Contentious Politics and Social Movements
Foundational Principles of Contentious Politics
Distinction Between Formal and Contentious Politics:
Formal Politics: Defined by institutionalized mechanisms of interest aggregation. Activities include running candidates for public office, conducting elections, and pursuing policy agendas through established legislative and executive bodies.
Contentious Politics: Involves collective claim-making outside or against formal institutional routines. Even conventional institutional actors (such as the Democratic Party in the United States) engage in contentious politics when coordinating extra-institutional actions, such as organizing street demonstrations against the Trump administration prior to and during mobilization events like the Women's March.
Core Conceptual Overlap: All contentious political activities inhabit an intersecting domain defined by three essential concepts:
Contention (making claims bearing on others' interests).
Politics (involvement with state actors, state power, or public authority).
Collective Action (coordinated actions undertaken by groups rather than isolated individuals).
Taxonomy and Spectrum of Contentious Behaviors:
Mass Demonstrations and Protests: Public gatherings designed to display collective strength and visible opposition.
Boycotts: Contentious actions that frequently target private corporations rather than the state directly, seeking accountability for corporate practices or ideological stances deemed unethical:
Bud Light: Boycotted following corporate marketing initiatives associated with the trans community.
Starbucks: Boycotted over political positions and relationships concerning Israel.
Nike: Boycotted in the 1990s over overseas manufacturing labor practices and the use of sweatshops in South Asia.
Chick-fil-A: Boycotted in the early 2000s due to perceived financial and institutional ties to anti-LGBTQ organizations.
Target: Boycotted over political and social controversies related to corporate retail positioning.
Nestle: Boycotted over human rights and environmental issues surrounding its commodification of water and supply chains in coffee and other commodities.
Looting and Rioting: While widely categorized as illegal and immoral, looting functions analytically as a mode of contentious politics. During periods of severe political or economic unrest, looting acts as a forceful signal directed at the state and public authorities. Historical examples include:
Argentina (2001–2002 Crisis): Looting was explicitly political and mobilized directly by institutional elites, specifically coordinated by the Peronist Party.
Ferguson, Missouri: Looting events in the wake of police shootings constituted collective political behavior expressing structural grievances.
Occupation of Space: Involves occupying physical buildings or public spaces, exemplified by the Occupy Wall Street movement following the 2008 global financial recession.
Hacktivism: A digital mode of contentious politics developed over the last 20 to 30 years, utilizing unauthorized computer access, cyber-disruption, and data leaks for political aims.
Political Violence and Severe Contention: Armed insurrection against the United States government, organized terrorism (such as the events of 2001 that fundamentally altered the trajectory of American politics), civil war, and armed revolution represent extreme, non-institutional forms of contentious politics.
Petition Signing: A conventional, low-risk, and milquetoast form of contentious collective action.
Social Movements: Definition, Dynamics, and Repertoires
Definition of a Social Movement:
Formulated by Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow (the foundational theorists of contentious politics), a social movement is defined as:
A sustained campaign of claim-making;
Employing repeated performances that publicize and advertise the claim;
Anchored in organizations, networks, traditions, and solidarities that sustain these activities over time.
A social movement is not an isolated event; it is an iterative, ongoing process that steadily builds and expands an organizational base of adherents.
Performances vs. Repertoires:
Performance: An individual, discrete contentious behavior or event (e.g., a specific march, a sit-in, or drafting a formal declaration of grievances).
Repertoire: The overarching toolkit or modal array of collective-action forms available to, understood by, and commonly employed by contentious actors within a given regime at a particular historical moment.
Prominent Historical and Modern Social Movements:
British Abolitionist Movement: Documented by Tilly and Tarrow as the first modern social movement, emerging in Britain in the late 1700s as a sustained, organized campaign utilizing repeated public performances.
American Civil Rights Movement: Regarded as the classic social movement within American history, utilizing nonviolent direct action, community institutions, and sustained collective pressure.
Black Lives Matter (BLM): One of the most encompassing, decentralized, and organized modern movements in the United States, expanding from local chapters into a national presence with international reach.
Women's Rights Movement: Traced historically through foundational claim-making performances, such as rewriting the Declaration of Independence into a declaration outlining the systemic harms and grievances inflicted on women by men.
The 4B Movement in South Korea: A feminist social movement centered on four distinct refusals (no births, no dating or boys, no sex with men, and no marriage to men) designed to intentionally accelerate the decline of South Korea's birth rate to compel societal recognition of systemic discrimination and violence against women.
Latin American Anti-Gender Violence Mobilizations: Active since approximately 2015, focusing on halting pervasive domestic abuse and femicide.
The Me Too Movement (#MeToo): An international movement addressing sexual harassment, assault, and systemic gendered abuse.
Pro-Democracy Movements: Encompasses recurring demonstrations (such as "no kings" protests) targeting perceived executive overreach and defending democratic governance.
