Social Movements in Political Science PDF

Chapter 9 Social movements in political science Ondřej Císař As stressed by this very volume, social movement research has been constituted as an interdisciplinary field of study. Still, this chapter aims at presenting social movements through the lenses of political science, summarizing political...

Chapter 9 Social movements in political science Ondřej Císař As stressed by this very volume, social movement research has been constituted as an interdisciplinary field of study. Still, this chapter aims at presenting social movements through the lenses of political science, summarizing political science’s most important contributions to the study of social movements. 1 By taking this perspective, the chapter clearly goes beyond the field of social movement studies as narrowly defined. Moreover, unlike previous reflections on this subject, which either try to provide an exhaustive list of political science work (Meyer and Lupo 2007) or present a very short overview (Andretta 2012), this chapter focuses on broader research traditions that can be traced back to the founding fathers of the social sciences. Since contemporary mainstream social movement studies as developed especially within US academia are rooted in liberal pluralism (Meyer and Lupo 2007: 113), we need to start with James Madison. Most criticisms of the pluralist paradigm pointed to its inability to capture the power asymmetries in the field of modern politics. Drawing on this insight, the political science view of social movements generally sees them as an expression of collective power interacting with other coordinated powers, be they capitalism, state, countermovements, or the plurality of civil society groups. Based on this and other relevant dimensions, Table 9.1 gives an overview of the particular traditions to be discussed in this chapter. INSERT TABLE 9.1 HERE The author gratefully acknowledges funding from the Czech Science Foundation (grants “Collective Action and Protest in East-Central Europe,” code GAP404/11/0462 and “Protestors in Context: An Integrated and Comparative Analysis of Democratic Citizenship in the Czech Republic,” code GA13-29032S). 1 1 In the Marxist view, social movements fight capitalism, envisioning an alternative social arrangement to be built ‘from below’. According to the Weberians, movements are shaped by institutionalized power in the form of the modern state, they provide the tools of collective expression to those not included in the formal decision-making structure. Followers of K. Polanyi see movements as a regulatory reaction to capitalist expansion, they aim at its democratically-based regulation; while participation researchers following in the footsteps of A. de Tocqueville see them as the collective expression of individual political action reflecting unequally-distributed resources within the population. The associations and advocacy groups reflecting the pluralism of modern democratic society form various social movements. Madisonian Roots: Plurality of Interest Groups In line with the general liberal understanding, Madison feared the tyranny that ensues whenever a certain group, especially the majority of society, monopolizes political power, which can thus be used in the oppression of the rest of its citizens. Like virtually every liberal, Madison did not believe in the possibility of finding a single enlightened ruler, but viewed the plurality of various competing groups in civil society, and the division of powers in the institutional arena, as the only safeguards against tyranny. This perspective on democracy as the rule of many minorities based on the principle of open competition, which ensures both their mutual control and the curbing of state power, was further developed by modern American pluralists. Originating in Bentley, and fully expressed by David Truman’s pluralism (1951), interest groups were conceived a collective vehicle in a democratic society, more or less available to every segment of the population, through which citizens aggregate and articulate their preferences and interests. According to this view, the state is institutionally structured 2 and at the same time a neutral arena in which various interest groups interact and try to influence public policies, counterbalancing one another. In this Madisonian view, a plurality of organized groups and open competition among them prevents narrow interests from gaining uncontrolled domination over the state (Dahl 1961). As recalled by S. Tarrow (2006: 7), Truman’s view of interest groups as interacting within the state in the sense of being structured by its institutions and rules, was later behind ideas about the state structuring not only political insiders, but also its outside challengers, i.e. social movements. The original pluralist approach has undergone an important transformation in this process of reformulation. Besides conflating the state with American government, Truman was mostly criticized for his lack of a theory of the state going beyond the group-based interpretation. In fact, pluralism captures the particular American situation more than the general features of modern politics, which include many more configurations of state-interest group relations than the one described by pluralism. Reflecting both the general political science research on the effects of different patterns of democracy (for example Lijphart 1984, 1999) and the structural foundations of social power (for example Lukes 1974), contemporary social movement theory goes well beyond its original pluralist limitations by meticulously theorizing about the general structure of the state, and hypothesizing the effects of its variable configurations across nations, as well as their differing elite strategies towards institutional outsiders. This is basically the main contribution of the political process model, with its central concept of political opportunity structure (see Kriesi et al. 1995, Kriesi 2004 and below). By investing the state with active powers and ideological characteristics, and focusing on their various configurations, social movement theory transformed original Truman’s model into one with a more Weberian understanding, which views the state as an autonomous source of 3 power in society, stemming from its monopoly of the legitimate use of violence (see Tilly 1978, 1985, 1995). Before coming to this approach, the chapter will focus on a supposedly excluded tradition within the social movement field, Marxism. Although often unrecognized, it has not only shaped the terrain of current mainstream approaches to social movements (see Tilly 1978, esp. ch. 2), but also forms a paradigm of its own (see Hetland and Goodwin 2013 on the disappearance from social movement studies of capitalism in general and the Marxist perspective in particular). Marx’s Followers: Movements and the (Capitalist) System According to Karl Marx, the modern society’s class structure was divided between two main social classes, the privileged capitalists and underprivileged proletarians. It was the latter who were expected to help bring about epochal social change in the direction of a truly free society. Regarding social movements, the most important insights derived from Marxism were the class-based interpretation of political conflicts (“class struggle”), a stress on the structural grievances produced by capitalism leading to their political articulation in the form of movements, and the concept of social movements as the agents of systemic social change voiced “from below” (see della Porta and Diani 2006, Tarrow 2011, Barker et al. 2013). In general, Marxism frames social movements as the expression of an alternative world to established capitalist society. Like Marx, who believed in an emancipatory potential of the working class, his followers have regarded the progressive movements of the 20th century as agents of human liberation and emancipation. This has been most forcefully manifested by the paradigm of the new social movements, which were seen as the expression of resistance by the new middle class against a supposedly depoliticized technocratic capitalism (cf. della Porta and Diani 2006: ch. 2). Although the Marxist perspective does not, explicitly at least, dominate the current research agenda on social movements, it has always 4 been present among the most visible approaches to these studies; moreover, the ongoing economic crisis has given the critical Marxist perspective on capitalism an even more prominent place in the current debate (Barker et al. 2013). From “Voices from Below” to “Another World Is Possible” In a broadly Marxist perspective, Piven and Cloward (1977) famously argued that extrainstitutional protest of the poor is the only tool left to the underprivileged and underresourced classes in a capitalist society to achieve real change in policy, in opposition to the power and resources of the economic and political elite. In normal times this elite maintains control over the political output; only in times of crises and upheaval there is a chance for the unprivileged to disrupt business as usual. Such extraordinary times opening up opportunities for political change are very rare; most commonly the situation is under the control of the elite, who strive to coopt any potential disruption through organizational inclusion. Therefore the lesson for the poor is clear: stay unorganized and disruptive, since institutionalization takes away the only weapon you have at your disposal: protest (see Meyer and Lupo 2007: 116-117). Looking at the potential for a genuine transformation of the social order, the neoMarxist world-systems theory (Wallerstein 2004) also points out the danger of institutional cooptation. Although modern anti-systemic movements such as socialism and feminism originally challenged the capitalist hegemony, they ended up reinforcing it. According to Wallerstein, there are two main reasons for this: (1) these movements were unable to establish coalitions; on the contrary, they often spent as much time fighting one another as challenging capitalism; and (2) they relied on “a two-step agenda for action”: first take over the state, then begin political reforms. In this respect, they prioritized attaining the positions of power and working for limited political change (change within the system) rather than a 5 more radical program of transforming the cultural hegemony underpinning capitalism (changing the system). Still, according to Wallerstein, the potential for a systemic transformation remains open. In times of systemic stability, the structure of capitalism keeps all political agents within its limits. Only recently has the systemic crisis of the capitalist system itself opened up a real opportunity for change. Since the hegemony of