Tarrow (1998 [with 2011 additions])
This week we will make the transition from Tilly to
Tarrow, via state-centered theory (Goldstone and Skocpol) and
political process models (McAdam). What I hope you can bring
from the lectures is an appreciation for the debates within the
range of Marxian and Weberian theory and a certain degree of
uncertainty or disagreement about the extent to which statecentered, political process, and resource mobilization theories
are more or less Weberian (or Marxist) and more or less
compatible.
State centered theory provides two important concepts that
are directly related to resource mobilizaton theory: state capacity
and state crisis. Both of these concepts should be related to
political opportunities, which is a critical factor in resource
mobilization and political process. In fact, it seems reasonable
to argue that political process models incorporate state capacity
and crisis in the concept of cycles of political opportunity.
Much of Tarrow's book is focused on opportunities, which
seems to be the critical factor in predicting social movements
and social movement cycles. In the first part of his book,
Tarrow discusses the birth of national social movements,
following Tilly in the analysis how social movements have been
facilitated (if not invented) in the last two hundred years, with
the major transformation occurring in the nineteenth century. In
this section, he focuses on how social change affected (or
effected) social movements by creating opportunities. In the
second section, he turns to how social movements affect (or
effect) social change, looking at the power of movements and
how they are capable of mounting challenges, taking advantage
of opportunities, creating new opportunities, developing
innovative tactics, framing their challenge, organizing and
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mobilizing suporters. The third section focuses on cycles of
political opportunity, between 1848 and 1989, focusing on the
1930s, the 1960s, and the 1980s. Here he considers the rise and
fall of movements (and movement cycles), the "residue of
reform," and the future of social movements.
I have framed Tarrow's book as an analysis of the
relationship between social movements and social change and as
a synthesis (or effort to integrate) resource mobilization and
political process models. In this regard, the first section of his
book is a friendly critique of Tilly's changing repertoires of
political contention. Specifically, he takes exception to Tilly's
implication that social movements be considered as a repertoire
or "form of collective action" (Tarrow, p. 33 [p. 42 in 2011).
Tarrow argues that the development of the national social
movement is not a change in repertoires but a product of such a
change. He thus reconfigures Tilly's model of changing
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repertoires as a shift from direct action that is target and interest
specific to a new, "modular" form of collective action that is
indirect and applicable to a variety of interests and targets (see
figure below).
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Like Tilly, Tarrow views the change in repertoires as a
response to developments in the formation of the modern state.
The development of "modular" tactics, deliberate organization,
and means of communication (or diffuson) were the elements
that enabled or facilitated national social movements. The old
tactics were rooted in local, homgeneous communities that were
capable of direct action in pursuit of specific interests. The new
tactics were rooted in the weak ties that linked members of
"communities of print" and "networks of associations." To
some extent, these tactics and communities were created in the
process of statemaking, but Tarrow insists that the relationship
between state capacity (and crisis) and social movements is
dialectical.
"By the second half of the nineteenth century, movements
and their potential for disruption had led nation states to broaden
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the suffrage, accept the legitimacy of mass associations and
open new forms of political participation to their citizens. In a
very real sense, citizenship emerged through a rough dialectic
between social movements—actual and feared—and the national
state." (p.66). [p. 89 in 2011]
The interactive or dialectical relationship between social
movements and social change (particularly statemaking) are
even more apparent in the second section of the book.
Section Two
Tarrow (p. 76-77 [pp. 160-1 in 2011]) defines opportunity
as components of the political environment that inspire the
perception on the part of challengers that they might succeed.
Clearly political challengers can construct opportunity or fail to
create opportunities by not challenging authorities, but the
examples of opportunity that Tarrow offers (p. 76) [pp. 164-5 in
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2011] suggest that he is not taking a constructionist approach.
Increasing access, shifting alignments, influential allies, divided
elites, and diminishing capacity for repression are the major
examples of opportunities [this last type of opportunity is less
prominent in the 2011 discussion; here he discusses repression
and facilitation in Part III (pp. 208-210). The inability to repress
is suggested in a more nuanced discussion of suppression and
coercive control, channeling and managing contention (pp. 1705). The discussion of repression and weak states is more
nuanced and cast in terms of regimes, opportunities and threats
(pp. 175-179).
Opportunities are associated not only with state crisis but
also with state capacity. State capacity limits the effectiveness of
social movements that demand political actions that the state is
incapable of executing. Prior to Abolitionism, in the early days
of Women's Suffrage (1848-1865), the AnteBellum state did not
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have the authority (or the capacity) to determine voting rights in
the States (see Bensel 1990).
