Political Opportunities Social Movements, and Democratization: Volume 23

This paper asserts that the Rastafarian movement's ideological challenge to the Jamaican democracy became meaningful to the Afro-Jamaican poor and political elites for three reasons. First, given their origins among the Afro-Jamaican poor, the Rastafarians were able to construct resonant challenging frames out of a shared history and experience. The Rastafari were able to construct frames that were built upon the experiences and narratives of their target group. These frames tapped pre-existing pan-African visions such as Marcus Garvey's, the grinding poverty faced by many urban and rural Jamaicans, and benefited from the presence of actual African retentions such as the Revival religion. These emphases made the frames empirically credible and therefore particularly resonant to the Jamaican poor. Second, changing political opportunities, including changes in the political structure and the elevated prestige of the Rastafarian movement led some political elites to use Rastafarian frames to mobilize support among the poor, and helped shift Rastafarian frames from the periphery to the political mainstage. Third, certain mobilizing structures, including the popularity of Rastafarian reggae, augmented the dissemination of Rastafarian precepts. The paper highlights the interrelationship between culture and structure in a movement's emergence and success. Structure constrains movement possibilities, but the framing capablilities of movement actors help create maneuverability for the movement.

South Africa's struggle against apartheid illustrates a theory of compromised revolution. Compromise is associated with three levels of analysis: the immediate level of bargaining conditions; the structural level of political opportunities; and the societal level of class relations. By the late 1980s in South Africa, all parties were increasingly aware of an emergent military stalemate, and both sides saw negotiation as the only way out of indefinite war. Beyond this proximate level of analysis, shifting class interests and political instability during heightened financial crisis shaped cost assessments and political realignments within the National Party government. Movement and government efficacy fluctuated in response to one another during the 1980s, effecting a shift in the balance of power that increasingly favored the opposition and opened the possibility of negotiations. Attention to the interplay between class relations and political alignments in shaping the “ripe moment” for resolution highlights the usefulness of a multi-dimensional explanation of negotiation, thereby contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of the structures and dynamics of conflict and compromise.

This study examines how collective identities change when the political opportunity structure becomes more favorable to a social movement. Activists within the complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) movement in the San Francisco, California Bay area have traditionally competed with physicians by criticizing Western medicine and providing an alternative medical model for consumers. Physicians are increasingly interested in CAM given financial changes within Western medicine, and increased consumer interest and governmental recognition of CAM. Activists in the Bay area are beginning to form networks with physicians to develop an integrative model of medicine, which combines Western and alternative approaches. Consequently, some activists are changing their collective identity now that they are advocating an integrative, rather than alternative, model of medicine. Activists within any social movement do not always agree on goals and strategies, however. The aim of this research is to contrast the collective identity of “alternative” and “integrative” activists, and to show that the latter identity is gaining prominence as political opportunities become available to the movement. This research contributes to the work of contemporary social movement theorists who are examining the relationship between the political opportunity structure and collective identities.

Why do some indigenous rights campaigns succeed while others fail? I explain the contrasting outcomes of two campaigns in terms of contention between rival transnational issue networks. Because of its considerable resources, organizational strength, positive member dynamics, salient indigenous identity, persuasive framing and effective tactics, the network supporting the San Blas Kuna in Panama readily took advantage of emerging political opportunities to secure the creation of a national park. The park has protected Kunan lands from further encroachments. With limited resources, weak organizational capacities, paternalistic dynamics, multiple indigenous identities, a narrow frame and ill-advised tactics, the network supporting the Yanomami in the Brazilian Amazon struggled in the face of both a strong, savvy, well-coordinated opposition and a more slowly opening, often fluctuating structure of political opportunity. The network tentatively secured an Indian reserve only after a considerable loss of indigenous lives, environmental destruction and cultural disruption. The findings underscore the need to account for organized opposition as well as for transnational and local processes when explaining the policy consequences of indigenous rights movements.

The protest movement against nuclear power in the U.S. emerged as a consequence of the initial decline of the nuclear-power industry. Changes in financial and energy markets in the early 1970s threatened the industry, and in response, nuclear proponents and political elites initiated a political defense of the nuclear industry that exposed institutionalized relations of power, defined a visible target, and generated a simultaneous, collective perception of injustice, which led to the protest movement against nuclear power. The opposition to the Seabrook plant and the formation of the Clamshell Alliance represent a paradigmatic case, because at Seabrook the defense of the industry took its most visible form and because the Clamshell initiated the protest movement. This analysis presents a modified version of political-process theory by advancing a critical theory of power and developing the concept of a political condensation in contrast to political opportunity to explain the origins of the protest movement against nuclear power.

