Post class
Dynamics of contention
The main thrust of the dynamics approach (see, Dynamics of Contention, McAdam, Tarrow,
Tilly, 2001) is to show how different forms of contention – social movements, revolutions, strike
waves, nationalism, democratization and more – result from similar mechanisms and processes
and to argue that we can learn more about all of these mechanisms and processes by comparing
their dynamics than by looking at each on its own. McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, for example,
explore several combinations of mechanism and processes with the aim of discovering recurring
causal sequences of contentious politics. In a nutshell, Dynamics of Contention attempts to
examine democratisation, nationalism, revolution, ethnic conflict, and social movements as a
unified field by dissolving all these research areas under the aegis of contentious politics. Thisthe
authors want to do not by identifying “wholesale repetitions of large structures and sequences”
but by singling out “significant recurrent mechanisms and processes as well as principles of
variation” (33).
The purpose of this book, then, is to construct a theory of collective political struggles that can
inform our understanding of a range of episodes of contentious without falling prey to the
reifying effects of theories specific to particular episode types. The authors want to encourage a
crossing of various boundaries (disciplinary, historical, geographic, and between different forms
of contention) that divide the field of contentious politics and demonstrate how different forms of
contention may be compared by constructing analytic narratives of episodes of contention and
breaking these down into the mechanisms and processes that drive them and connect them to
their origins and outcomes.
One of the main theoretical contributions of this work is its attempt to categorise different types
of cases – revolutions, democratisation, nation-state building, ethnic conflict, and civil war – all
as episodes of contentious politics, not sui generis phenomena, each subject to its own laws.
This, the authors do, by identifying a number of “significant recurrent mechanisms and
processes” (33) across apparently diverse forms of action. These mechanisms are the causal links
between independent and dependent variables – events that produce the same immediate effects
over a wide range of circumstances. Brokerage, social appropriation, certification/decertification,
collective attribution of opportunity/threat, category formation, identity shift, radicalisation,
convergence and competition are some of the recurrent mechanisms mentioned – and specified
for episodes of mobilisation, identity constitution, contentious trajectories and different forms of
contention, including revolutions, nationalist mobilisation, and democratisation.
These mechanisms have different origins and different outcomes depending on how they
concatenate with other mechanisms and processes; they reveal causal connections underlying
large-scale social contention (32): “Explanation consists of singling out problematic features of
the phenomena at hand…then identifying recurrent mechanisms that produce those features,”
(87). The sequences and combinations of these mechanisms in a variety of settings help explain
particular causal chains and hence different collective outcomes.
These mechanisms also establish ‘legitimate’ connections across social chasms, and within and
between political groups that are already part of an emerging agonistic political divide. Indeed,
they make it possible to develop and maintain an agonistic dynamic that in turn fuels the
dynamics of contention. For instance, the mechanisms of certification/decertification
respectively legitimate or de-legitimate political positions in the context of political competition
and can thus potentially change the course of claim-making, alliances and challenges.
In doing all the above, the authors are careful to deny any intent to provide a ‘general theory’
(see pages 23, 32, 34, 306, 313, 340) or a comprehensive explanation of contentious processes;
they emphatically reject single models of any large-scale process. Instead of creating a general
model for all contentious episodes, the authors suggest “the comparison of episodes of
contention in light of the processes that animate their dynamics…Our goal was to interrogate a
broad range of episodes to learn whether they concatenate in recurring combinations of
mechanisms – robust process – that are consequential across a significant number of cases”
(314).
Such a relational approach, the authors contend, yields a better understanding of the causes and
consequences of social interaction than do structuralist, phenomenological, rationalist, or cultural
approaches alone.
Critiques of McAdam, Tarrow, Tilly
The authors say that the mechanisms they have identified fill in the underspecified causal arrows
between the boxes in the political process model: political opportunities, mobilizing structures
and frames. But some of their mechanisms seem to do less and some of them more than that. I
am not convinced that an “opportunity spiral,” which involves the “perception of significant
environmental uncertainty on the part of state and non-state elites and challengers alike” (97)
solves the problems of underspecification that weakened the original political opportunity
concept. On the other hand, it seems likely that the constitution of new identities that the authors
describe will in some cases substitute for local mobilising structures in triggering contention. So
should researchers hold on to the political process model or, as the authors themselves
sometimes seem to be doing, break out of its categories altogether.
