Social Movement Outcomes Research Articles

The Racial Limits of Disruption: How Race and Tactics Influence Social Movement Organization Testimony before Congress, 1960–1995

Abstract Social movement theory holds that disrupting social and political processes is among the most effective tools social movement organizations (SMOs) use to motivate recognition for themselves and their constituents. Yet, recent research suggests that the political reception of disruption is not racially neutral. Black SMOs face a dilemma in that, although disruption is a powerful tool for change, the public often perceives nonviolent Black disruptive protest as violent. We investigate this bind by analyzing how nondisruptive protest, nonviolent disruption, or violence helps or hinders both Black and non-Black SMOs to gain state “acceptance” as legitimate spokes-organizations for their issues. We combine data on newspaper-reported protest events with data covering 41,545 SMO Congressional testimonies from 1462 SMOs from 35 movement families. In panel regressions, we find that Congress is generally more accepting of nondisruptive protest but that nondisruptive protest is only roughly one-tenth as effective for Black SMOs compared with non-Black SMOs. Furthermore, whereas non-Black SMOs are significantly more likely to testify after using nonviolent disruption, Black SMOs using nonviolent disruption are significantly less likely to testify before Congress. Regardless of race, violence was associated with fewer congressional testimonies. Collectively, these findings suggest that Black SMOs face a tactical bind: Black SMOs can use nondisruptive tactics that are resource-intensive and slow, or they can use nonviolent disruption that gets media attention but hinders congressional acceptance. These findings contribute to a growing literature on how racial inequality and prejudice impact the outcomes of social movements.

The Effect of the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests on Police Budgets: How “Defund the Police” Sparked Political Backlash

Abstract This article investigates whether a core political demand of the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests was realized: “defund the police.” Original hand-compiled data containing budget information on 264 major cities in the United States and comprehensive protest data enable us to assess the effect of protests on changes in city police budgets. We find no evidence that BLM protests led to police defunding. In cities with large Republican vote shares, protest is associated with significant increases in police budgets. We demonstrate that electoral incentives cannot explain this policy backlash. Instead, we provide tentative evidence that backlash in Republican cities might stem from policymakers’ own conservatism and entrenched right-wing influences within city politics. The analysis offers novel evidence on the consequences of the largest protest movement in U.S. history and reveals the importance of backlash in explaining policy outcomes of social movements.

International Political Contexts, Digital Technologies, and Political Outcomes in Nigeria’s #EndSARS Movement

Abstract When do social movements achieve political outcomes? Extant literature has identified two broad factors that can explain the political outcomes of social movements: movements’ infrastructure, and political opportunities. Focusing on the 2020 #EndSARS protest in Nigeria, I build on this literature to understand how and why social movements may achieve policy outcomes when social movements’ infrastructure and domestic political opportunities are relatively absent. I analyzed the Twitter activities of protesters during the 2020 #EndSARS Movement in Nigeria. I argue that the #EndSARS Movement transformed from online campaigns to offline demonstrations against police brutality because of favourable international political contexts (Black Lives Matter or blm protests in the US, covid-19 induced economic hardships). Further analysis shows that the protest achieved significant political outcomes and responses from both federal and state governments in Nigeria because the protesters were able to successfully leverage digital technologies (like social media, blockchain technology), international media and global personalities to their advantage.

The outcomes of residential squatting activism in the context of municipalism and capitalism in Madrid and Barcelona (2015–2019)

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the impact of the Spanish housing movement on policies regarding residential squatting of municipalist coalitions in Madrid and Barcelona. Combining literatures on social movement outcomes, new municipalism, and the importance of capitalism for social movement studies, we address the following research questions: How has the Spanish housing movement framed its claims regarding residential squatting? How have these claims impacted policies in Madrid and Barcelona between 2015 and 2019? What explains the differences—if any—in these outcomes? We conclude that—following the 2008 global financial crisis—activists have reframed squatting as a legitimate response to unjust evictions and foreclosures in neoliberal political economies. While this has prompted support from municipalist councilors in both cities, gains have been more substantial in Barcelona. We explain this from variations in political alliances and urban political economies. Our analysis underscores the importance of capitalism in urban and housing movement studies.