capitalism began to crumble after 1968, symbolized among other things by the mobilization of new social movements, a relatively open battlefield has replaced the previous structural stability. Therefore the current antisystemic movements, associated by Wallerstein with the forces of alter-globalization and anti-capitalism (he groups them together as the “spirit of Porto Alegre”), are in a unique position to bring about a more just world than the capitalist system (Wallerstein 2003). The result of this battle is yet unclear – gone is the original historical optimism of Marx – since the current progressive forces are being actively resisted by the privileged class of the global economic and political elite (“spirit of Davos”). Probably the most influential (post-)Marxist take on social movements was the theory of new social movements related to the rise of the post-materialist movements in the late 1960s and 1970s (Cohen and Arato 1992). Like the working class in the 19th century, which was a manifestation of the systemic conflict within industrial modernity over the social product and its distribution, the new social movements are a manifestation of the new systemic conflicts within post-industrial (or late) modernity over autonomy, quality of life, and recognition of minority life styles (identity politics). In this view, post-industrial society is no longer defined by the struggle between two dominant classes, but oscillates around new varying conflicts over human rights, gender equality, individual autonomy, political participation, and environmental protection. At the same time, global capitalism “in the last 6 instance” – to paraphrase famous Althusser’s dictum – shapes the field on which these conflicts take place. Marxism has not only been a theory of social movements, but for social movements (see Barker et al. 2013). Therefore these variable new movements should, on the basis of their mutual equivalences, articulate a single political project of “democratic hegemony” which would present a progressive alternative to the neoliberalism ideologically underpinning capitalist rule (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). This new Left counter-hegemony project created a never-realized political ethos, which would be taken up by later movements, most importantly some components of the alter-globalization and Occupy Wall Street movements (the so-called new new Left), proclaiming the values of individual autonomy and self-fulfillment. Weber’s Followers: Movements and the (State) Institutions Although Max Weber admired Marx’s analysis of capitalism, he refused to see it as the only force shaping modern societies. According to Weber, the state played an even more important role in constituting the terrain of modern politics. Like the capitalists in the sphere of economy who monopolized the control of productive forces, the state monopolized control of physical coercion on a given territory. Charles Tilly famously depicted the state as a legitimized protection racket, which by crowding out other mafias appropriated the control of violence on a given territory for itself (Tilly 1985), consequently creating a centralized arena for modern (movement-based) democratic politics (Tilly 1995). According to Tilly, the state originated from the processes of war making, state making, protection provision, and resource extraction. Similarly, Tarrow (2011: 81) recognizes three ways in which state making in the form of “making war, collecting taxes, and providing food” contributed to the 7 formation of modern social movements in Britain, France, and the US. In short, state making preceded and contributed to modern social movement making (Tilly 1992, 2004). Unlike the Marxist literature, which largely views the state as a derivative of capitalism, the neo-Weberians understand it as an equally important causal force in the generation of modern social movements. The state is both an actor and the main arena – electoral and non-electoral – that modern politics takes place in. According to this political process model, variable institutional arrangements produce various patterns of collective action. This perspective can be applied both longitudinally (such as in Tilly 1995, for more see Tarrow 2011) and cross-sectionally (such as in Kriesi et. al 1995, for more see della Porta and Diani 2006). On a more general level, since the end of the 1970s this approach to social movements has developed with the general drift of political science analysis towards (neo)institutionalist approaches, which aim to explain political outcomes by looking at institutional variables and their configurations. Social movement studies have drawn on the rationalist version of institutionalism, as well as its historical and sociological versions (for this differentiation see Hall and Taylor 1996). Models of Democracy, Political Opportunity Structure, and Political Culture In political science this approach has been very visibly manifested in the comparative literature on political institutions that studies models of democratic governance for divided societies. In the form of consociational and consensus models (for the difference see Lijphart 2008: 6-9) of democracy, A. Lijphart famously argued (for example 1984, 1999, 2008) for a power-sharing model of democracy as an alternative to its competitive majoritarian version based on power concentration. Although not