Social Movements as Political Struggle

Charles Tilly

Center for Advanced Study in the Behavorial Sciences at Stanford University

July 1997

draft article for the Encyclopedia of American Social Movements

In democratic countries, social movements have been providing political outsiders with effective means of announcing their presence and of making claims for almost two centuries. A cluster of features distinguishes social movement politics from the prescribed politics of democratic regimes: sustained challenge to existing holders of power in the name of a wronged population, by means of repeated public demonstrations that the wronged population or its representatives are worthy, unified, numerous, and committed, including at least some actions outside the forms of political participation currently favored by the law. The social movement itself consists of repeated interactions among challengers, objects of their claims, relevant publics, and various third parties such as rival challengers, counter-demonstrators, bystanders, incidental victims, and police. Social movement organizers often rely on or create social movement organizations. The movement itself, however, consists not of organizations but of sustained interaction, of political struggle.

Popular challenges of this general sort have arisen now and then for thousands of years, usually with little effect but brutal repression, although occasionally with revolutionary outcomes. With the growth of democratic regimes after 1800, social movements became much more common. Although the social movement as such never acquired the legal standing of such forms of political participation as elections, referenda, parties, and petitions, social movements promoted the legalization -- or at least the legal toleration -- of a number of familiar forms: public meetings; demonstrations; rallies; special-interest associations; strikes; occupations of public buildings, public spaces, and workplaces. Social movements are thus partly causes, partly effects, and almost invariably concomitants of democratic freedoms to speak, assemble, associate, and complain.

Elections and social movements have important parallels and interdependencies. Both of them gauge support or opposition for authorities' actions, potential or actual. Both of them also identify blocs of like-minded people who might take further action if conditions continue to meet their disapproval. Social movements often gain impact from the presence of binding elections because movements signal the presence of connected, aggrieved populations that could either vote together or otherwise disrupt politics as usual. Successful social movement activists often enter electoral politics individually or as members of new parties, their issues gain places on party platforms, and their constituencies become forces to be reckoned with in future elections. As a result, social movements have generally increased in frequency, scope, and impact where and when binding contested elections based on broad suffrage have become more central to political life.

Social movements also differ from elections in several crucial ways. On the average they demand much higher levels of energy than elections. Although candidates and party organizers may turn elections into full-time occupations and although some people do no more for a social movement than contribute money now and then, for the most part the minimum participation in social movement activity requires greater effort and more extensive interaction with other people than does an ordinary citizen's voting. Elections focus attention primarily on candidates for office and secondarily on parties or programs, while social movements generally give primacy to programs or even to very specific demands. Elections pay off on sheer numbers; victory is virtually insured by getting out enough supporters, regardless of their motivations and commitments. Social movement challengers always seek more complex objectives, including both specific claims and general recognition. As a consequence, numbers alone do not suffice for social movement success.

More differences between elections and social movements follow. One election generally resembles the last not only in its prescribed actions but also in its outcomes:

routines of campaigning and voting change incrementally for the most part. Participants therefore attach great importance to relatively small shifts in turnout or expressed preference. In contrast, social movement activists invest a great deal of effort in differentiating this action from the last or the next, not to mention from the actions of rivals or enemies. Finally, participants in elections sometimes make a public point of their partisan identity or support for a particular candidate but often do nothing of the sort; such displays of identity, support, and membership figure centrally in social movements.

Differences between elections and social movements result from their contrasting relations to the existing structure of power. People who already hold power set the rules of elections and usually benefit from them. Incumbents tend to win reelection, established parties to prevail despite shifts in relative strength among them, newcomers to have difficulty even getting on ballots, advocates of new programs to have trouble injecting their issues into electoral campaigns. Social movements specialize in creating political space for newcomers, marginal populations, neglected programs, and unheard grievances. Whereas elections commonly pass with no strong public expressions of collective identity and no demonstrations of intense support for one demand or another, social movements center on coupling assertions of shared identity with statements of well-defined claims. Elections and social movements do sometimes converge, as when hotly-contested races for office generate rallies, marches, and fights or when movement activists throw their support to maverick candidates. On the whole, nevertheless, elections pivot on insiders' politics, social movements on outsiders' politics.

Remember the elements that together set off social movements from other forms of politics: sustained challenge; direction of that challenge to power-holders; action in the name of a wronged population; repeated public demonstrations that the wronged population or its representatives are worthy, unified, numerous, and committed; and actions outside the forms of political participation currently favored by the law. Each element has its own historically4ormed political underpinnings. Let us review each one in turn.

Sustained Challenge. In social movements, participants make collective claims not once but repeatedly, and openly rather than in disguised ways. They voice their claims as active demands, complaints, or proposals instead of humble supplications or subtle indications of preference. Over the long sweep of political history, most regimes have suppressed any such claims when they have arisen, persecuted advocates of such claims when it was feasible, turned deaf ears when it was not, and undermined the social conditions that promote sustained, direct, popular statement of claims. Generalization of social movement claim-making rests on relative freedom of association, assembly, and speech - all of them historically exceptional, all of them hard-won democratic rights.

Power-Holders. More often than not, social movement activists direct their claims at governmental officials. Less often, they aim at members of privileged social categories, owners of economic enterprises, operators of significant public facilities, and similar wielders of one kind of influence or another. Historically, such direct targeting of power-holders has always been risky; except with the protection of a patron, the cover of anonymity, or the chaos of civil war, it has typically invited direct retaliation, cutting off of patronage, and discrimination against people connected with the claimant. Social movements capitalize on some combination of lawful rule, institutionalized protection for dissidents, vulnerability of power-holders (e.g. to their own rivals), and capacity of movement supporters for protection or counter-offense. These conditions overlap historically with the conditions for sustained challenge - which means they appear more frequently in democratic regimes - but they also become more salient when a visible split has opened up within the elite.