Seattle’s CHOP guerrilla garden as a “thick” space of civil resistance

ABSTRACT More than just everyday acts of appropriation, guerrilla gardens have appeared in a growing number of civic protests. During Seattle’s Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP) in 2020, a guerrilla garden was featured prominently within the six-block area taken over by protesters following a standoff with the Seattle Police. Through informal and semi-structured interviews with the garden leaders, volunteers, protesters, and neighbours who lived near the site, this study examines the garden's role and significance during the month-long protest. Findings suggested that the CHOP garden provided opportunities for social interactions among protesters as well as non-protesters. Through expanded engagement, the garden brought a wider range of individuals to the protest site. With its ability to engage broader participation, the garden helped mobilise additional human and material resources for the movement. Furthermore, the garden functioned as a place of learning that deepened the meanings and narrative of the movement. It also served as a place of refuge and relief during the tense occupation. Lastly, the social networks and relationships that emerged from the garden serve as a vehicle for sustaining the movement beyond the protest. As a place that facilitated these multilayered processes, these findings suggest that the CHOP Garden functioned as a “thick” space of civil resistance. The notion of thick space highlights the importance of specific spatial practices that can contribute significantly to the transformative outcomes of social movements.

The Effect of Insider versus Outsider Activism on Corporate Targets’ Market Performance

Although outsider activists are the main participants of social protests, the large scale protests initiated by insider activists in recent years have attracted the public eyes and induced us to wonder whether insider activists, with higher risk and more significant cost to initiate and participate in social protests, are able to achieve more social movement outcomes than outsider activists. While factors influencing social movement outcomes have received ample attention from the perspectives of structure and agency, we still lack a good understanding of the impact of activist identity on social movement outcomes. This research builds a theoretical model to explain the links between activist identity and social movement economic outcomes by employing and extending the political process mode, a particular theory to explain social movement emergence and outcomes. Hypotheses developed from the model predict that protests initiated by insiders are more destructive to corporate targets’ market performance than outsider protests and that the destructiveness advantage of insider protests would be alleviated if corporate targets enjoy higher status but strengthened if targeted firms focus on service business. Results from a sample of social protests targeting U.S. public corporations reported by the New York Times between 2001 and 2021 provide support for the predictions. This research contributes to social movement outcomes by exploring the diverse impact of different types of activists and examining and extending the mobilizing structures of the political process model. This research also extends literature about insider activism by studying the economic outcomes of insider external activism.

The effects of target vulnerabilities on social movement outcomes: Wage campaigns in U.S. cities

How do target vulnerabilities affect social movement outcomes? Walsh (1986) and Jasper and Poulsen (1993) conceptualize target vulnerabilities as characteristics or practices of organizations that are inconsistent with relevant normative expectations (laws, professional codes, widely-held public expectations, etc.). Organizations' claims to legitimacy, and the access to resources that legitimacy bestows, are based on the presumption of adherence to those normative expectations, so credible threats to that presumption cannot be ignored. We draw on political process theories and the logic of policy change to analyze how target vulnerabilities affect movement outcomes in campaigns for living wages (1994–2003) and for increased minimum wages (2012–2017). For living wage campaigns, we model the effects of political elites’ vulnerability to the threat of popular delegitimation and vulnerability to non-participation by municipal workers on the likelihood of city councils 1) holding a vote (access outcome) and 2) adopting a living wage ordinance (advantages outcome). Using sequential regression analyses of these outcomes in 596 U.S. cities, we find that the effects of target vulnerabilities vary across living wage ordinance outcomes: delegitimation vulnerabilities affect the likelihood of access outcomes, whereas adoption advantages are more likely in the presence of non-participation vulnerabilities. We test the generalizability of our model and measures in an analysis of local minimum wage ordinance campaigns. We show that contentious politics at the local level differs from the national-level in ways that render city political elites potentially vulnerable to movement threats of delegitimation and non-participation.