Also, the assumption of the book is that by mapping crucial processes underlying contentious
sequences, the authors have explained the phenomena. That such mapping may well provide
apposite description of the events in question is acceptable; but doesn’t ‘explanation’ require, at
a minimum, telling us why the phenomenon in question happens in certain settings rather than
others. A still more demanding notion would have it that explanation requires formulas that
predict, or retrodict, the quantitative extent or qualitative form of the explanandum. This would
mean statements of the following form: When you start with situations like abc, under conditions
like def, you get outcomes like xyz.”
The biological metaphor
In an attempt to theorise the study of movements in strategic interaction with their bystanders
and opponents and to account for the contingency and uncertainty in actors’ choices and the
unfolding of events, Oliver and Myers (2003) draw an analogy with coevolutionary theory in
biology: “Social movements are...like species. Unlike an organism, which has a distinct set of
properties, a species is a breeding population characterised by a statistical distribution of
properties. Species evolve when these statistical distributions change” (2). Therefore, Oliver and
Myers conclude that social movements are not long unitary collective actions but populations of
collective actions with statistical distributions of properties: “actions are structurally equivalent
to genes. Biologically, genes are not selected directly but rather indirectly, through selection on
organisms. However, in protest evolution, actions are usually selected directly by actors’ choices,
not through indirect selection on actors, although indirect selection may also occur. Thus we
understand a social movement as a distribution of events across a population of actors” (2-3).
Oliver and Myers are clearly following in the Dynamics of Contention (McAdam, Tarrow, Tilly,
2001) tradition in so much as they seek to identify the process and their constituent mechanisms
that constitute contention. The assumption of using the biological metaphor is that as in biology,
in contentious politics too, the same mechanisms can appear in different processes. Diffusion,
framing, competition, adaptive learning, or scale shift are all different mechanisms that could be
at work in different processes and episodes of contention. However, what differ are the
circumstances in which they occur and their combination or sequence with other mechanisms. It
makes sense that to be able to understand processes better, you can disaggregate them into their
component mechanisms and understand their interaction with other mechanisms. As Tarrow puts
it in The New Transnational Activism (2005), “in biology the mechanism of muscle contraction
contributes to respiration, locomotion, digestion and even reproduction. Mitosis is a mechanism
that prepares a cell for division but sometimes replaces healthy cells and produces cancer. If
biologists are interested in any of these process, they can ill afford to ignore their constituent
mechanisms. The same is true of contentious politics” (30). Indeed, “serious attention to the
underpinnings of coevolutionary theory provides new and powerful ways of theorising relations
among social movements and other actors” (Oliver and Myers 2).
Koopmans (2005) too is indebted to the ‘dynamics of contention’ school and calls for an
evolutionary approach to collective action that prioritises changing social processes over time.
One of the major implications of using such an approach is a shift from explanations based on
the assumption of rational actors to a model of adaptive rationality. The notion of adaptive
rationality is a more realistic assumption that improves on the rational choice approach. Instead
of assuming fully rational actors that make detailed calculations based on accurate beliefs about
the future, it is more realistic to argue, for instance, that actors will also use trial and error.
Another core argument of this literature is that protest and repression cannot be seen in isolation
but are connected by a dynamic interdependence. The behaviour of the opposition towards the
government is influenced by the way in which the government reacts to the behaviour of the
opposition; similarly, the behaviour of the government towards dissent is conditioned on the
action of the opposition toward the government. When faced with government sanctions or
coercion, dissidents are expected to respond with resistance. Analysing the Iranian Revolution
for instance, Rasler (1996) argues that due to micromobilisation process, protest increases in the
long run when faced with government sanctions. Micromobilisation occurs because overt
dissident behaviour shows the willingness and commitment of others, makes the goal of their
activities desirable, and raises the social rewards for participating in the dissent movement. Opp
and Roehl (1990) argue that “repression sets in motion ‘micromobilisation process’ that raise the
awards and diminish the costs of participation” (523). The reaction of the government to
dissident activities is expected to be similar to the response of dissidents to repression. If a
government is faced with protest, it is likely to respond with coercion in order to reduce the
threat posed by such dissent.
Reading the ‘dynamics of contention’ literature, one is left wondering if it provides a mere
description of processes and misses out for the most part on a causal account of the phenomena
described. My own sense is that these works fail to explain why a particular protest happened at
a particular time or why a particular movement took the form it did. Do we take away anything
from this literature besides mere description and typologising? It is necessary to take stock of the
mechanisms of contentious politics to understand their operation and outcomes, but is this
exercise useful without a corresponding correlational analysis? Do efforts to elaborate typologies
of mechanisms and processes generate intellectual payoffs that justify the effort? Is attention to
social processes and interactions enough or is it necessary to employ this process-oriented
thinking to look toward the future of contention?