How Social Movements Matter
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HOW SOCIA I MOVEMENT S MATTE R Social Movements, Protest, and Contention Series Editor: Bert Klandermans, Free University, Amsterdam Associate Editors: Sidney Tarrow, Cornell University Vena A. Taylor, The Ohio State University Ron Aminzade, University of Minnesota Volume 10 Marco Giugni, Doug McAdam, and Charles Tilly, eds., How Social Movements Matter Volume 9 Cynthia L. Irvin, Militant Nationalism: Between Movement and Party in Ireland and the Basque Country Volume 8 Raka Ray Fields of Protest: Women's Movements in India Volume 7 Michael P Hanagan, Leslie Page Moch, and Wayne te Brake, eds., Challenging Authority: The Historical Study of Contentious Politics Volume 6 Donatella della Porta and Herbert Reiter, eds., Policing Protest: The Control of Mass Demonstrations in Western Democracies Volume 5 Hanspeter Kriesi, Ruud Koopmans, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Marco G. Giugni, New Social Movements in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis Volume 4 Hank Johnston and Bert Klandermans, eds., Social Movements and Culture Volume 3 J. Craig Jenkins and Bert Klandermans, eds., The Politics of Social Protest: Comparative Perspectives on States and Social Movements Volume 2 John Foran, ed., A Century of Revolution: Social Movements in Iran Volume 1 Andrew Szasz, EcoPopulism: Toxic Waste and the Movement for Environmental Justice HOW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS MATTER Marco Giugni, Doug McAdam, and Charles Tilly, editors Foreword b y Sidne y Tarro w Social Movements, Protest, and Contention Volume 10 University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London Copyright 1999 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data How social movements matter / Marco Giugni, Doug McAdam, and Charles Filly, editors ; foreword by Sidney Tarrow. p. cm. — (Social movements, protest, and contention ; v. 10) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8166-2914-5 (hardcover). — ISBN 0-8166-2915-3 (paperback) 1. Social movements. 2. Protest movements. 1. Giugni, Marco. II. McAdam, Doug. III. Tilly, Charles. IV. Series. HM131.H625 1999 303.48'4—dc21 99-17529 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 1110 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 1098765432 Contents Foreword vii Sidney Tarrow Preface xi Introduction How Social Movements Matter: Past Research, Present Problems, Future Developments xiii Marco Giugni Part I: Types of Consequences 1. Social Movements and Public Policy 3 Paul Burstein 2. Making an Impact: Conceptual and Methodological Implications of the Collective Goods Criterion 22 Edwin Amenta and Michael P. Young 3. The Impact of Social Movements on Political Institutions: A Comparison of the Introduction of Direct Legislation in Switzerland and the United States 42 Hanspeter Kriesi and Dominique Wider 4. Protest, Protesters, and Protest Policing: Public Discourses in Italy and Germany from the 1960s to the 1980s 66 Donatella della Port a 5. Political Protest and Institutional Change: The Anti—Vietnam War Movement and American Science 97 Kelly Moore 6. The Biographical Impact of Activism 119 Doug Me Adam Part II: Comparative Perspectives 7. Feminist Politics in a Hostile Environment: Obstacles and Opportunities 149 Joyce Gelb and Vivien Hart 8. How the Cold War Was Really Won: The Effects of the Antinuclear Movements of the 1 980s 182 David S. Meyer 9. The Impact of Environmental Movements in Western Societies 204 Dieter Rucht 10. Ethnic and Civic Conceptions of Nationhood and the Differential Success of the Extreme Right in Cermany and Italy 225 Ruud Koopmans and Paul Statham Conclusion From Interactions to Outcomes in Social Movements 253 Charles Tilly Bibliography 271 Contributors 303 Index 307 Foreword Sidney Jarrow Marco Giugni, Doug McAdam, and Charles Tilly have put together a sub- versive reader. Everyone who has worked on social movements knows how important it is to try to understand their outcomes. Almost everyone admits the extreme difficulty of doing so. Some of us make halfhearted attempts anyway; others retreat to the tried-and-true terrain of studying movement origins; a few take refuge in phenomenology. Giugni, McAdam, and Tilly are braver souls. After obligatory curtsies in the direction of caution, they and their collaborators strike out boldly to detect, discriminate among, and define the outcomes of social movements. As if this were not subversive enough, they and their contributors refuse to limit themselves to the most direct, short-term effects of