Responses to dissatisfaction can take the form of inaction, individual action or collective action (e.g. protest). The aim of the present article is threefold: to put forward a model which treats these responses as a linked set of objects of analysis (rather than marginalizing the former two as in the literature on social movements), to emphasize the importance of social structure and the institutional context for all three responses (contrary to Hirschman's ‘exit, voice and loyalty’ model) and to throw light on responses to housing dissatisfaction in two former state socialist capital cities, Budapest and Moscow. It is shown that: (a) inaction in the housing sphere is concentrated among those in the weakest social structural position and that attempts to represent this as due to their ‘loyalty’ are quite mistaken; (b) that individual action is the dominant response to housing dissatisfaction (an effect of issue domain) and is most common among those in middling or strong social positions; and (c) that although respondents did not consider collective action as a way of dealing with their housing dissatisfaction, such action does exist especially in Moscow where it was due to strong motivation in the face of an unfavourable political and resource context.

Despite the recent increase in scholarly work on movement outcomes, researchers have identified a number of areas that still deserve attention. Many of these criticisms have focused on the conceptual and methodological challenges that movement outcomes research presents. This paper contributes to these on-going discussions by arguing for a microsociological approach to the study of movement outcomes, one that makes face-to-face interactions between protesters and their targets the focus of inquiry. Taking this approach helps address two methodological challenges in the study of movement outcomes: identifying intended as well as unintended consequences of movement activity and establishing causality. Paying attention to what transpires during these interactions can shed light as well on the broader, more macro impacts in which most scholars are interested. Although useful for illuminating the immediate outcomes of protest activity, this approach is still intended to complement rather than refute existing strategies. I illustrate my argument with examples from extant studies as well as my own fieldwork with animal rights activists and their targets.

Here we examine some of the contemporary challenges facing Plaid Cymru — the Party of Wales, the principal nationalist political party and one of the mainstays of the nationalist movement in Wales. Against the backdrop of the establishment of the first directly-elected national government forum in Wales for 600 years, we present new research and explore how the party's response to the ‘inclusive’ politics of the mid-1990s was central to Plaid Cymru's recent dramatic electoral breakthrough into the political mainstream and how it will be crucial to hopes for its future advancement. We contextualise this as part of this nationalist party's overall transformation during the last 75 years. This has been a journey from espousing an exclusive to purportedly inclusive nationalist ideology. Such development has been shaped along a number of non-discrete axes that include: the geographical spread of the party's organisational structures and electoral support, its readiness to embark upon co-working with other parties and groups, its evolving policy agenda, its stance on the Welsh language and, latterly, its response to ‘inclusive’ politics and constitutional reform. We test what Plaid's former leader has described as, the ‘inclusive philosophy’ underpinning Plaid Cymru's ‘civic nationalism’ against the party's record of engagement with some of the most marginalised groups in Welsh society: women, disabled people and people from an ethnic minority. These groups must be engaged if Plaid's claims of inclusiveness are to be meaningful and it's growing influence in Welsh, U.K. and European politics consolidated. We base our discussion and findings on the analysis of published interviews and documents together with transcriptions of 280 semi-structured interviews undertaken between May 1999 and September 2000. We have interviewed over a third of the Assembly Members of the National Assembly for Wales, key officials, members of Plaid Cymru, managers of ninety membership organisations and over 150 key individuals and practitioners associated with the marginalised groups under study.

This essay studies the social causes of political and electoral homicide in Mexico's democratization in the 1988–2000 period. Three main plausible hypotheses are tested with a qualitative and quantitative data set as potential explanations for these political-electoral homicides: (1) the “peasant-landlord conflict” thesis which explains this violence against peasants as a manifestation of underlying agrarian struggles over land and wages; (2) the “violence as a political strategy” thesis which assumes political-electoral homicide is the unfortunate response of the authorities to the violent party tactics of an opposition political party; and (3) the “rise of a leftist opposition” thesis which explains political-electoral homicide as the result of social disruption caused by the PRI-regime's loss of its traditional populist social base. The results suggest that the rise of an organized leftist opposition was perceived as a threat to certain agrarian interests, and to local PRI political, police and electoral control over the municipalities in question. The relatively high incidence of “paid” political contract killings, and/or killings by anonymous assailants against individuals engaged in everyday social activities at the time of their death points toward the use of homicide as a control mechanism to protect, maintain and to minimize threats and resistance to existing political and economic group interests.

A common tactic in the analysis of the racial civil disorders of the 1960s has been to eliminate from data sets those events that occurred on university and college campuses. This procedure assumed a disjuncture between urban and campus collective violence, specifically in that the former would be related to local economic and social conditions and the latter would not. As a result, campus racial riots have not been well represented in the research on the rioting of the 1960s and their place in, and contribution to, the riot wave are not well understood. Contrary to earlier assumptions, our analysis shows a strong connection between campuses and their local context. First, campuses having stronger ties to local communities had higher rates of racial disorder during 1967–1969. Second, economic competition indicators for the local community influenced campus rioting, just as they influenced inner-city rioting. We conclude by discussing the implications of omitting campus events from past riot research.