The Mahdavī Society: The Rise of Millennialism in Iran as the Cultural Outcome of Social Movements (2000–2016)

This study asks questions about the understudied cultural, especially discursive, consequences of social movements at large, and rightist movements in particular. Focusing on the discursive repertoire of the Islamist rightist movement in Iran (known as principlism), I demonstrate that in response to the liberal Reform Movement (1997–2005), the principlist groups in Iran weaponized a millennial language against liberal reformists beginning in the early 2000s. The institutionalization of the Islamist principlist movement in 2005 mainstreamed this politicized language, giving rise to a new cultural reform politics in the country known under Aḥmadīnizhād as the Mahdavī discourse (millennialism). That is, the Mahdavī discourse represented a new cultural reconfiguration, or “cultural engineering,” in state politics. However, the Green Movement of 2009 as well as the Arab uprisings divided the unified Mahdavī discourse within the principlist movement into divergent millennial discourses. Drawing on millennial-oriented news stories and events from the early 2000s until the rise of the self-identified Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, I highlight the millennial discourses, as well as the Islamist-centered cultural engineering project, as the discursive outcomes of social movements.

Pitting the Working Class against Itself: Solidarity, Strikebreaking, and Strike Outcomes in the Early US Labor Movement

AbstractIt is axiomatic that high-risk activism requires solidarity if social movements are to have success in struggles against powerful adversaries. However, there is little research that attempts to gauge the impact of various types, limits, or breakdown of solidarity directly and systematically. Drawing from historical political economy, cultures of class formation, and social movement outcome literatures, we address the question of solidarity’s impact across dimensions and at various levels of scale (i.e., at the point of production or firm level, local community, and wider society) by analyzing the outcomes of more than 4,500 strikes during the late-nineteenth-century rise of US industrial capitalism. We find that while strike solidarity at the point of production is necessary, it is not sufficient for success. Disruption costs that strikers seek to impose to gain leverage can be significantly reduced by the countertactic of hiring strikebreaking replacement workers recruited from the local community or imported from beyond. We also find that the urban regime of strike policing matters by moderating the impact of strikebreakers. The most powerful predictor of strike outcomes is employer use of replacement workers, signaling the key to undermining working-class strike solidarity directly pits the working class against itself. Intraclass solidarity is necessary for the success in interclass struggle but needs to extend beyond the struck firm implicating the importance of solidarity of the surrounding community and wider social factory. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding the historic formation of the US labor movement and its present predicament.

Social Movement Outcomes and the Transformation of Boundaries in Crisis-Ridden Greece

The literature of social movement outcomes is engaged with the study of social change. However, social movement theories limit the explanatory potential of social movements' political outcomes, only in relation to policy and institutional change. Therefore, they do not pay attention to the various political qualities which emerge from protest cycles and move away from institutional arrangements. Against this backdrop, the paper suggests approaching social transformations as changes in boundaries. Boundaries define, each time, the limits of social settings and describe organizational and identarian aspirations of social change in daily life. Periods of crises are characterized by intense transformations, which overcome the old and create new boundaries. Based on qualitative field research conducted in more than 50 social movement organizations in Greece, between 2016 and 2017, the paper analyses the mechanisms that facilitated the enlargement of social movements' cognitive and structural boundaries, towards service-oriented repertoires of action. By studying social movement outcomes through boundary transformations, the paper challenges the rigid categorizations of movement outcomes and unravels the interactions among their personal, cultural and political aspects. As such, it demonstrates the need for social movement theories to consider non-institutional political changes of daily life, within the study of movement outcomes.

Spillover Through Hared Agendas: Understanding How Social Movements Set Agendas for One Another

Social movement spillover is an internal social movement sector outcome in which movements influence one another. Although research on social movement outcomes has advanced significantly in recent years, there has been less work on consequences that movements have on one another. One reason for this is that research on social movement spillover has been limited by its reliance on a small number of research methods, nearly all of which involve pre-selecting movements that are expected to be at risk of spillover. In this article, we contribute important new findings to the study of spillover in two ways. First, we examine a novel form of spillover: agenda spillover, which occurs when the goals of one movement come to be taken up by another movement in a serious or enduring manner (e.g., when racial justice goals become embedded in environmental goals). Second, using social network and computational methods, validated by significant pre-study testing, and event history analysis, we examine what factors seem to explain agenda spillover. We find that the social movement sector, characteristics of social movements themselves and, to a lesser extent, the political context, affect the propensity for movements to experience agenda spillover.

