How Social Movements (Sometimes) Matter. David S. Meyer
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beyond the movement’s network.
Protest movements are organized. Although events, a crystallized combination of tactics, constituencies, and claims, often include elements of spontaneity, like the bystanders who decided to join the patriots clambering on the tea ships, there is always an element of planning underneath. Organizers try to engage supporters, pick places, promote particular grievances and alternatives, and try to figure out what happens next. The continuing relationship among people committed to a particular vision of social change can broadly be thought of as an organization.
Here too, there is an enormous range of organizational forms and commitments. A small group that meets regularly in a church basement or around a kitchen table, where no one is paid, and participants get to know each other very well, can be the basis of an ongoing campaign for massive political change. At the other end of the organizational spectrum, social movements are often staged by well-established and well-resourced groups whose efforts span long periods of time and decades of engagement. Such organizations develop complicated bureaucratic structures for governance, and division of labor to execute plans. Some organizations develop in the service of one narrow objective, planning a particular protest or demonstration; they start with no commitment beyond the event. Others develop with longer-term goals that contain a range of events, activities, and even services (Blee 2012; Kretschmer 2019; Levy and Murphy 2006). All groups must manage the struggle of supporting their efforts, but those with a shorter-term, more limited focus, can often depend upon volunteer labor and low overheads. A group dependent upon volunteer efforts will have a difficult time sustaining presence over an extended campaign, because most people have to balance commitments beyond politics.
In contrast, organizations with broader or much longer-term objectives must develop systems to ensure that they have the money and expertise to continue. They need to rent offices, buy computers, maintain telephone lines and websites, and pay staff. Many different sources can provide that support, but each comes with different obligations and constraints. A group dependent upon funding from the government, for example, must follow the rules and restrictions of that government. A group dependent upon a few wealthy funders can’t risk offending or alienating those supporters, and can be subject to the whims of the funders. A group dependent upon large numbers of small donors must invest a great deal of time in soliciting that money, and is vulnerable to changes in the political environment.
Even as maintaining a stable presence in politics is costly, it also comes with some advantages. Professionals engaged in movement work may be reasonably well-paid and enjoy routine access to media or authorities. They can develop expertise in policy or politics, and they can pay close attention to events and policies, and act opportunistically (Staggenborg 1988). And a group that knows its efforts will be sustained can think about longer-term efforts. Organizations plan, and well-funded, stable, and professionalized groups should be able to plan better.
Strategy is a coherent plan of claims and tactics targeted at particular audiences that is intended to promote social change (Maney et al. 2012). Sometimes plans for social change are well-developed and articulated, based in informed understanding of the workings of government. At the same time, everyone engaged in a piece of the effort is unlikely to be aware of some master plan, or even a longer-term plan altogether. Sometimes, participants just know that they have to do something to express their own concerns, trusting that well-intentioned and morally grounded action will somehow contribute to the change they seek to promote. At the same time, some organizers will have a vision of how social change takes place, and the influence of a set of actions they can coordinate can trigger further action. Strategy involves choices about which grievances to emphasize, who to focus on recruiting, and what to have adherents do. Importantly, however, purposeful strategists operate in a larger universe they can’t control, with both supporters and opponents making their own initiatives.
Challenging and Entering Political Institutions
Social movements are not unitary actors. Because a movement contains a diversity of organizations and individuals, often including people with at least one foot in governance or mainstream politics, the politics of coordination and cooperation within a movement is critical to its development and its ultimate impact. Allied organizations argue about which issues are most pressing or promising, and how to address them most effectively. They argue about which political leaders to trust, and which ones to target. They argue about who will represent their efforts and who will be kept off the podium. And they argue about how to get things done. All of this matters.
Perhaps more significantly, movement activists are not the only ones who decide what they want, who their leaders are, and what constitutes acceptable progress. All of these issues are contested in public, with authorities, media, and supporters playing a role in advantaging some ideas and people at the expense of others. To take an example, while the organizers of a rally can decide who will appear on their speakers’ roster and when, outside coverage of those speeches need not follow the organizers’ preferences. Similarly, when social movements advance broad calls for social change, media outlets choose which to cover most extensively and which to ignore.
In democratic states, media generally follow public attention, and are likely to give the most attention to the most dramatic events, that is, actions that involve conflict and/or celebrities and/or theatricality (Rohlinger 2015, 2019). Organizers compete with the range of other events in life, as well as other contingents of activists, to capture the attention of mainstream media. Mainstream media are also likely to follow public interest in identifying spokespeople, which means gravitating toward celebrity, novelty, and clarity. Organizers who are media savvy know how to promote themselves and their cause, how to return inquiries quickly, and how to provide media outlets with the sort of quotes or appearances that will draw audiences. Thus, a movement that, like most, contains multiple factions, may see itself portrayed as offering a more radical or more modest set of claims than most at the grassroots support. Actually, media outlets face a clear choice: they can promote and cover radical or outlandish aspects of a social movement – and every movement has some – thus contributing to discrediting or marginalizing that movement. Alternatively, they can promote the most mainstream and least contentious elements of a movement, reducing the claims of those in the streets to those which are not too threatening. The nuclear freeze campaign, for example, a movement for nuclear disarmament and a reconfiguration of foreign policy, started in the 1970s and gained little political traction. In the early 1980s, however, it won widespread public support as politicians redefined it as a return to a superpower arms control process that accepted large standing nuclear arsenals as a reality of modern life (Meyer 1990).
Government officials also make choices about which people and proposals to legitimate by discussion and which to marginalize through neglect or ridicule. Like media, they face similar choices in emphasizing the outlandishness of a particular movement, or its utter reasonability and pragmatism. Those officials can also choose to recognize some individuals as spokespersons for a movement, ignoring others. There is an inherent difficulty in finding spokespeople who have sufficient credibility with the grassroots to still political protest, yet are willing to negotiate moderate policy reforms with authorities. For example, the minority white government in Rhodesia, facing domestic pressure, a guerrilla war, and international sanctions, sought to respond by designating Black leaders of moderate groups that it could negotiate with. The eventual negotiated agreement, however, did nothing to still either the guerrilla war launched by other Black leaders or even international pressure. The attractive negotiating partners couldn’t deliver the peace the white government wanted. Eventually, the government had to deal with the opponents who commanded armies (Matthews 1990).
In much of the world, activists launch effective movements without guerrilla armies, but the same sorts of dilemmas remain for authorities. Seeking to maintain a governing majority and reduce disruptive protest, they want to find opposition leaders who aren’t too oppositional, yet retain sufficient credibility with activists to be able to reduce disruptive protest. At the same time, movements at the grassroots struggle to hold their own leadership accountable to the ideas that motivated them in the first place.
Taken together, the elements of a movement suggest a stylized process through which a movement