they have the power to bring about change and they must blame the system for the problem. Looking at structural opportunities without considering the cognitive processes that intervene between structure and action can be very misleading. It is important, therefore, to analyze activists’ understandings of available opportunities, the lenses through which they view potential opportunities for their movements (Gamson and Meyer 1996). Perceptions of state response may be particularly influenced, for instance, by its more dramatic manifestations, such as repression, causing the less visible responses, such as negotiation, to be overlooked.
The political process approach has also been criticized externally for its tendency to adopt a kind of “political reductionism” (Melucci 1987, 1989). In effect, its proponents have paid little attention to the fact that many contemporary movements (of youth, women, homosexuals or minority ethnic groups) have developed within a political context and in a climate of cultural innovation at the same time (Melucci 1996; Rupp and Taylor 1987). Lastly – as we have already noted when introducing resource mobilization theories – rationalist approaches to the study of collective action have tended to neglect the structural origins of protest. Other scholars, often associated with the new movements approach, have long pointed at this limit, by raising attention to the cultural dimension, while more recently Marxist approaches have returned upon the relevance of the interaction between the state and the market within the evolution of capitalism (Barker et al. 2014; della Porta 2015a). Within this perspective, in a moment in which movements tend to proliferate even with a closing down of political opportunities, attention went to the role of socioeconomic threats as triggers for collective action (ibid.).
Faced with some relevant transformations in the two main sources of opportunities for movements – the nation‐state and the political parties – research developed in two main directions. On the one hand, and especially in Europe, attention focused on the role played by movements, not just within the political system, but also within the public sphere. In this direction, the discursive opportunities – i.e., the presence of dominant public discourses on certain controversial issues, which are likely to affect movements’ chances of success – have been stressed (Koopmans and Statham 1999). Moreover, more and more attention has been paid to transnational opportunities, or, better said, to a multilevel opportunity structure for movements (della Porta and Tarrow 2005). The development of the European Union as an arena for movement demands has been discussed more in depth (della Porta and Caiani 2009). Considering movements as part and parcel of the political system, an increasing number of studies has also focused on their effects, especially in terms of policy process and policy decisions (Bosi, Giugni, and Uba 2015). What is more, while social movements had been traditionally considered as ‘strangers at the gate’ of the political system (Tarrow 2012), in the turmoil of the Great Regression, social movements have been very effective in penetrating electoral politics through referendums from below as well as the proliferation of movements’ parties (della Porta, O’Connor et al. 2017; della Porta, Fernandez et al. 2017).
1.1.5 Are These Questions Specific to Social Movement Analysis?
In this book we shall address these different questions: the social determinants of protest (chapter 2), the role of cultural and symbolic elements (chapters 3–4), the organizational dynamics (chapters 5–6), and the political context for and effects of movements (chapters 7–9). But, before doing that, we still have to discuss whether the questions – and the responses – identified above are peculiar to social movement research. In many cases, these questions address not just social movements but collective action more in general. Collective action broadly refers to individuals, sharing resources in pursuit of collective goods – i.e., goods that cannot be privatized and subtracted to any of the members of the collectivity on behalf of which collective action has taken place. Such goods may be produced within movements, but also in many contexts that normally are not associated with movements. In our notion, the idea of ‘collective goods’ comprises both public goods à la Olson and club goods. For Samuelson (1954), the key characteristics of public goods are non‐excludability, and nonrivalrous consumption (i.e., no scarcity once the good is produced). A club good is nonexcludable for club members but excludable for outsiders, possibly (but not necessarily) non‐rivalrous for those with access (Buchanan 1965).
For example, political parties also face the problem of mobilizing their members and providing them with incentives to join and somehow support the organization – if anything through the payment of membership fees; so do interest groups only minding the sectoral – often, very parochial – interests of their specific reference groups (Jordan and Maloney 1997; Knoke 1990). Likewise, even political parties or narrow interest groups focus face the problem of adapting their strategies and tactics to changing environments, as the context in which they operate may become more or less favorable, such as through changes in the attitudes of power holders toward specific parties or interest groups’ demands, changes in legal opportunities for interest representation, or changes in the cultural models with which ordinary people make sense of their political and social world (Panebianco 1988). From a different angle, many voluntary organizations do not identify any social or political opponent to protest against, and their strategies focus entirely on service delivery rather than advocacy, political representation, or challenges to dominant norms or lifestyles. Even these organizations, however, still face problems of attracting and keeping members, securing the resources necessary to promote action, elaborate the cultural models necessary to pursue goals along the desired lines, and framing their issues in order to make them as attractive as possible to the widest audience as possible (Wilson 2000).
As it happens, analyses of social movements and analyses of collective action at large are inextricably linked. Let us say that the experience of social movements reflects phenomena with more than passing analogies to other instance or political or cultural collective action, taking place within political parties, interest groups, or religious sects. Therefore, when we analyze social movements, we deal with social processes that may also be of interest to researchers who do not define themselves at all as social movement analysts. Accordingly, we feel that a lot of what is presented here may be of interest to a much broader audience.
Recently, there have been several attempts to synthesize scholarship on social movements with the aim of linking it to broader theoretical and/or empirical concerns. Some of these attempts have aimed at integrating social movement theory with general sociological frameworks.
A most ambitious development by social movement scholars, openly criticizing the insularity of the social movements studies community, and also drawing heavily on non‐Western materials, has been the Dynamics of Contention (DOC) program (McAdam et al. 2001). The main suggestion coming from this approach has been the possibility to combine the knowledge developed in the fields of social movements with those elaborated on revolutions, democratization, and ethnic conflicts, singling out a field of contentious politics, defined as “episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claim and their objects when (a) at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the claim and (b) the claims would, if realized, affect the interest of at least one of the claimants” (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001, p. 5). As Sidney Tarrow (2015, p. 90) summarized, the contentious politics approach focused on episodes of contention, rather than on individual social movements, looking at the relations of different actors within complex political processes. Advocating a dynamic rather than static use of concepts, the scholars involved in this project have tried to single out general mechanisms of contention, defined as “delimited changes that alter relations among specified sets of elements in identical or closely similar ways over a variety of situations” (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001, pp. 24–25). While criticized for the uncertain