primarily concerned about political mobilization and social movements, when compared to the majoritarian model Lijphart claimed that by incorporating interest groups into policy making the power-sharing consensual model has 8 displayed a pacifying effect on mobilization and industrial conflict. The result is fewer strikes, generally less political violence (fewer riots and political deaths), and kinder and gentler public policies (Lijphart 1999: ch. 15–16). Importantly, research on social movements and collective action has come up with similar results when comparing institutional structures of states closed to external actors with their counterparts characterized by more open access. While closed institutions induce less but more radical collective action, open institutions produce more action but less radical (Kriesi et al. 1995, Kriesi 2004). In social movement research, the well-established concept of political opportunity structure captures this institutional context of social movement mobilization. The basic idea of this approach is that open political institutions facilitate mobilization (up to the point where protest gives way to institutionalized politics made possible by very open systems; see Tilly 1978), while closed institutions impede and radicalize it. The comparative and state-centric version of the political process model (see Tarrow 2011 for other approaches) also overlaps with the comparative literature on political institutions in the way that openness/closeness are measured. Lijphart (1999: ch. 1) distinguishes between two dimensions – federal-unitary and executive-parties – that shape the two-dimensional space in which the world’s democracies are positioned according to their particular placement in these dimensions (for more see Lijphart 1999). Likewise, in measuring the level of access to political system, Kriesi and his colleagues focus on the level of a state’s territorial decentralization and functional power-separation (largely Lijphart’s first dimension) and the configuration of its elite actors (basically Lijphart’s second dimension). Drawing on Lijphart, Kriesi (2004: 71) summarizes: “majoritarian democracy concentrates political power within and between institutions, which limits their accessibility (…), while consensus democracies divide political power and thus increase the institutional 9 accessibility…” Thus open opportunities can be operationalized as the existence of the formal and informal mechanisms and procedures for inclusion of social movements in the policy process. Closed opportunities display the opposite value. While more open access facilitates political mobilization and invites movement actors into the political process (such as in the federated US), closed opportunities exclude them from the process, and increase the costs of collective action (such as unitary France, or semi- and non-democratic regimes; see also Tilly 2004, Tarrow 2011, della Porta 2013). Being part of the more general “cultural turn” in political science and policy analysis, sometimes conceptualized as the fourth type of institutionalism (so-called “discursive institutionalism,” see Schmidt 2010), social movement research has pointed out that political mobilization is not only determined by the level of institutional access, but that the structures within which social movements interact possess a symbolic/cultural dimension. For example, Kriesi and colleagues distinguish between exclusive and inclusive strategies in the way political elites deal with institutional outsiders. Put into the mainstream political science language, we might say that there is a differentiation among various configurations of political culture, some more and some less facilitative of political mobilization (for a review see Vráblíková and Císař 2014; the political science classic here is Almond and Verba 1963). In social movement studies, Koopmans and his collaborators have successfully coined the term “discursive opportunity structure” in order to highlight the idea that the context of political mobilization is not only shaped by formal political institutions, but also by the prevailing interpretative schemata that make some ideas and claims generally acceptable, ‘sensible’, ‘realistic’, and “‘legitimate’ within a certain polity at a specific time” (Koopmans and Statham 1999: 228). 10 International Political Opportunity Structure The processes of globalization, internationalization, and Europeanization have played an important role in political science and international relations (IR) since the beginning of the 1990s. Reflecting these processes, the political process model has applied its originally statelevel concept to the study of international organizations too (see Tarrow 2005, della Porta and Caiani 2009). Thus the available contributions have pointed out that political opportunities are provided not only by national institutions: an international opportunity structure is also developing which influences both state institutions and social movements operating within national boundaries (Keck and Sikkink 1998, Meyer 2003, Tarrow 2005, della Porta and Caiani 2009, Císař and Vráblíková 2013). In the same way as state institutions provided, and still provide, political opportunities for political actors at the nation-state level, supranational institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the European Union provide