Tarrow (pp.83-85 [pp. 174-5 in 2011]) argues that states'
routine repression of challengers may intensify the magnitude of
the challenge (suggesting that authoritarian states are likely to
experience few yet more intense challenges). Alternatively,
states' toleration of challenges (which is, of course, selective)
may be "a double-edged sword," depriving challengers of the
opportunity to confront hostile authorities and to play upon the
sympathies of the larger public audience (p. 84 [p. 173 in
2011]). Clearly, since the Democratic Convention of 1968,
American authorities have learned that repression can
undermine the legitimacy of the state, particularly when the
television reporters are being assaulted and arrested.
As Tarrow suggests, the state and the challengers are
involved in a strategic political game of innovation and
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accomodation. When the Civil Rights Movement filled the
Birmingham jails with peaceful protestors, this innovative tactic
captured the attention of the national media. Now the police
routinely batch-process protestors, without ever placing them in
holding cells. Ultimately, then, the secular trend facilitating
social movements (and political challenges, more generally) also
facilitates state accomodation, preemption, and cooptation of
challengers [Tarrow 2011, p. 116].
Consider the possibility that challengers may be returning
to community-based direct-action and away from social
movements. We'll reconsider that idea in evaluating Epstein's
book.
In the remainder of section 2, Tarrow deals with the
resources that enable challengers to take advantage of
opportunies--tactics, cultural/political frames, and organization.
Clearly, he sees these as important intermediate steps between
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opportunity and action, and he recognizes the importance of
strategic, symbolic, and organizational choices, but these don't
seem to be determinant but contingent factors that lead down
diverging paths that are not necessarily more or less successful.
Tactics, for example, include violence, disruption, and
convention, which are associated with distinctive constellations
of social movement and socio-historical conditions. Social
movements tend to follow a life-cycle that leads from disruption
to the strategic choice between violence and convention (p. 104;
this discussion is extended in 2011, pp. 98-117, with an
extended discussion of violent and nonviolent repertoires,
innovation and suppression). Tactics, however, also follow a
life-cycle from violent (or disruptive) to conventional. Thus
particular tactics (strikes and marches and sit-ins) have become
conventional. Curiously, tactics begin as violent/disruptive and
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end as conventional, while movements begin with disruptive and
move to violent/conventional.
Framing collective action is similarly contingent.
Mobilizing frames and action frames stand in an uneasy relation
with the dominant culture and the established authorities. Some
cultural frames, like "rights" in America seem to articulate well
with the dominant culture and at the same time challenge the
status quo, as we have moved from Civil to Women's to Gay
Rights and the Right to Life. "Rights," like marches on
Washington may have already become old news. It may be
necessary to innovate even more than we already have on the
general theme of rights in order to resuscitate the news value of
the rights of anyone (does anyone remember States' Rights? The
Bill of Rights?).
Mobilization and organizational form is also contingent and
problematical. Top down mobilization facilitates response to
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new opportunities or threats but threatens to alienate the base of
constituent support (p. 126 [pp. 124-5 in 2011]).
Decentralization can bring its own form of tyranny (p. 130 [pp.
131-132 in 2011]), not to mention the endless delays of arguing
fine point of procedure and rhetoric. What is necessary is a
mechanism for mobilizing networks of potential supporters
when opportunity knocks and then allowing them to return to
their conventional lives during cycles of decline. The women's
movement and the environmentalist movement have managed to
sustain themselves, despite factionalism, etc. Maybe the
community base is more important than the mechanism for
mobilization, although the IWW might be an example of the
extreme on that end.
In any case, it seems that mobilization (like tactics and
frames) is important in determining the direction and capacity of
a particular challenge by a particular challenger at a particular
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point in time. What seems definitive, however, is the presence of
opportunity. The problems of tactics, rhetoric/solidarity, and
organization are important in enabling challengers to respond to
opportunities or to sustain themselves in the doldrums (Rupp
and Taylor), but opportunities are the limiting condition.
Without opportunity, the rest doesn't matter.
In the new (2011) edition, Tarrow moves the chapter on
Opportunities and Threats to the end of this section (chapter 8).