movements— national, institution-based policy outcomes. Though experts like Paul Burstein and Dieter Rucht contribute to the book lucid treatments of direct policy effects, even their contributions are unconventional: Burstein ques- tions the distinctiveness of social movements altogether, and Rucht elabo- rates a complex model of movements' environmental impact—both through policy and beyond it. But the most subversive message of the book is found in its authors' willingness to go beyond the range of national policy and political impacts of social movements and into such nonnational areas as the international peace movement (Meyer); such nongovernmental areas as movement effects on scientific institutions (Moore); such cultural areas as the changing dis- course of protest policing (della Porta); and such noninstitutional areas as the effects of movements on the life course (McAdam). vii Vlll FOREWORD The authors, it is true, touch base with familiar old friends in social movement debates: debates about whether disruption or moderation pays greater dividends; whether internal or external resources make more of a dif- ference for movement success; whether purposive or unintended outcomes of movements are more important; and whether the changes initiated by movements are durable or ephemeral. But their true contributions are more subversive: • questioning, on the one hand, whether movements are distinct from interest groups (Burstein) or whether they are best seen not as groups at all, but rather as structured contentious performances (Tilly) • turning away from the search for invariant causal models toward a search for historically contingent combinations of factors (Giugni, Tilly), a shift that directs attention to the mechanisms responsible for translating structural determinants into action and outcomes (Moore, Meyer, Rucht) • displacing the tried-and-true configurative case study with paired comparisons that tease important outcomes and their causes out of differences in similarly situated cases (Kriesi and Wisler, della Porta, Gelb and Hart, Meyer, Koopmans and Statham) • taking social movement research out of its intellectual ghetto by linking movements to processes of democratiza- tion (Kriesi and Wisler, della Porta) and even embedding hypotheses about movement outcomes in a theory of democracy (Burstein) The authors of these pieces do not have all the answers—nor do they pose all the questions. In focusing mainly on progressive movements (bar Koopmans and Statham), they have little to say about either the religious or the retrogressive movements that have surfaced in the 1990s. In focusing on the United States and Western Europe, they do not help us understand the rare but dramatic successes of movements in authoritarian systems. And, but for one chapter (Amenta and Young), they do not come to grips with how movements solve collective action problems. The conclusion, by Tilly, dips a broad net of proposals for further re- search into the stream of research on movement outcomes, urging scholars simultaneously to work "upstream" by identifying instances of movement ef- FOREWORD ix fects, then seeing whether the hypothesized causal chain is actually operat- ing; to work "downstream" by identifying instances of the causal chain in operation, then seeing whether and how its hypothesized effects occurred; and to work "midstream" by examining whether the internal links of the causal chain operate as the theory requires. Movement fish beware: Tilly in- tends to hook you from several directions at once! These are cavils. In How Social Movements Matter, Giugni, McAdam, and Tilly provide a road map of the current state of research on movement outcomes, open that map to unexplored provinces, and put high-test gaso- line in the engine. If in the process, they threaten to broaden the field of social movements into a general approach to contentious politics, the field will be the richer for their efforts. This page intentionally left blank Preface During the past decade or so, systematic literature on social movements has been growing at an impressively fast rate. Yet, in what has now become a real "growth industry," there are still some areas that have remained somewhat understudied. The outcomes and consequences of movements certainly con- stitute one of these relatively neglected areas of inquiry; investigators have generally given much more attention to origins and trajectories of social movements than to their impact on routine politics, on their social environ- ments, on other social movements, or on the participants themselves. The principal aim of this book is to draw