Week 9/10 - theories and practicing contentious politics Flashcards
BLM vs. Indigenous movements
Contentious politics and social movement scholars like Tilly and Tarrow (2015) or McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald (1996), would explain the difference resulting from the fact that Indigenous people have political recognition as Indigenous stemming from the Indian Act.
BLM vs. Indigenous Act
- Not a huge institutional act for BLM compared to Indigenous people
- Indigenous people are a part of contentious politics
- Social movement (BLM)
When we study contentious politics through the lens of PCJ, what we are trying to do is to understand how collective action especially in the form of contentious politics, social movements, or resolutions can serve as a mechanism for negotiating peace, addressing conflict, and pursuing justice
Theda Skocpol and bringing the state back in
Argued: political scientists for a very long time have forgotten about the state
Nothing happens outside the purview of the state
What this means for PCJ is that claims can be made at the grassroots level.
Theories of contentious politics: McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald (1996)
A social movement is “ a set of opinions and beliefs in a population which represents preferences for changing some elements of the social structure and/ or reward distribution of a society”
= THE HOW AND WHY OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
Timeline for contentious politics
Pre 1900s: class and economic forces
1900s-1940s: collective behaviour and authority
1940s-1960s: resources, such as social networks and organizational capacity
1960s-1970s: political environment
Three factors for understanding social movements and contentious politics
- political opportunities
- mobilizing structures
- framing processes
At a minimum people need to feel both aggrieved about some aspect of their lives and optimistic that, acting collectively, they can redress the problem. Lacking either one or both of these perceptions, it is highly unlikely that people will mobilize even why afforded the opportunity to do so.
Movements may largely be born of environentl opportunities, but their fate is heavily shaped by their own actions. Specifically, it is the formal organizations that purport to speak for the movement, who increasingly dictate the course, content, and outcomes of the struggle. In terms of our three factors, t his means that both political opportunities and framing processes are more the product and organizational dynamics than they were during the emergent phase of the movement.
Political opportunities
- Openness or closure of the institutionalized political system
- The stability of that broad set of elite alignments that typically undergird a polity
- The presence of elite allies
- The state’s capacity and propensity for repression
Mobilizing structures
“Those collective vehicles, informal as well as formal, through which people mobilize and engage in collective action”
Two main types of mobilizing structures: 1. Resource mobilization theory and 2. The political process model
Resource Mobilization Theory and the Political Process Model
Resource mobilization theory: “sought to break with grievance-based conceptions of social movements and to focus instead on mobilization processes and the formal organizational manifestations of these processes”
The political process model documents the critical role of various grassroots settings work and neighbourhoods, in particular in facilitating and structuring collective action
Framing processes
They adopt this term from David Snow who defines framing processes as “the conscious strategic efforts by groups of people to fashion shared understandings of the world and of themselves that legitimate and motivate collective action”
The framing process will tend to be less consciously strategic than later efforts. In fact, at the outset, participants may not even be fully aware that they are engaged in an interpretive process of any real significance. This is certainly not the case later on as various factions and figures within the movement struggle endlessly to determine the most compelling way to bring the movement’s ‘message’ to the ‘people’.
Theories of contentious politics: Tilly and Tarrow (2015)
= THE DOING OF CONTENTIOUS POLITICS AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
Contentious politics involves interactions in which actors make claims bearing on other actors’ interests, leading to coordinated efforts on behalf of shared interests or programs in which governments are involved as targets, initiators of claims, or third parties
A social movement is a sustained campaign of claim maing using repeated performances that advertise the claim based on organizations networks traditions and solidarities that sustain these activities
The elements of social movements include 1. Sustained campaigns of claim making; 2. An arry of public performances including marches, rallies, demonstrations, creation of specialized associations public meetings, public statements, petitions, letter writing, and lobbying. 3. Repeated public displays of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment by such means as wearing colors, marching in disciplined ranks, sporting badges that advertise the cause, displaying signs, chanting slogans, and picketing public buildings.
