What explains the success or failure of particular social movements?

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Essay

The success or failure of particular social movements is best explained by a combination of their level of unity and organisation, and externally determined factors such as political opportunities which arise for them. These external factors could also be taken to include whether the movement has powerful allies and the support of public opinion, but such variables are partially within the control of the movement and are better seen as components (rather than causes) of success. The effects of movements’ use of violent or disruptive tactics are unclear and appear to be highly context-dependent, making them less useful as a means of explaining why certain movements succeed and others fail. In this essay, I first briefly establish what it is we mean by a social movement, and outline how to conceptualise and operationalise success for them. I then explore empirical evidence on the impact that organisational structure, tactics, and political opportunities have on outcomes for social movements, before concluding that internal and external structural factors do the best job of explaining success or failure.

A social movement is a form of collective action in which participants challenge more powerful opponents – such as elites or governments – to accept their claims and demands, through a prolonged public campaign (Tilly and Tarrow 2015, 11). By their nature, then, social movements are made up of a large number of agents, each with their own aims. This complicates the task of establishing whether a particular movement was a success or a failure, particularly given that many unformalised social movements may lack a hierarchical leader and thereby an individual whose objectives can act as a proxy for those of the movement as a whole (Saeed 2009). Moreover, social movements often possess goals in addition to simply challenging powerful opponents. Some, such as the women’s rights and gay rights movements, have a supplementary focus on shifting public opinion in the direction they wish, independently of its impact on the legislative process (Koopmans 2007, 700). Others serve partly as a means for participants to signal membership of a particular identity group to wider society (Melucci 1996, 70). Classifying a movement as successful or a failure is therefore not a trivial task

Also, the focus and goals of a movement may evolve over time, which makes it even more difficult. When there’s value drift, whose perspective do we assess goodness from?
, which poses problems for scholars attempting to identify what determines these outcomes.

However, most academics settle on a two-dimensional operationalisation of success formulated by Gamson (1975), which captures both the social and policy types of aims which movements generally have whilst avoiding overcomplication. The first axis, “acceptance”, is maximised when the movement’s leaders are recognised and legitimised by existing sources of authority. “New advantages”, meanwhile, centres on whether the movement’s efforts actually lead to policy changes in favour of the social groups that it was established to benefit. These dimensions will serve as the framework for the dependent variable in my examination of what factors can explain success or failure.

There is strong evidence across different time periods, geographic regions, and cause areas that movements which are more professionalised and centrally organised

I should really include unity as a contributor too - Gamson finds that groups with single-issue demands were more successful than those spread across multiple issues.
have a better chance of both social and policy success. Analysis by Gamson (1975, 92) of 53 American social movements from 1800-1945 shows that those which were centralised and bureaucratised had a greater chance of acceptance and gaining new advantages. Most strikingly, a movement which was neither centralised nor bureaucratised had only a 15% chance success in bringing about policy change, compared to a 75% chance for movements which were both. This empirical association supports the prediction of resource mobilisation theory that movements with greater access to human and financial resources and those which use their resources
Could also talk about provision of selective incentives, using Gamson (1975, 69) for data. For more on incentives and resource mobilisation, see Martin (2008): “tactical resource disbursements do increase the union’s ability to recruit new members”. But Jenkins (1983) says this isn’t borne out by data.
 more effectively will be more successful. In this case, movements with a larger organisational capacity are better able to present a united front to opponents, prevent factional infighting among their members, and act in a more strategic manner, all of which contribute to both social and policy success (Jenkins 1983).

Increased centralisation also enables coalition-building, another contributor to success

Here is a good review piece on coalition-building.
. Multivariate re-analysis of Gamson’s original dataset by Steedly and Foley (1979) shows that one of the best predictors of a particular movement’s outcomes is the extent to which they have strong partnerships with nonrival groups. Besides the obvious direct effect that this has on extending the reach of the movement, alliances also enable individual social movement organisations (SMOs) to specialise in their respective comparative advantage (for instance, one SMO might focus on logistics for a protest whilst a partner concentrates on mobilising demonstrators), to the benefit of the wider movement (Jones et al. 2001). Taking a closer look at the professionalisation of the abortion rights movement can help elucidate why centralisation enables the development of coalitions, which in turn contribute to success. Staggenborg (1988) demonstrates that having more developed organisational structures permitted pro-choice SMOs to dedicate some of their human resources towards liaising with coalition partners, and maintaining strategic coherence, something that decentralised movements are not able to do. In sum, movements which are more centralised and bureaucratic are better able to sustain their unity and to form coalitions, both of which contribute to success.