opportunity spaces for social movements to interact, cooperate, and clash. Research has mostly focused on the interaction between national politics and international relations/global politics. First, in a “partially globalized world”, to borrow a phrase from leading IR scholar Robert Keohane, international institutions interfere with national political opportunities: “Changes in the international context can, by altering political and economic conditions, and/or perceptions of those conditions, change the opportunities for activists within a country” (Meyer 2003: 20). Second, international institutions provide social movements with additional opportunities to mobilize at the supranational level. Nowhere are these opportunities more developed than in the context of an integrating Europe (Imig and Tarrow 2001, della Porta and Caiani 2009, Císař and Vráblíková 2013). In terms of theory building, Tarrow (2005) has probably offered the most comprehensive catalogue of international-national interaction mechanisms, defining them in terms of six main processes of transnational contention. 11 Polanyi’s Followers: Movements Countering (Unregulated) Capitalism While the initially US-centric field of social movement studies originated in American pluralism, Europe-centered interest groups studies grew out of post-war European attempts to tame capitalism into the form of liberal corporatism. This tradition can be traced back to Karl Polanyi (for a classical and somewhat different view see Schmitter 1974). Like Marx, Polanyi sees capitalism as a transformative destructive force changing the structure of pre-modern society, thus bringing about a Great Transformation. Unlike in Marx, whose revolutionary proletariat was supposed to ultimately dismantle capitalism, Polanyi’s counter-movement aims at the political regulation and taming of capitalist market society without necessarily changing its basic logic. In Polanyi’s view, we need political regulation to make modern capitalism socially acceptable. Since, unlike unregulated capitalism, political institutions can be democratically controlled, capitalism can only contribute to social well-being if it is under collective (democratic) control. Here reside two interconnected ideas of post-1945 democratic capitalism, namely the Keynesian belief in macroeconomic management, and the neo-corporatist concept of interest concertation based on non-competitive coordination between the state, employers, and the representatives of working classes, trade unions. According to the corporatist approach, the incorporation of trade unions and employers together with the state in coordinated tripartite institutions made the economic management of modern societies more effective and the distribution of national product fairer (also see Lijphart’s research on consensus democracies discussed above; corporatism is one of their characteristics). 12 Regimes of Interest Representation Neo-corporatism, unlike pluralism but like both Marxist and Weberian social movement theory, acknowledges the privileged access to politics enjoyed by some interest groups; however, it parts company with both traditions of social movement studies by making these privileged groups – trade unions and employers’ associations – the sole focus of scholarship (see Schmitter 1974). As a result, it has developed as a distinctive paradigm in interest group studies, in isolation from the broader social movement field, especially its US version. This is partly because while neo-corporatism was clearly Euro-centric in its focus, the empirical studies of social movements were originally developed in the American context. The very different trajectories of Europe and the United States after the Second World War account for the separate development of these two fields of study. By including employers and trade unions into policy making, European societies started to experiment with and build corporatist institutions to coordinate their post-War economic boom; in contrast, starting in the 1950s, the United States experienced consequential social movements, most notably the civil rights struggle and the various successors it inspired (see Císař 2013). For some time a division of labor seemed to exist: interest group studies (pluralism, neo-corporatism) were primarily defined by their focus on institutional insiders, while social movement scholars concentrated on outsiders. While essentially capturing the same type of phenomenon, namely the interest organization, interest group studies focused on those organizations integrated into the policy process, while social movement scholars looked at the extra-institutional challengers (see Beyers et al. 2008). In general, by focusing on a model of interest representation different from US pluralism, neo-corporatism generally contributed to our knowledge of the variability of interaction patterns between interest organizations and their environment, the state. 