Digital Media, Activism, and Social Movements' Outcomes in the Policy Arena. The Case of Two Anti-Corruption Mobilizations in Brazil

This article investigates the role of digital media in mechanisms that sustain the achievement of social movement outcomes during key phases of mobilizations that aim to impact policymaking. It does so by comparing two anti-corruption initiatives in Brazil that became legislative bills through popular petition and included the employment of digital media to support them: the Ficha Limpa (or Clean State Law) and the Ten Measures Against Corruption (TMAC) campaigns. Based on in-depth interviews with key activists and secondary sources, including an analysis of the campaigns' digital media content, this study evaluates three types of outcomes in the political realm: access, agenda, and policy responsiveness. Although both anti-corruption initiatives elicited public preference and placed their legal inputs in the public agenda of the political system, they were not equally successful in converting their ideas into new legislation. The Ten Measures was a campaign that occurred when the digital affordances for civil society actors were considerably higher, but it did not achieve positive outcomes as the Ficha Limpa did. This article suggests that initiatives focusing more on online mobilization strategies without a clear advocacy approach to negotiate with (and pressure) public officials do not seem to be enough to promote policy changes.

The Cultural Outcomes of Social Movements: A Computational Linguistics Approach

Scholars have long established the importance of the cultural outcomes of social movements in the context of political power and representation. However, they have also acknowledged the methodo-logical difficulties associated with studying cultural outcomes, especially when culture is manifested through linguistic practices. This paper addresses the potential for dealing with movements and culture as mani-fested in symbols, public discourse, narratives, and rhetoric and makes two contributions: It links the social movement literature studying culture through language with Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for systematic and comprehensive cultural analysis; and introduces a state-of the-art method which pro-vides a better understanding of language change and linguistic influence given the capacity of computa-tional analyses to process large volumes of data for multiple actors and varied data sources during long pe-riods of time. The paper describes the cultural influence of women organizations in Spain between 2000-2020 on issues such as gender inequalities, abortion, gender violence, prostitution, and surrogacy. Tweets and manifestos by women's organizations', as well as national press coverage of women issues and inter-ventions by MPs in the parliamentary arena, are used to describe the advantages and limitations of the method for the study of cultural outcomes. Computational linguistics provides new possibilities for scholarly research on cultural outcomes of social movements but also shows that these methods should be accompa-nied by precise definitions of cultural outcomes, detailed and replicable operationalisation processes, and theoretical models that identify the mechanisms that explain the linguistic phenomena that underly cultural change.

Religion and Nonviolent Movements: The Catholic Church’s Influence on Chilean Resistance

AbstractThis study examines the relationship between religion and nonviolent resistance. I assess the influence of the Catholic Church in Chile on the nonviolent opposition to the Pinochet‐led military regime by producing a systematic account of the Church’s contribution to twelve factors necessary for successful nonviolent movements. The Church’s role was the most crucial in that it provided organizational strength and resources, delegitimized the opponent’s strategy for consolidating control, and helped formulate objectives for the opposition. The role of the Catholic Church in opposing the Pinochet regime in Chile provides an instructive case study of the influential and determinative role religious institutions can play in the outcomes of nonviolent social movements.

How Social Movement Actors Assess Social Change: An Exploration of the Consequences of Ukraine’s Local Maidan Protests

Social movements aim to change society, but whether they actually cause change is difficult for researchers to assess. A social constructionist approach can add to the understanding of social movement outcomes by allowing the activists themselves to define these consequences. I demonstrate the utility of this approach with a qualitative study of the social movement actors who attempted to change their society through Euromaidan in Ukraine. The movement in Kyiv grew into a nation-wide contention in which local Maidan actors issued their own demands to authorities. The larger consequence was the resignation of the President and new elections, followed by a military conflict in the east of the country. To examine the outcomes of Maidans from the participants’ point of view, I used primary documents issued by protest assemblies in 2013-2014 to select four local communities as case studies and, in 2018, held 24 interviews with 33 Maidan activists, representatives of local authorities, and observers. My findings suggest that local Maidans resulted in a rotation of local elites, but also in shifts of the receptiveness of local authorities to public opinion. These changes, however, mostly did not spread, which is due to the military conflict that ensued immediately after Maidan.

The Role and Impact of Social Media on Online Social Movements: An Analysis of ‘ALS Ice Bucket Challenge’ in India

Online social movements have taken root and flourished in the last decade due to online communication networks attributed to Social media. In this paper, the mixed-method approach is utilized for qualita- tive and quantitative analysis to investigate the efficacy of social media in propounding the outcome of online social movements in India. Further, several factors which have a definite impact on the outcomes of such online social movements are highlighted. This study concludes that online social media campaigns can be viewed as an extension of ‘social norms media campaigns’. Further, it establishes that the internet penetration in India coupled with ‘online peer pressure’ accompanying such movements has ef- fectively aroused the consciousness of users towards such campaigns. It also highlights the alteration in the process of diffusion of ideas in society due to the advent of social media platforms.

