PART 2 SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Three sets of variables

1. political opportunity structure,

2. configuration of power,

3. interaction contexts.

Political Opportunity Structure

influences the choice of protest strategies and the impact of social movements to their environments

(Kitschelt 1986, 58)

2 pairs OF STRUCTURES

• open and closed structures

  • Structures which allow for the easy access to the political system or which makes it difficult

• input and output structures

  • referring specifically either to the openness of a political

    system in the input phase of the policy cycle or its capacity to impose itself in the output phase.

Degree of Openness

centralization and degree of its separation of powers

Decentralization

Implies a multiplication of state actors and, therefore points of access

and decision making.

Separation of Powers

greater seperation = greater the degree of formal access for movement of movementactors and more limited the capacity of the state to act.

• executive, legislative, judicial

4 Impacts of Media System in Political Process —> H & M?

4 Impacts of Media System in Political Process (Hallin and Mancini, 2004)

1. Media Markets : emphasis on the

   strong or weak development of a mass circulation press.

2. political parallelism

3. Journalistic professionalism.

   1. state intervention in the media system.

3 Levels of Media System

• The Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist Model

• The North/Central European or Democratic Corporatist Model

• The North Atlantic or Liberal Model

impact of Commercial media

• powerful new techniques of representation and

  audience creatio

Two Most Important Techniques

1. Personalization

2. The Tendency to Privilege the point of view of ordinary citizens

extent to which social movement actors obtain access to the decision-making arenas depend on two things…

1. formal institutional

   structure

2. informal preconditions.

distinguish exclusive and integrative strategies

• exclusive

  • (repressive, confrontational, polarizing)

• integrative

  • (facilitative, cooperative, assimilative)

how does Political-cultural or symbolic opportunities resonate with public opinion

Political-cultural or symbolic opportunities that determine what kind of ideas

become visible for the public, resonate with public opinion, and are held to be 'legitimate' by the audience.

Ethnic-cultural models

Ethnic-cultural models of national identity assert that people belong to

a nation because of their ethnic or cultural (e.g. linguistic or religious)

origin.

General settings for the mobilization of social movements

According to Tarrow what factors facilitate transnational activism? [4]

• rapid electronic communication,

• cheaper international travel,

• diffusion of the English language,

• the spread of the 'script' of mod-ernity,

  • 'internationalism'; offers a wide range of venues for conflict

According to Tarrow - unusual character of the contemporary period

• "rooted cosmopolitans' and 'transnational activists'

  • stratum of people who are able to combine the resources and opportunities of their own

    societies into transnational networks, leading to an 'activ-ism beyond borders'

Configuration of Actors [3]

1. Protagonists:

   ● the configuration of allies (policy-makers, public authorities, political

   parties, interest groups, the media, and related movements).

2. Antagonists:

   ●the configuration of adversaries (public authorities, repressive agents,

   counter-movements).

   1. Bystanders:

      ● the not directly involved, but nevertheless attentive audience.

what does Structures of Political Context do?

Determines the configuration of political actors

configuration of political actors, is it stable?

• The configuration of political actors is less stable than the structural component of the political context. The alliance structure of a given movement may, for example, change decisively at any election, depending on whether the political party which constitutes a natural ally for the social movement in question is elected into power or loses its government position.

what is Interaction Context

Links structures and configurations to agency and action, and it is at this

level that the strategies of social movements and their opponents comes

imto view.

Four mechanisms involved in linking the general structural setting to the

mobilization of social movements:

1. Facilitation

2. Repression

3. Chanes of Success

4. Threat/Reform

Impact on the volume of mobilization

1. Facilitation: increase in the level of mobilization.

2. Repression: make collective action unattractive for the large majority of potential activists.

3. Chanes of Success

   1. Proactive vs Reactive Success

4. Threat Reform

   1. The level of mobilization is likely to increase with the intensity of threat;

   2. the level of mobilization is likely to decrease with the chances of reform;

   3. threat contributes to the likelihood of 'defensive' mobilization.

define Strategy

conceptual links: Specific way of framing specific choices about targeting, timing, and tactics of actors.

Opportunity vs relative oppurtunities

• Oppurtunity: focus on the process of defining opportunity and how it works

  • Strategic Capacity: determined by the configuration of actors and

    structural context.

define Strategic Capacity

movement’s capacity to develop effective strategy.

Three Key Influences in Strategic Choice

1. Salient Knowledge:

   ●The precondition that actors deal effectively with the problems they face.

2. Heuristic Process:

   ●Permit them to use this knowledge imaginatively.

3. Motivation:

   ●Critical because of its effect on the actor’s ability to concentrate their effort for a period of time.

At the origin of the three social revolutions she studied-the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions-Skocpol finds a conjunction of two key factors:

(1) a political crisis and

(2) agrarian socio-political structures (i.e. a given form of national

cleavage structures) that gave rise to widespread peasant discontent and

facilitated insurrections against landlords.