13 Drawing on a rare synthesis of interest group and social movement literature, Balme and Chabanet (2008) distinguish among three different regimes of interaction between interest groups/social movements and political institutions. So-called regimes of collective action are “combined institutional, political, sociological, and cognitive elements shaping the forms and intensity of collective action” (ibid: 29, further description draws on pp. 33-35). These are the clusters of variables, including political opportunities, organizational capacities, framing, and repertoire, that shape political mobilization and its characteristics. In a pluralist regime such as the US, opportunities are relatively open to a variety of policy-oriented groups that have developed the organizational capacity for a sustained exchange with the political system. They largely use political framing; in terms of their repertoire they rely on lobbying and legal action. In a corporatist regime such as that of the Scandinavian countries, opportunities for recognized, mostly occupational, groups are open and institutionalized. Compared to the pluralist regime, interest groups are more concentrated and incorporated into the institutional processes. As a result they use bureaucratic framing, and instead of lobbying engage in consultation and co-management of public policies. In a protest regime such as France’s, the political opportunity structure is unfavorable to external groups, which compensate for this closeness by seizing opportunities provided by the media. Interest organizations are diffused; their capacity is limited to agenda-setting and vetoing. They use public opinion framing, and rely on extra-institutional mass mobilization and media-centered strategies. In this typology, the corporatist regime of state-interest group interaction embodies the logic of Polanyi. The same type of reasoning for dealing with the challenges of yet another Great Transformation, namely economic globalization, has recently been inspired by Polanyi, this time on the global (or rather international) level. According to this view, like the modern state which had to catch up the capitalist expansion in order to subject it to political regulation 14 during the era of industrial modernity, the globalization of our late modern era requires international political regulation to catch up with globalized capitalism in order to make it manageable and socially acceptable (Habermas 2001). As a result of international institutionalization, opportunities for social movements open up at the international level; here, too, the political process model explicitly draws on Polanyi’s logic (see Tarrow 2005: especially ch. 2). Tocqueville’s Followers: Political Participation and Policy Advocacy According to Alexis de Tocqueville, modern society is driven by a progressive equalization of citizens that endangers their political freedom. This equalization, which actually created the conditions for democracy, at the same threatens democracy with its ultimate destruction. First, modern democratic society melted down the traditional intermediary institutions such as churches and guilds, creating an unstructured mass devoid of any collective capacity to counter the centralized power of the state. Second, democratic equality transformed individuals into isolated individuals fully focused on their private life, with no interest in public affairs. As a result, atomized individuals are left unprotected from the potentially tyrannical state, and completely immersed in minding their own business. Under such conditions democracy is not likely to survive, and is open to displacement by a “new despotism” transforming a democratic citizenry into the passive receivers of state-driven programs. Democracy gives way to paternalistic care. Alexis de Tocqueville not only diagnosed this danger, but also saw its potential cure in the form of a developed civil society; i.e. a society of participating and associating individuals able to coordinate their individual forces in a collective venture. Two types of political science literature relevant to social movements originate here: individual-level political participation literature, and meso-level policy advocacy literature. 15 Individual Participation Unlike research on social movements which mostly focuses on the meso-level of social movements, organizations and their protest events, political participation research primarily works with individual-level data. Substantively, while social movement research studies sustained activism, political participation research focuses on non/participation: activism refers to what activists and their organizations do, while participation captures what ordinary citizens do. Activists are individuals who devote a substantial part of their time or/and other resources to the political activities of particular organization(s). Others are non-activists, i.e. ordinary citizens, who may or may not participate in politics: research on political participation calls it action by ordinary citizens aimed at direct or indirect influencing governmental officials (see Verba et al. 1995: 37–39). Applying this distinction, there are three logically possible combinations of activism and participation: activism with participation (traditional participatory activism; see for example Tilly 2004), activism with limited participation (professionalized advocacy groups without members, the specter haunting some analysts especially of contemporary American civil society; see below and Putnam 1995, 2000, Skocpol 1999), and participation without activism, characteristic of some self-organized and episodic protest events and/or personalized engagement (Bennett and Segerberg 2012). Although originally focusing on elections, campaigning, and lobbying in line with the research on social movements (Meyer and Tarrow 