It was at the beginning (chapter 5) in the old (1998) edition. He
has also renamed chapters 7 (from “Framing Contention” to
“Making Meanings”) and renamed what was chapter 8
(“Mobilizing Structures and Contentious Politics”) and becomes
chapter 6 (“Networks and Organizations”). These changes are
more than cosmetic. What was simply framing has now become
a more elaborate set not just frames but identities and emotions,
updated to include the Mohamed image and sociology of
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emotion work—inspired by the challenge of new social
movements and the cultural turn. Similarly, networks and
organizations recaps some of the old organizational theory—the
iron law of oligarchy and new versions of that problem, along
with the digital and virtual networks.
Still, Part II ends with opportunities, threats (adding
regimes instead of constraints), which remain the most
important predictor of contention. The most dramatic difference
in this section is the admission at the end that the old Resource
Mobilization and Political Process models are static and the
promise to rectify this problem in the new and improved Part III.
On that note, we might turn to the concepts of cycles, success,
and the future of social movements--in other words, Part III.
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Part III
The first thing we see in the new (2011) edition is the
addition of a new chapter, “Mechanisms and Processes of
Contention.” This is a summary of the Dynamics of Contention
model that McAdam, Tilly, and Tarrow offered in 2001. They
offer an interactive contingency model that reoriented the study
of political contention:
(1) away from single challenger/movement toward a “field”
of contentious action that includes multiple challengers,
authorities, targets, beneficiaries, antagonists, etc.
(2) away from Eurocentric/Western focus toward
international fields of contention, including nondemocratic and non-Western national and international
fields
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(3) away from static structures that predict contention
toward mechanisms and processes that seem to operate
in similar ways across time and place (2011, pp. 184-5).
“Mechanisms are a delimited set of changes that alter
relations among specific sets of relations in identical or closely
similar ways over a variety of situations.” (2011, p. 185).
Examples include brokerage or third party alliance
constructions, as when A. Philip Randolph (2011, p. 114)
established relations between unions and civil rights
organizations in support of his March on Washington
Movement. In my paper on Reconstruction Georgia (Hogan
2011) I use “divide and conquer” as another example of a
mechanism that tends to produce similar results across time and
place. Tarrow distinguishes “dispositional, environmental, and
relational mechanism” (2011, p. 187) associated with
mobilization and demobilization.
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He also views “processes” as a set of mechanism that work
in combination in similar ways across time and place. Tilly
suggests democratization, state-making, and capital
accumulation and processes—not static structures. Tarrow
suggests diffusion and scale shift as processes. He then takes
these mechanisms and processes into the previously (second
edition) chapters on cycles, reformist struggles, and
transnational contention, concluding (like Tilly and Wood) with
the future of social movements.
What I pulled out of the last section of Tarrow for
discussion was three major assertions (or questions).
1. Opportunities and social movement cycles tend to move from
the top down (p. 142-4 [pp. 199-202 in 2011]), with conflicts
between elites eventually creating opportunities for grassroots
challenges.
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2. These cycles produce effects on participants, political
institutions and practices, and on political culture (p. 164 [p.
220 in 2011]).
3. Historically, over the past two hundred years, there has been a
tendency toward mass, modular, peaceful movements, which
"flourish" in the modern era, particularly in Western
democratic states (p. 196-7 [more implicit in 2011 edition:
“High capacity democratic regimes produce and enormous
concentration of social movements.” (p. 179)]).
Recently, however, some might argue that movements are
becoming international in scope and more prone to violence. Are
we becoming a movement society? Are movements now
transnational or international? Are we returning to violent, direct
action?
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Tarrow asserts (pp. 172-174; pp. 230-1 in 2011) that
despite diversity the women tended to use conventional tactics,
but they also were much more effective in framing their
demands, in maintaining community based networks, and thus in
sustaining themselves to take advantage of opportunities even
after the end of the Sixties cycle. Obviously the transitory (and,
perhaps, overly intellectual) nature of the student population was
a major difference between the movements, but are movements
that use conventional tactics generally more successful?
The role of violence and disruption in the social movement
cycle is not clear in Tarrow. He suggests that violence represents
a strategic choice when disruption is no longer effective and the
movement needs to do something else to create uncertainty
among antagonists and to bolster solidarity among potential
supporters (pp. 94-98, 104-5; pp. 101-7 in 2011). Violence and
convention are alternative paths that movements might follow at
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the end of a cycle (pp. 149-150; p. 104 in 2011), when
supporters are leaving the movement. Convention maintains the
organizational structure that can mobilize community-based
networks when opportunities present themselves again. In this
regard, the women's movement survived "the doldrums" (Rupp
and Taylor), but what about the community base?
