Extant research on social movements has highlighted activists' discursive tactics to challenge the state, yet little analytical attention focuses on elite efforts to dominate the discourse arena through the deployment of oppositional frames. This paper analyzes elite oppositional framing surrounding the placement of a highway bypass in the Czech…

Research on the consequences of social movements typically aims to identify determinants of success or to draw attention to ways that social movements are able to secure new benefits for constituents by gaining concessions from political authorities. Yet social movements, even those that are ultimately defeated, may have an enduring impact on the…

Using terms like free spaces and havens, conventional wisdom views social ties by subordinate groups to dominant group members as hindering protest participation. In contrast, we draw on ethnic resiliency and social capital perspectives and argue that there are mobilization benefits to having dominant group members as friends. We offer a unique…

This study builds on political mediation and movement infrastructure models to highlight contingent and synergistic ways in which social movements may impinge upon the U.S. national policy-making process. Analyses employ a variety of datasets to examine the role of environmental movement organizational capacity, protest and institutional activity…

Using a unique dataset on the geographic distribution of reported protest events from local sources, the study explains the variation in community-level mobilization in response to neoliberal reforms in two countries in the global periphery. Building on insights from macro, cross-national studies of protests related to market reforms, this article…

Polish farmers became politically contentious after democratization in 1989, despite their minimal involvement in the Solidarity movement. I test the effectiveness of social movement theories in explaining this phenomenon by examining frequency and intensity of protest from 1980-1995. I find that grievance models have little explanatory power,…

Why do some social movement leaders work harder than others? And, how does gender affect the patterns we uncover? Utilizing historical case study evidence of local chapters in the emerging movement opposing drinking and driving we are able to develop and test theoretical expectations about predictors of weekly effort among MADD and RID leaders.…

Research regarding the impact of repression on social movements has yielded conflicting findings; some argue that repression decreases the total quantity of protest events while others argue that it motivates protest. To move beyond this impasse, various scholars have suggested exploring how repression influences the quality of social movements.…

This research examines the influence of types of protest activities, Congressional hearings and political characteristics on environmental legislation enacted from 1961-1990. We find that rates of environmental protest rise with increases in the amount of previous institutional activities, but extra-institutional activities do not raise the…

Despite great interest in the role of social networks as channels of political mobilization, few studies have examined which types of social networks work more effectively in recruiting political activists. Using the Citizen Participation Study data, this study shows that contrary to the conventional wisdom in the literature, there is little…

Indonesia's Islamic revival has coincided with the growing involvement of women in civil society. Muslim women's organizations are playing an important role in how the Indonesian nation-state is being re-imagined for the 21st century. Muslim women's groups are incubators for women's diverse political activism. The increasing role of Islam in the…

We use survey data from all accepted applicants to Teach for America 1993-98 to assess the longer-term effect of youth service on participants' current civic attitudes and behaviors. While TFA "graduates" score higher than the two comparison groups--"drop-outs" and "non-matriculants"--on a broad range of attitudinal items measuring civic…

This study tackles the question to what extent the composition of protest events is determined by the stance of governments. Established contextual theories do not formulate propositions on how context affects individual protesters. The article engages in empirically testing whether the macro-context affects the internal diversity of the crowds…

During the late 1990s, college students across the United States mobilized around labor issues. Our research explores whether this explosion of student protest activity was generated, in part, by concerted efforts of the AFL-CIO through its Union Summer college student internship program. A statistical analysis of factors influencing the location…

Domestic violence continues to be a serious problem for women in the United States. As a result, the battered women's movement has been tireless in campaigning for greater awareness of the issue, tougher penalties against offenders, and public vigilance against potential batterers, including fathers from dissolving families. In reaction to this…