1998), participation researchers have recently observed a massive broadening of political participation, from demonstrations and other types of direct elite-challenging actions (for example Inglehart 1997) to community activism and consumer politics (Micheletti 2003, Dalton 2008). As a result of the recent digital media revolution, political participation now includes novel repertoires, including 16 episodic flash mobs, personalized connective action, clictivism, and trolling (Dalton 2008, Bennett and Segerberg 2012). Moreover, Inglehart (1997) and Dalton (2008) in particular demonstrate that the rise of direct elite-challenging (protest) forms of political participation in the industrial democracies indicates the arrival of self-expressive (in Inglehart’s original dictum, post-materialist) values, and thus engaged citizens who are critical of their political elites, but at the same time firmly allegiant to the principles of democracy. In this perspective, protest indicates a developed democracy. When explaining political participation, the research originally focused on the microlevel. Individual-level variables based on resources, such as indicators of socioeconomic status, and variables based on motivations, especially political efficacy and attitudes towards politics, have traditionally been used to explain differences in political participation (the socalled “civic voluntarism” model, see Verba et al. 1995, Norris 2002). Although this approach observed the influence of socioeconomic inequalities on participation similar to what social movement research showed in focusing on resource mobilization by movement organizations, it actually overlooked the structuring effect of organized movements at the individual level. Unlike social movement literature, these micro-level approaches treat individuals almost as isolated units (Vráblíková and Císař 2014). Contrary to this understanding, the meso-level explanation focuses primarily on people’s connections to their peers, social groups, and the organizations that recruit them for collective action. While individual-level explanations also focus on mobilization agents such as social movement organizations, they see their effect as mediated by individual predispositions. In line with Tocqueville’s concept of “schools of democracy”, this approach sees organizations as building the human capital, i.e. civic skills, of active citizens. On the other hand, meso-level explanations conceptualize the effect of group membership differently, namely through the mechanism of relational social capital: group members are 17 not only cultivated to be active citizens, but are also much more exposed to encouragement by other group members. In this respect, besides social recruitment by acquaintances within inter-personal networks, movement organizations provide individuals with a genuine basis for political mobilization, i.e. recruitment by strangers (this paragraph mostly draws on Teorell 2003). Organizations, Members, and Policy Advocacy The relationship between individual participants and their organizations has assumed a prominent place in the recent political science literature on the transformation of American civil society. Theda Skocpol (1999) argues that American civic life has undergone a profound change since the mobilization of the anti-Vietnam-war movement and related rights-based movements of the 1960s and 1970s. While all these movements at first brought an innovative repertoire of disruptive action, over the course of time they have become established as “public interest groups”, combining occasional direct action with moderate lobbying strategies, within the formal structure of federal political institutions. In response to the changing opportunity structure of US politics, these groups increasingly focused their attention on the federal level. This naturally evolved into a growing number of Washington offices devoted to routine lobbing, and the politics of influence rather than contentious politics. Mirroring Putnam’s (1995, 2000) famous diagnosis of the decline of social capital in America, Skocpol shows that the new advocacy groups display a different pattern from the traditional membership organizations, which relied on their membership bases not only in order to gain influence, but also to sustain themselves financially. Instead of collecting membership dues, these organizations seek funding from external sources, i.e. foundations, corporations, and governmental agencies, and solicit individual contributions via direct mail 18 techniques and media advertising. As a result, even an organization claiming to represent a large constituency “does not absolutely need members” (Skocpol (1999: 494). According to Skocpol, this threatens the very democratic system in the US. However, in contrast to Skocpol, a series of recent studies try to show that while there has been an increasing absolute number of professionalized advocacy organizations dependent on external funding, their proportion has not changed over time (Walker et al. 2011); and that they represent just one organizational model among many others (Minkoff et al. 2008). According to these studies, although democracy is undergoing a profound transformation, there is no decline as diagnosed by Skocpol. This debate forms part of a broader discussion on the decline (R. Putnam) versus transformation (R. Dalton, R. Inglehart, P. Norris) of