Protest Is Not Enough: A Theory of Political Incorporation

Abstract

Protest Is Not Enoughis partly a report on the politics of black and Hispanic mobilization in ten northern California cities and partly an effort to formulate a theory useful for the study of minority mobilization and its significance in cities generally. The cities are San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Sacramento, Stockton, Berkeley, Richmond, Hayward, Vallejo, and Daly City. We did not expect to generalize the particulars of our ten cities to others, but we did try to cast our concepts and fundamental relationships at a sufficiently general level to encompass a wide variety of cities, and we hoped that the application of our framework to other cities would suggest ways in which it should be extended or altered.The TheoryWe wanted a conception of minority political action and position that linked mobilization to policy, that demonstrated the connection between the passions, interests, and actions of mobilization and the governmental response—if any. It was apparent that blacks and Hispanics achieved a much stronger and more positive response to their interests in some cities than in others. It was apparent also that minority representation in elective offices, the customary way of describing their political position, did not capture the strength of the minority position in the more responsive city governments. The key to the higher levels of responsiveness was not representation but coalition: minority inclusion in a coalition that was able to dominate a city council produced a much more positive governmental response than the election of minority council-members who were not part of the dominant coalition.