Increased levels of formalisation within social movements also leads to less use of violent protest in comparison to institutional engagement, a mechanism for an additional, indirect effect on success (Staggenborg 1988). This brings us on to the consideration of tactics, and whether disruptive or violent ones help or hinder a movement in achieving its desired outcomes. Early scholarship in the field found a positive association between use of violence and success, with a statistically significantly difference in proportion of groups which won new advantages for their beneficiaries (Gamson 1975, Figure 6.2). However, examination of the specifics of the cases indicates that their use of violence was less a contributor to than a demonstration of these movements’ success. The six groups in the dataset which employed violence did so only as a minor accompaniment to their predominantly nonviolent tactics and used it against targets significantly weaker than themselves (Gamson 1975, 82). In certain limited circumstances, then, use of violence may promote a movement’s interests – specifically, when there is already public support for the movement’s claims, and its use of violence is neither too frequent nor untargeted (Button 1978, 174-176). This contingency is supported by the very high variance in outcomes associated with violent tactics (Steedly and Foley 1979). However, recent work has shown that increased use of violence tends to reduce the acceptance of social movements, with survey data showing that perceptions of a social movement are negatively affected by their use of violence, even when directed against targets that respondents disapprove of (Simpson et al. 2018). These findings were mirrored by research exploiting a natural experiment where violent protest suddenly erupted from a previously peaceful movement, which concluded that the use of violence reduced approval of the movement across all parts of the public (Muñoz & Anduiza, 2019). So, although we cannot say that violence is a strong predictor of either success or failure because of the substantial context-dependency, there is moderate evidence to suggest that, in general, movements which adopt violent tactics as their principal strategy are more likely to fail than those which do not.

The conditionality of the value of violence points to the importance of context in determining success of social movements. Re-analysis of Gamson’s 53 case studies by Goldstone (1980) showed that a stochastic model with an exogenous probability that a movement is successful in a given each year does a better job of explaining the observed successes and failures than either organisation or tactics. Importantly, successes are clustered in periods of broader social upheaval, and the annual chance of a movement’s success matches up almost exactly with the annual chance of social upheaval. Together, this indicates that the political opportunities created by crises are a key factor in explaining movements’ outcomes. Comparative analysis of the successes of the anti-nuclear movement in different countries supports the political opportunity structure hypothesis, finding that activists had greater policy success in nations such as Sweden with relatively powerful and centralised legislatures, as opposed to systems with more federalism and executive power like the USA (Kitschelt 1986). In order for a country’s open and responsive democratic system to work in favour of a particular social movement, though, the campaigning group must gain sufficient support from citizens. Consequently, positive public opinion is a joint requirement for movements obtaining new advantages, alongside favourable party-political conditions (Giugni & Passey 1998). It can be seen, therefore, that the sociopolitical context

Which Guigni (1988) calls the “state and party system”.
in which social movements make their demands plays a crucial role in whether they will successfully obtain acceptance or new advantages.

So, to conclude, internal and external structural factors do the best job of explaining the success or failure of particular social movements. Increased formalisation, in terms of greater centralisation and bureaucratisation, leads to a higher chance of the movement securing positive policy and social outcomes. Having more organisational resources to mobilise enables SMOs to form effective coalitions with others, and act with more strategic direction. Public opinion and the wider political environment also play a significant role in explaining the success or failure of social movements, by creating opportunities for movements to exploit. These external contributors to success also partially determine whether it is beneficial for a group to use violent tactics, a factor which, due to the high variance in its effects, otherwise tells us little about a particular social movement’s chance of success.

References

Button, J. W. (2015). Chapter V: Toward a Theory of the Political impact of Collective Violence. In Black Violence (pp. 156–179). https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400867615-009

Gamson, W. A. (1975). The strategy of social protest. Homewood, Illinois: Dorsey Press.

Giugni, M. (1998). Was it Worth the Effort? The Outcomes and Consequences of Social Movements. Annual Review of Sociology, 24(1), 371–393. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.24.1.371

——— & Passy, F. (1998). Social Movements and Policy Change: Direct, Mediated, or Joint Effect?.

Goldstone, J. Α. (1980). The Weakness of Organization: A new look at Gamson’s The Strategy of Social Protest. American Journal of Sociology, 85(5), 1017–1042. https://doi.org/10.1086/227123

Jenkins, J. C. (1983). Resource Mobilization Theory and the Study of Social Movements. Annual Review of Sociology, 9(1), 527–553. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.so.09.080183.002523

Jones, R. N. H. a. W. (2001). Coalition Form and Mobilization Effectiveness in Local Social Movements. Sociological Spectrum, 21(2), 207–231. https://doi.org/10.1080/02732170121587

Kitschelt, H. (1986). Political opportunity structures and political protest: Anti-Nuclear Movements in four Democracies. British Journal of Political Science, 16(1), 57–85. https://doi.org/10.1017/s000712340000380x

Koopmans, R. (2007). Social movements. In The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior (pp. 693–707). https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199270125.003.0037

Melucci, A. (1996). The process of collective identity. In Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age (pp. 68–86). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Muñoz, J., & Anduiza, E. (2019). ‘If a fight starts, watch the crowd’: The effect of violence on popular support for social movements. Journal of Peace Research, 56(4), 485–498. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343318820575

Saeed, R. (2009). Conceptualising success and failure for social movements.* Law, Social Justice & Global Development Journal, 2.*

Simpson, B., Willer, R., & Feinberg, M. (2018). Does violent protest backfire? Testing a theory of public reactions to activist violence. Socius, 4, 237802311880318. https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023118803189

Staggenborg, S. (1988). The consequences of professionalization and formalization in the Pro-Choice movement. American Sociological Review, 53(4), 585. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095851

Steedly, H. R., & Foley, J. W. (1979). The success of protest groups: Multivariate analyses. Social Science Research, 8(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/0049-089x(79)90011-5

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