movement theory. If we have learned anything from the last twenty-five years of social movement research, it is that movements do not depend on interest or opportunity alone, but must build on indigenous social networks in domestic societies. We argued earlier that it is more due to networks of people who are linked to each other by a specific interpersonal bond than to formal organization or individual incentives that collective action is aggregated. Advocates of the "strong" globalization thesis will have to show that trans-national (and inevitably long-distance) activist networks have the same effects as the face-to-face networks and resulting collective identities that have been at the basis of the national social movement.

Not all prospective movements have the resources to respond to transnational forces with proportional activism. Consider the labor movement: If only because capital is more mobile than labor, labor movements have been unable to respond effectively to the global economic interdependence that has been restructuring labor all over the world (Tilly 1993). Even in Europe, where the European Union would seem to encourage transnational cooperation, organized labor has been unable to match the rate of multinational business growth with cooperation across national boundaries (Marks and McAdam, 1996). 6

This is why a "weaker" version of the transnational social movement thesis may be more plausible than the strong one: one that does not imply that emerging transnational institutions or an expanded capacity for cross-national communication will automatically create transnational movements, but that they do provide new political opportunities and expanded resources that can turn indigenous social networks into national social movements. Where these networks are lacking, a globalized economy cannot create a social movement. Most of the examples we have are actually not cases of global movements with national locals, but of political exchange between allied actors whose contact has been facilitated by global economic integration and communication. In short, we do not know whether globalization will ultimately render the national social movement anachronistic, but if it does, we suspect that institutionalized politics, ongoing political interaction, and indigenous social networks will continue to structure the dynamics of contentious politics.

Conclusion

These represent our preliminary thoughts on the four topics we sketched at the outset of the paper and which will occupy our attention over the next several years. As should be obvious, these thoughts hardly amount to the kind of integrated, coherent synthesis we hope to produce over the course of this project. As befits the current topography of the intellectual terrain we seek to traverse, our thoughts are necessarily fragmented, partial and, we hope, provocative. We have shared them in hopes of stimulating an ongoing dialogue, both with our colleagues on the project, and more diffusely with all who aspire to a deeper understanding of the dynamics of contentious politics. We invite your feedback and look forward to a prolonged and productive exchange. Let the conversation begin.



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Notes

Note 1: We offer this paper (forthcoming in the inaugural issue of the new journal Contention) as our joint contribution to the initiation of a three year project of theoretical and empirical synthesis that we are beginning with our colleagues Ron Aminzade, Jack Goldstone and William Sewell Jr., under a grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation's initiative of Seminars in Studies of Foreign Areas and Cultures. The project will be administered by the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Back.

Note 2: This vast domain is usually thought of as the sole province of professional historians, but we should be aware, both of the degree to which historiography has become more explicitly theoretical in the last twenty years, and of the extent to which purely descriptive monographs animated by a passion for particular movements continue to be produced in sociology and political science. Back.

Note 3: The work of Alberto Melucci (1988, 1989) is a fount of much recent research. For a rich recent collection on identity politics, see Calhoun, et.al (1994). Actually, this strand of theorizing goes back further -- and has more "structuralist" roots than recent "cultural turn" advocates recognize -- to Pizzorno's explanation of the vitality and spontaneity of Italian worker insurgency in the late 1960s. See Pizzorno (1978) and the work inspired by him in Crouch and Pizzorno, eds. (1978). Back.

Note 4: The strongest versions of the theory are put forward by political scientist James Rosenau, who sees a new phase of global turbulence growing up since the end of World War Two (1990), and by communications specialist Michael O'Neil, for whom a new age of transnational people power has been advanced by global television, fax machines and electronic private media (1993). Back.

Note 5: >We need only look at Hobsbawm's Age of Empire to join him in thinking that, on the centenary of the French and American revolutions, the world had become "genuinely global" (1987: 13). Back.

Note 6: Moreover, depending on movement organizations from advanced industrial countries is not the best way for activists in Third World countries to build indigenous movements. For one thing, their links with international environmentalists are often fragile or intermittent (Macdonald n.d.). For another, relations between the two actors almost always favor those with expertise and access to power over those they come to help. When they leave, their local allies may disperse or be more easily vulnerable to repression. Back.

 

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