Structural Environment and Individual Determinants of Social Movements:
Societal Habitat: Social movements require advanced, industrialized, and at least moderately democratic societies to emerge and thrive.
Structural Conditions: Sustained movement campaigns depend on a sizable educated middle class, institutional density, social networks, and a context with sufficient political freedom to prevent total state repression and elimination.
Individual-Level Determinants: Empirical research demonstrates that higher levels of education and general political activism serve as the two strongest individual-level predictors of participation in social movements and broader contentious politics.
Theoretical Frameworks of Contentious Politics
The Three Research Questions of Contention:
Why do individuals participate in protest, rebellion, and contentious collective action while others abstain?
Why do collective actors select specific tactics, performances, and repertoires over alternative strategies?
What are the political and societal consequences of contentious politics, and what factors dictate whether an activist campaign succeeds or fails?
Three Major Theoretical Traditions:
Relative Deprivation (Grievance-based theory).
Resource Mobilization Theory.
Political Opportunity Structure.
Relative Deprivation Theory (Ted Gurr):
Foundational Text: Articulated in Ted Gurr's 1970 work, Why Men Rebel.
Core Premise: Rebellion and contentious collective action stem from "relative deprivation"—defined as the perceived gap between an individual's expectations regarding their life and the actual socioeconomic and political reality they endure.
Behavioral Mechanism: The growing divergence between reality and expectations produces intense psychological frustration, which manifests through an animalistic, aggressive lashing out against established authority.
Predicted Participants: Predicts that those most inclined to revolt are individuals on the political and economic margins: the destitute, the down-on-their-luck, the newly unemployed, and those experiencing extreme poverty, inequality, or oppression.
Davies' J-Curve (James C. Davies):
Graphical and Structural Logic: Models relative deprivation over a temporal axis. Throughout prolonged periods of economic and social development, citizen expectations and lived realities rise simultaneously. A tolerable gap between expectations and reality is accepted by the public.
The Tipping Point: When a sudden, severe crisis occurs, reality plunges sharply while popular expectations continue their upward trajectory. When this divergence expands beyond a tolerable threshold into an unacceptable gap, rebellion, riots, and systemic contention predictably ignite.
Application to Argentina's 2001–2002 Crisis:
Expectation Buildup: During the 1990s administration of President Menom, the Argentine economy experienced sustained expansion, growing at rates between and annually. Despite elevated underlying unemployment, domestic purchasing power surged, and citizens gained unprecedented access to imported goods, elevating long-term expectations.
The Crisis: In 2001, a catastrophic sovereign debt crisis triggered strict government-mandated bank withdrawal freezes, causing citizens' life savings to evaporate rapidly.
Outcome: The resulting breach created an unacceptable gap between expectations and reality, triggering nationwide food riots, street protests, and widespread looting.
Empirical Critiques and Limitations of Relative Deprivation:
Popular Media Bias: Mainstream reporting (such as The New York Times coverage of mass labor protests in France) habitually attributes contentious behavior strictly to specific grievances (e.g., pension reforms, corruption scandals, inflation).
The Problem of Unequal Outbreaks: Grievance-based models cannot explain why contention erupts in some societies experiencing a severe shock but remains entirely absent in other societies enduring identical economic or political grievances.
Individual-Level Latin American Panel Data (2008–2018):
In econometric models analyzing individual protest participation over a 12-month period across Latin American nations, point estimates and confidence intervals for grievance indicators (such as personal economic deterioration, negative assessments of the national economy, and perceptions of public corruption) frequently cross the zero-effect threshold (represented by the green line in regression coefficient plots).
The variables demonstrating statistically significant, positive predictive power are not grievances, but rather individual-level characteristics: educational attainment, political sophistication, and access to local civic and organizational networks.
Resource Mobilization Theory:
Core Premise: Resolves the empirical shortcomings of grievance models by holding grievances constant. Because grievances, inequality, and discontent are ubiquitous across human societies, grievances alone cannot explain collective action.
Mechanisms: Contention occurs only when aggrieved populations possess the requisite organizational infrastructure, communication networks, leadership, and material resources necessary to overcome the collective action problem (the temptation to free-ride on others' efforts).
Comparative Example (United States vs. Brazil on Police Violence):
Grievances concerning illegitimate state force, systemic police brutality, and institutional corruption directed toward Black populations are empirically more extreme in Brazil than in the United States.
Despite this disparity in grievance severity, the Black Lives Matter movement arose, institutionalized, and sustained its collective claim-making within the United States.
This divergence illustrates that mobilizing resources, organizational density, and civic structures—not the absolute severity of the grievance—determine whether mass contention emerges.
Micro-Foundations of Participation and Non-Participation
The Collective Action Problem in Higher Education:
Across university student bodies, an overwhelming majority agrees that the cost of higher education is excessively high and financially burdensome.
In practice, however, almost no students organize, mobilize, or engage in contentious collective action demanding affordable, state-subsidized higher education pathways.