Are social movements truly social? The prosocial and antisocial outcomes of social movements

AbstractA growing body of research demonstrates that U.S. politics has become increasingly polarized over the past few decades. In these polarized times, what potential roles might social movements play in bridging divides between, or perhaps further dividing, people across a variety of political and social groups? In this article, we propose a research agenda for social movement studies focused on the prosocial and antisocial outcomes of social movements. Although scholars commonly frame their work on the consequences of social movements in terms of social movements' political, economic, cultural, and biographical outcomes, we suggest a focus on two categories of social movement outcomes (prosocial and antisocial outcomes) that cut across prior theoretical categories, and we show how an emerging body of scholarship has documented such outcomes at micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis. We also consider how emerging scholarship has addressed the sociological question about the conditions under which social movements produce prosocial versus antisocial outcomes. As we argue, attention to prosocial and antisocial outcomes of social movements holds both theoretical implications for social movement research and practical implications for social movements navigating the United States' political and social divides.

Lenguaje de derechos y apertura de oportunidades legales para el cambio social: el Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad y la Ley General de Víctimas

<p><span class="fontstyle0">Este trabajo aporta evidencia empírica a la creciente literatura enfocada en la movilización legal, primero, mediante el análisis del uso del lenguaje de derechos para enmarcar demandas colectivas y, segundo, con una discusión sobre los resultados de los movimientos sociales relacionados específicamente con los marcos legales. Para hacerlo, estudio el caso del Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad (MPJD), actor colectivo que consiguió la promulgación de la Ley General de Víctimas (LGV) en un contexto en el que la narrativa oficial se enfocaba en la criminalización de las víctimas de la violencia. Mediante un rastreo de proceso, analizo las razones por las cuales el MPJD enfocó sus esfuerzos en conseguir la LGV y qué factores influyeron para alcanzar tal objetivo. Los resultados indican que la LGV se concibió como un instrumento capaz de fomentar el cambio social mediante la ampliación</span> <span class="fontstyle0">de oportunidades legales. Al mismo tiempo, sostengo que la promulgación puede explicarse mediante la enmarcación del discurso en torno a la figura de las víctimas, la capacidad estratégica de quienes lideraron el movimiento y la estructura de oportunidades políticas.</span><br /><br /></p>

Does Climate Protest Work? Partisanship, Protest, and Sentiment Pools

This study demonstrates whether and how climate protest increases or decreases the “sentiment pools” available to the climate movement. Using an experimental vignette survey design ( n = 1,421), the author finds that compared with a control condition, peaceful marches are effective for both independents and Democrats, while civil disobedience has a positive effect among Democrats. These effects are isolated to those who are most certain of anthropogenic climate change. No effect is observed among Republicans. Despite evidence from other studies suggesting the possibility, no “backfire” effects are observed for any group or protest type. This study (1) lends supports to the use of tactical diversity within the climate movement and (2) demonstrates how the broader forces of partisanship interact with protest to shift the pool of supporters available to movements, extending our nascent collective knowledge of how partisanship shapes the outcomes of social movements and protest.

Political Assassination and Social Movement Outcomes: Martin Luther King and the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike

Despite a growing literature on social movement leadership, few studies consider how assassination shapes movement trajectories. Using event structure analysis, this study examines whether and how the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. propelled the struggling Sanitation Workers’ Campaign to success. It finds that King’s assassination can be understood as a “turning point” in the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike and distills four mechanisms connecting King’s assassination to the strike’s ultimate outcome: the assassination precipitated some repressive local policies while diminishing others; evoked moral outrage, further mobilizing sympathetic third parties and enhancing external resources; intensified economic and reputational concerns, provoking pressure from the local business community on local political authorities; and provided access to federal resources, enabling local political actors to “save face.” These findings extend previous research on assassinations’ outcomes, finding that external factors are, indeed, salient, significantly shaping movement trajectories in the aftermath of political assassinations of charismatic leaders.