In this chapter we will analyze the way that traditional political cleavage structures facilitate or constrain the action space of new social movements. As already suggested in the Introduction, the new social movements tend to articulate a political conflict that is based on anew cultural and social cleavagein society. Not only in this case, but quite generally, political conflicts are ultimately rooted in structural and cultural cleavages. In other words, they have their origin in broad societal transformations that oppose social groups for structural and cultural reasons. However, “structure” and “culture” do not impinge directly on politics. Social...

The analysis of cleavage structures in the preceding chapter allows us to understand why the goals for which people are most likely to mobilize differ from country to country, but it does not tell us much about the absolute levels and the action repertories of political mobilization. To explain these characteristics of political mobilization, we shall introduce two additional sets of elements of political opportunity structures (POS): the formal institutional structure of the political system and the informal procedures and prevailing strategies of political elites in dealing with challengers. Just like the national conflict structures, these two additional sets of...

In this chapter, we shall turn to the less stable elements of the political opportunity structure—certain aspects of the configuration of power of a political system. These are the elements underscored by the conceptualization of the POS by Sidney Tarrow (1989a, 1989b, 1994, 1995). He insists on the importance of the political conditions of the moment, on short-term changes in political opportunities that may unleash political protest and may contribute to its decline. The elements of the political context that may change in the short run include the opening up of access to participation, shifts in ruling alignments, the...

In this chapter, we analyze the relationship between social movements and their political context in a somewhat different perspective. Whereas in the preceding chapters we focused on differences between the NSMs of the four countries in relation to differing national political contexts (POSs), in this chaptersimilarities across countriesanddifferences within countriescommand our attention. Until now, we have dealt with the impact of political opportunities on a whole social movement sector. The general idea to be investigated in this chapter, however, is that the POS does not influence a whole social movement sector in the same way and...

In the preceding chapters, we have discussed differences and similarities in the mobilization of new social movements across countries and across movements. We now focus on a third dimension: the dynamics of NSMs over time. This dimension was touched upon in chapter 3, where we analyzed the impact of discrete changes in political opportunity structures on the level of mobilization of NSMs. However, this analysis remained confined to a static comparison of mobilization levels before and after changes in POS, and leaves us with a number of questions as to the subsequent development of NSMs. We have, for instance, shown...

The question of the relation between social movements and social problems is perhaps the most hotly debated theme in the social movement literature. Conventional wisdom has it that the explanation for protest behavior lies in intolerable circumstances, unbearable deprivations, and intense grievances. Classical theories of collective behavior have generally followed this line of argumentation, and saw social movements as a direct result of the frustrations and anomie caused by large-scale social-structural change. Adherents of the resource mobilization model have taken a diametrically opposed position, arguing that “there is always enough discontent in any society to supply grass-roots support for a...

Understanding the gay and lesbian movement is, to a certain extent, more complicated than grasping an instrumental movement like the environmental movement. Whereas the latter’s goal realization depends almost 100 percent on the external world—adversaries, authorities, and allies—in the history of the gay and lesbian movement, campaigns directed toward authorities and against adversaries alternate with internally oriented activities. These internal activities in particular confront us with the following conceptual problem: how do we draw the boundary between movement and subculture if both their activities are aimed at identity construction? In order to comprehend the gay and lesbian movement,...

Social movement activists know very well that what they are doing relates to what other people, sharing the same willingness to struggle for a common cause, are doing. They also know that what they constantly see about other people struggling for the same or similar causes strongly influences their political activism. In other words, social movement participants implicitly acknowledge the fact that their actions are subject to external influences and that the external environment is subject to their actions. Students of social movements, on the contrary, often seem to have forgotten this apparently simple fact. By neglecting the links among...

Students of social movements have traditionally focused on factors determining or influencing their emergence and development. Yet the literature on this subject has largely neglected the consequences of social movements’ action. Although a lot of work on social movements at least mentions some of their outcomes, systematic studies on the sources and causes of their success are still underrepresented.¹ Moreover, cross-national studies, which are most suited to inquiry into the conditions under which certain types of social movement outcomes occur, are almost completely absent. In general, there is a controversy in the literature between authors who stress the movement characteristics...