Explanations for Political Quiescence in the Face of Grievance:
Institutional Trust and Electoral Substitution: Citizens who participate in formal politics (voting, campaigning for political parties) place faith in institutional mechanisms to resolve their policy grievances over time, viewing extra-institutional protest as redundant or unnecessary.
Issue Prioritization: Immediate personal economic survival concerns, such as impending graduation, career hunting, and securing stable post-college employment, frequently override collective mobilization around tuition costs.
Ideological Disagreement: Some individuals oppose universal college subsidies on principle, distinguishing higher education from basic public education and arguing that tertiary degrees represent private individual investments rather than public goods.
Monopolistic Market Pressures: Higher education functions effectively as a structural necessity for a professional career, eliminating realistic "exit" alternatives and compelling individuals to pay regardless of grievance.
Albert O. Hirschman's Framework (Exit, Voice, and Loyalty):
Formulated by economist Albert O. Hirschman, individuals confronted with an unsatisfactory institutional condition or grievance face three options:
Exit: Severing the relationship and withdrawing entirely from the organization, market, or institution.
Voice: Expressing grievances directly, demanding institutional remediation, or mobilizing contentious action against the status quo.
Loyalty: Enduring the situation passively, going along to get along, and maintaining commitment to the existing framework.
Application to University Mobilization: Because college students perceive a degree as vital to their long-term life plans, their capacity for Exit is constrained. While high investment can theoretically incentivize Voice (historically turning college campuses into the incubators for major movements such as the American Civil Rights Movement), students overwhelmingly resort to Loyalty, absorbing high costs rather than mobilizing contention.
Questions & Discussion
Dialogue: The Political Nature of Looting
Audience Question / Intervention: Why is looting categorized as contentious politics? Looting stems from riots or protests, but it is ultimately a personal decision rather than political action.
Response / Clarification: Political contention encompasses numerous behaviors that society may consider immoral, illegal, or objectionable, such as terrorism or armed insurrection. Looting is political because it takes place within periods of intense societal unrest and functions to transmit a forceful signal to the state and public authorities. In historical episodes, such as the 2001–2002 crisis in Argentina, looting was explicitly political and systematically coordinated by institutional actors within the Peronist Party. Even in decentralized instances like Ferguson, Missouri, looting carries overt political meaning and cannot be dismissed simply as random, non-political opportunism.
Dialogue: Distinguishing Performances from Social Movements
Audience Question / Intervention: Does the Seneca Falls declaration of grievances against men qualify as a social movement?
Response / Clarification: The rewriting of the declaration to enumerate the harms inflicted by men on women constitutes a performance—a discrete event and tactic. The social movement itself is the broader, multi-generational Women's Rights Movement in the United States, which sustained the overarching campaign and organizational network within which that specific performance took place.
Dialogue: The 4B Movement in South Korea
Audience Question / Intervention: Is the 4B movement in South Korea an example of a social movement?
Response / Clarification: The 4B movement qualifies as a social movement because it represents a growing, organized effort deploying distinct collective behaviors to win adherents. Its strategy involves intentionally lowering the national birth rate through explicit boycotts of men (no births, no dating, no sex, no marriage) to force South Korean society and its institutions to confront the systemic mistreatment and marginalization of women.
Dialogue: Motivations for Street-Level Mobilization
Audience Prompt: What motivates individuals who choose to take to the streets and actively engage in contentious politics rather than remaining on the sidelines?
Student Response: Direct participation in Black Lives Matter marches in Louisville was motivated by two primary factors: first, a sense of personal moral obligation and lived experience where standing on the sidelines was viewed as self-harm; second, familial and community involvement, wherein family members raised money and sold shirts to support the protests, embedding the individual in a shared, active network.
Analytical Synthesis: Mobilization relies heavily on two mechanisms: the alignment of personal, lived experiences that make the actor feel personally vested in the outcome, and pre-existing social networks (family, friends, community ties) that lower the barriers to participation and pull individuals directly into active contention.
Dialogue: The Argentine 2001–2002 Crisis Under Davies' J-Curve
Audience Prompt: How does Davies' J-curve graphical model explain the sudden outbreak of looting and rioting in Argentina in 2001–2002?
Student Response: The public's trust in the government's ability to take effective action evaporated, particularly following political bribery scandals, until citizens reached a breaking point where they could no longer tolerate the situation.
Analytical Clarification: From the J-curve perspective, the economic boom of the 1990s under Menom—characterized by to annual growth and an influx of imported goods—drove popular expectations steadily upward. When the sovereign debt crisis struck in 2001 and the state imposed freezing controls on bank withdrawals, the sudden destruction of personal savings caused lived reality to crash while expectations remained high. This dynamic created an intolerable, unacceptable gap that triggered mass riots and food looting. However, alternative theoretical frameworks (such as that advanced by Al Shado) challenge whether this grievance gap alone fully explains the outbreak of contention.