Violence is newsworthy and creates uncertainty, which
might extend the cycle and provide the conventional movement
organizations with leverage in negotiating policy reforms. One
might argue that Malcolm X did more for conventional Civil
Rights reform efforts than he did for the urban ghetto residents
(who were less likely to benefit from affirmative action and
integration and who were not particularly concerned with
discrimination in housing, education, or middle-class
employment). Since the cycle begins with conventional
challenges--in this case, NAACP legal challenges to
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discrimination in education and ends with violence or terrorism,
it may be that the two are dialectically linked in the political
process of creating and expanding opportunities. The repression
of the violent cadre or professional radicals reaffirms the
legitimacy of the state and, ironically, of the nonviolent protest
that has turned conventional.
If the social movement organizations are sustained as
conventional political challengers, they might be prepared not
only to provide opportunities in opening the next cycle but also
to contribute to the reconstruction of the history of the
movement.
Today, for example, decades after the movement went into
decline, Malcolm X has been reconstructed as a religious and
political leader who, after becoming disillusioned with the
Muslim leadership, might have joined an inter-racial coalition of
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nonviolent direct action advocates. Of course, we will never
know, since both he and Martin Luther King were assassinated.
This leads us, indirectly, to the role of the media in
constructing or reconstructing political challenges (or
movements). Here I find Tarrow's account (pp. 114-116; pp.
147-9 in 2011) more compelling. Let us not forget that media
are not public agencies but private profit-making enterprises.
The media makes news in much the same way that classes make
history--they don't construct it from whole cloth (Marx,
somewhere in the Eighteenth Brumaire I think). First and
foremost, news is what sells advertisements—what is predicted
to attract public attention. As movements and cycles (and
tactics) become routine, they lose their news value. Violence
and disruption are always newsworthy, but those who receive
violence tend to get better press (even if they are armed and
dangerous) than those who blow up buildings. Aside from that,
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the mainstream media tends to represent the values of the
dominant culture (or attempts to reflect and form those values,
reflecting to a greater extent in news and forming as a primary
goal in advertising).
In any case, in bringing our discussion of Tarrow to a close,
it is hard to find evidence that Tarrow views violence as
effective in achieving goals, creating opportunities, or sustaining
community networks. That does not mean that it is irrational,
simply that it tends to be ineffective and thus should decline
over time, as new challengers learn the lessons of history.
My inclination is to view convention and violence as two
sides of the same coin. While cycles may open and close with
convention (I'm still not sure that I agree with that), disruption
expands the opportunities for challengers. Ideally, disruption
should continue with innovation at the edges, but it becomes
increasing difficult to disrupt without violating the law and it
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becomes increasingly difficult to engage in large-scale peaceful
protest without losing the ability to create uncertainty and to
sustain solidarity.
In my mind, violence is a double edged sword. If
authorities are not convinced that there is, at least, a potential for
violent revolutionary struggle, they can routinize the challenge
and control the media. Eventually, civil disobedience becomes
conventional. In the medium run, the effect of violence tends to
undermine the position of the violence user. At the same time,
however, violence can create opportunities for the nonviolent by
creating uncertainty and a sense of rage. Gamson (1976) found
that violence receivers who did not respond in kind tended to be
less successful than others, but that may be a function of the
power of the group and the time period--before police learned
how to combat nonviolence.
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In any case, I find Tarrow's claim that revolution occurs
when the state collapses (p. 157 [ p. 210 in 2011]) to be
problematic. What are the cause and effect here? Does the
collapse of the state produce revolution, or does the potential for
revolution engender the collapse of the state. If, in fact,
decentralization of the means of coercion generates violence
does that mean that we need a central state to protect us from
each other? Of course, Tarrow suggests that this is a temporary
crisis. Clearly, he is not offering a theory of revolution (as Tilly
is) but a theory of social movements (which Tilly does not).
Ultimately, if we buy Tarrow's analysis of social movements,
does that help us to understand revolutions? Worded differently,
can we synthesize or combine Tarrow's theory of social
movements with Tilly's theory of revolution.
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If there is a dialectical relationship between statemaking
(and capital accumulation) and political challenge, does that
apply equally well to the analysis of social movements (which
emerge cyclically) and revolutions (which appear to be rare
events)? If one is interested in using social movements as a
means to (or path towards) effecting radical (institutional)
change (such as the destruction of capitalism), is that a mistake?
Are social movements the wrong vehicle? Should we look
elsewhere for radical political challenges?
On that note we might turn to new social movements and
Epstein's analysis of direct action communities.
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