Wronged Population. Very powerful people rarely engage in social movements they have less costly, more effective ways of pursuing their interests. Completely powerless people likewise rarely form or join social movements; they have neither the social connections nor the resources it takes. In between those extremes, social movement participants articulate a collective sense of wrong either on their own behalf or on behalf of some valued constituency. Movements vary enormously in the degree of overlap between activists and those for whom they claim to speak, from movements demanding protection of forests from clear-cutting or of fetuses from abortion to other movements aligning all of a neighborhood's squatters against the mayor who has signed their eviction notice. Rarely does a whole population for whom movement militants claim to speak actually mobilize - a fact that makes militants vulnerable to the contrary claim that they do not represent the actual will or interest of their announced constituency, to rivalries for recognition as legitimate leaders, and to the organization of counter-movements within the same population. In all cases, however, movement leaders take care to emphasize wrongs suffered by their constituency: deprivation of rights, threats to well-being, denial of earned recognition, or something of the sort.

Displays of WUNC. Social movements include public displays of WUNC -Worthiness, Unity, Numbers, and Commitment - on the part of activists, on the part of their constituency, or both. An implicit scale for movement strength applies: With worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment each running from 0 (none) to 1 (maximum possible in the circumstances) STRENGTH = W x U x N x C, which means that if any of the values falls to 0 50 does strength. A high value on one element (say commitment) makes up for a low value on another (say numbers). Thus a few highly committed hunger strikers can have the same impact as thousands of people who merely sign a petition. Relevant codes run roughly as follows:

Worthiness: sobriety, propriety of dress, incorporation of priests and other dignitaries, endorsement of moral authorities, evidence of undeserved previous suffering.

Unity: uniforms, marching or dancing in unison, chanting of slogans, singing, cheering, linking of arms, wearing or bearing of common symbols, direct affirmation of a common program or identity.

Numbers: filling of public space, presentation of petitions, representations of multiple units (e.g. neighborhood associations), direct claims of numerical support by means of polls, membership inscriptions, and financial contributions.

Commitment: persistence in costly or risky activity, declarations of readiness to persevere, resistance to attack.

With variation in the precise means used to display these characteristics (for example, the partial displacement of identifying banners by signs on sticks late in the 19th century), emphasis on WUNC has persisted from early in the social movement's history. The chief deviations from the code have occurred in pursuit of visibility and in deliberate assertions of difference, as when members of dissident factions have broken the facade of unity by resisting marching orders or gay militants have violated conventional standards of worthiness by cross-dressing.

Unauthorized Action. Every political regime requires some forms of political action, promotes others without requiring them, tolerates still others, and represses the rest. Contemporary democratic regimes, for example, ordinarily require payment of taxes, promote voting, tolerate (but police) public gatherings, and repress physical attacks on property. Social movements sometimes include required and promoted actions (for example, voting and electioneering), but specialize in innovative forms of actions on the margin of toleration and repression. Effective social movement actions strike a balance between innovation and intelligibility; a demonstration that precisely repeats the routines of its predecessor loses impact, but a gathering restricted to rituals, chants, and symbols no outsider can recognize likewise fails to communicate its message. Because social movement activists frequently innovate at the edge of legality, they often engage in semi-private negotiations with police and other authorities before and during their public displays, for example by agreeing upon the time, place, and itinerary of a demonstration, and by instructing their own monitors to keep enthusiasts in line.

Because social movements sometimes succeed in their demands, because they sometimes achieve political recognition of their constituencies, because they sometimes result in acceptance of their previously-repressed forms of claim-making, and because struggle between challengers and authorities itself produces alterations in toleration and repression, social movements contribute to redefinition of routine politics. The ironic consequence is that unauthorized action for one generation is authorized for the next, and the locus of social movement innovation shifts accordingly. In mid~18th century America, it was illegal for ordinary citizens to meet without prior authorization for political deliberations and form associations for that purpose; the proliferation of such activities during the American Revolution clearly had a social movement flavor. Half a century later, however, the right to assemble and form associations were so firmly established in the new United States that they no longer qualified in themselves as social movement activities. Later, the strike, the sit-in and a number of other social movement innovations underwent similar transitions into legality, or at least into the zone of tolerance.

Social movements' sustained challenges to power-holders necessarily interact with and depend upon a great deal of social life outside the public arena. Some kinds of connection deserve special attention:

• the heavy reliance of almost all movements on non-movement networks (for example, friends, classmates, neighbors, co-workers) for recruitment, resources, and moral support
• the formation of solidarities and mutual aid among movement activists
• the extensive behind-the-scenes recruiting, organizing, persuading, coalition-forming, lobbying, and strategizing that underlies complex public events.

Movements differ enough in their approaches to these activities and in their relative stress on public vs. private activity that we can distinguish roughly among three types: professional (the continuous, specialized, and sparse social movement conducted by professional organizers using funds supplied by a weakly committed set of supporters), ad hoc (the temporary, specialized, and relatively rich mobilization by members of a connected community against a specific threat), and communitarian (the continuous, unspecialized movement giving rise to a new community of the faithful, a community whose sustenance becomes a major preoccupation of movement supporters). The three tend to exit the social movement arena - the arena of sustained public challenge - in different directions, with professional activists moving into interest-group and electoral politics, ad hoc activists returning to their lives before the threat, and communitarian activists devoting full time to community-building. Intense involvement in any of the three, nevertheless, commonly reshapes people's social lives, giving them new ties, new priorities, and new understandings of political realities.

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