Civil Society and the State

Abstract

States, Parties, and Social Movements. Edited by Jack Goldstone. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 312 pp., $70.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-521-81679-3), $25.00 paper (ISBN: 0-521-01699-1). Among the many undertilled fields in political science, few are in as much need of cultivation as the study of the relationship between political associations and the state. Even though particular types of interactions have been analyzed at length, such as the role of political opportunity structures in mediating social movement success, other types of interactions, in particular those that would constitute “normal politics,” have received less attention. If political parties are thrown into the mix, the literature gap is even more evident. Fortunately, Jack Goldstone's new edited volume— States, Parties, and Social Movements —illuminates the various types of interactions among social movement organizations, political parties, and the state in both Western democracies and in non-Western nations—democratic and otherwise. Perhaps even more exciting, this fine collection of essays reflects the research of a younger set of scholars who stand poised to build on the intellectual contributions of their forebears. Goldstone frames the collection with a thoughtful opening essay that elucidates the central claim common to each of the essays: “social movements constitute an essential element of normal politics in modern societies, and … there is only a fuzzy and permeable boundary between institutionalized and noninstitutionalized politics” (p. 2). This claim stands in contrast with much of the literature on social movement activity. Conventional wisdom heralds that it is precisely because of a noninstitutionalized relationship between an aggrieved group and the state that social movement organizations form in the first place. Once a relationship becomes institutionalized, the need for a social movement organization dissipates, as does the type of political behavior typical of excluded …