In contentious politics, the actors already exist they are “recognized authorities whereas in social movements those actors do not exist, but are seeking that kind of recognition
Theories of contentious politics: Bayat 2021
A purely state-based view of contentious politics and social movements deprives us of seeing our everyday life as revolution or at least of having the capacity for revolution
Revolutions are more than just the transformation of the state or regime change, however indispensable they may be. Revolutions have also a social side, the level of the grassroots, the everyday. By this I mean transformation in people’s subjectivities, expectations, relations of hierarchies, as well as alternative practifces in farms, factories, neighbourhoods, schools, the streets, and in private realms. Thus the story of revolution is not just what happens at the top; it is also the chronicle of what transpires in the underside of society in the everyday.
Nonmovements
The collective action of non-collective actors who are directly related to one another through tacit communications, or passive networks, which in turn is triggered by recognizing their commonalities in public spaces
Refer to the chart on slide
Social Movement Theory and the Prospects for Climate Change Activism in the US by Doug McAdam
The youth is the foundation of climate change movements… smth McAdams predicted
- Political opportunities
- He argues that there are three reasons why institutional power in the US has not been receptive to climate change activism
- The rise of an increasingly dominant conservative republican party
- Since the 1960s and quite markedly from the 1980s, there is an increase in both republican conservatism that came to characterize the republican party’s policy preferences during the period
- Mcadam attributes the rise of the republican control of Congress and the party’s conservatism to a shifting racial geography of American politics - Partisan polarization and gridlock
- No political opportunity today for climate activists to pursue their political agenda through legislative means
- Instead of Congress paying attention to the interests of the general public, congress is paying attention to lobbyists and donors and their interests resulting in an undue influence in the policy process. - Mobilizing structures:
- We have to interpret the failure to achieve any significant legislative or policy breakthroughs on the issue at the federal level as a stark rebuke to the institutionalized movement
- The second structural impasse to climate change activism in the US are the mobilizing structures of the legislative institution, which are not amenable to the movement - Framing processes:
- Social movements need a frame that is strong enough to get people to break out of their quotidian patterns of behavior
- What McAdam argues in today’s text is that there are four reasons the framing of climate change activism has failed in the US - Lack of ownership of the issue
- Climate activists have little success at creative identity framing in the U.S - Extended sense of time
- People perceive climate change as a future issue so people don’t wanna act now - Emotions and Collective Action
- Our fear of climate change is more likely to be of a dispassionate intellectual nature than the more visceral fear that catalyzes action - The puzzle of extreme weather events
- Personal experiences have if anything a shorter effect on climate concerns
Three paths forward for climate change activism in the US, according to McAdam
- Promoting ownership of the issue
- College students because: - Vulnerability
- Represent a large population
- Biographically available
- Shrinking the time horizon
- Climate change activists must do a better job of educating the public about the present-day manifestations of climate change and the dangers those manifestations already pose - Fear anger and hope
- By pursuing very specific goals for instance blocking drilling in this coastal area or outlawing fracking in this country movements can achieve the small victories that sustain struggles by reinforcing hope and the shared sense of collective efficacy on which movements depend
The civil rights movement in comparative perspective with the BLM movements Clayton (2018)
Research question: in comparison to the civil rights movement is the lack of popularity/ failure/ disapproval of BLM because BLM was more “aggressive”/ “violent”/ “radical” than the civil rights movement?
Answer: the issue at hand is not how the movements were framed by the media but the internal framing of the issue within both movements
Argument: the civil rights movement framed its issues in a more inclusive manner than the BLM
Leadership: BLM = highly centralized while the Civil Rights movement = highly decentralized
The fact that BLM was gathered in the media adds to the decentralization of the BLM movement
For Clayton, the civil rights movement successfully constructed a master frame whereas BLM did not. A master frame: a frame that provides a broad generic collective action framework for an issue that allows numerous groups to articulate their own cause within its borders
Have a centralized community that encompasses many issues
BLM= Narrow framing… Civil Rights = Wide framing