the industrial democracies in general, and the American democracy in particular. Marx, Weber, Polanyi, and Tocqueville in the 21st Century “Marx was right” or “Marx is back” are common titles among the books and articles reflecting on contemporary societies. The same trend seems to apply to developments in social movement research (see above and Barker et al. 2013). The political economy of late capitalism is finding its way back into social movement research, reflected in the increasing attention paid to structural grievances and socioeconomic issues highlighted by the economic crisis (see della Porta and Diani 2006: ch. 2). According to some, this crisis is threatening the very legitimacy of democracy, which might be reloaded only if the current wave of social movement mobilizations translates into tangible changes towards a more participatory and deliberative model (della Porta 2013). While clearly drawing on the political economy perspective, this renewed interest in critical scholarship is often framed more in Polanyian 19 than Marxist terms. Either of them can help open up the long-awaited debate on the politicoeconomic conditions of collective action and its relation to contemporary democracy. Further challenges include the interactions between various arenas of action, and novel ways of claims making, especially important to Weberian scholars. Although social movement studies traditionally prioritized the protest arena of action (for exceptions see Meyer and Lupo 2007: 120-122), recently there have been important contributions pointing out the need to focus on the electoral arena, political parties, and their interactions with movement politics (Goldstone 2003, della Porta and Diani 2006, McAdam and Tarrow 2013). This is especially important in studying those segments of the population that tend to express their grievances not through street protest, but through the protest vote, which compared to the movements of the Left is more common among those siding with the (radical) Right (Koopmans et al. 2005). While the relationship between the electoral and protest arenas is reinforcing in case of the Left, it seems to be substitutive for the political Right (Hutter and Kriesi 2013). Moreover, the varieties of current popular resistance seem to cry out for novel conceptualization of their action repertoire (see for example Tilly 1995, 2004). Especially in response to the economic recession and technological innovations, there has recently been an upsurge in new repertoires of resistance. These repertoires seem to transcend the usual dualism of anti-establishment mobilization in the form of either (left-wing) social movements or (right-wing) party populism. On one hand, one can find innovative protest repertoire travelling in unexpected directions (from the global periphery to the industrial core); on the other hand, different types of capital make unexpected inroads into democratic politics, for example in the form of wealthy businessmen and popular celebrities demanding the end of the political system as we know it. As previously mentioned, liberal democratic governance may be in question for some time to come (della Porta 2013). 20 Research on participation focuses in particular on novel methods of political expression, and aims at incorporating a wider political context into its perspective. Drawing significantly on social movement studies, most of the recent conceptual innovations concentrate on the study of macro-context. Three basic dimensions of context are analyzed: (1) formal political institutions, (2) socio-economic development, and (3) political culture (for a review see Vráblíková and Císař 2014). Regarding political institutions, the insights of social movement theory, particularly the political process model, are combined with the contributions of comparative literature on institutions (majoritarian vs. consensual models), and electoral studies (types of electoral systems). Concerning economic development, modernization theories usually serve as the perspective for generating explanations of political participation. Last but not least, political culture studies focus on the effects of national patterns of political attitudes. These developments offer a broader potential for incorporating the results of the last four decades of social movement research more firmly into political science, which has traditionally viewed them either as a marginal alternative to institutionalized politics, or a disruptive outburst of popular dissatisfaction. Since social movements have seemingly defied the readily available political science categories such as state institutions, parties, and interest groups, they previously stood outside the mainstream research. 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Durham and London: Duke University Press. 27 Table 9.1 Four Views of Social Movements in Political Science Tradition Marxist Weberian Polanyian Tocquevillean Opportunities Capitalist Modern state Corporatism Civil society and threats economy (context) The concept Anti-capitalist State Contra- Associations of the movements challengers movements and advocacy groups movement Interaction Anti-systemic Challenging Regulatory and Representation reformist with the of social pluralism system Represented Socially Groups Occupational A wide range groups excluded without access groups of social groups to decisionmaking 28 interests