1.2.1). This has enabled us to differentiate social movements from a number of other related processes and phenomena. These include collective actions oriented to non‐conflictual goals, e.g. in the field of charity work (section 1.2.2); the differences between movements and coalitions, mobilizing on specific issues or events (section 1.2.3); the relationship between political organizations such as parties and traditional interest groups and social movement processes (section 1.2.4); and the role of protest in contemporary movements (section 1.2.5).
As we have repeatedly argued, the questions we have identified are neither restricted to nor specific of social movement analysis, and can be of interest to a much broader spectrum of social and political analysts. At the same time, they are surely central to social movement research as it has developed since the 1960s, hence our decision to organize the rest of the book around such questions. We start with a discussion of the structural bases of contemporary movements (Chapter 2). By this we refer, on the one hand, to the mechanisms by which new social groups and new interests take shape, while other groups and interests which previously held center stage see their relevance declining; and on the other, to the impact that structural changes such as first the growth and then the contraction of public welfare, and the expansion of higher education, have on forms of political participation and, in particular, on noninstitutional participation. The impact of globalization processes is particularly relevant to our discussion.
There follow two chapters dedicated to symbolic production. Chapter 3 shows how cultural elaboration facilitates the definition of social problems as the product of asymmetries of power and conflicts of interest, and the identification of their causes in social and political factors, which are subject to human intervention. In chapter 4, we show how the creation and reinforcement of symbols also represents the base for the development of feelings of identity and solidarity, without which collective action cannot take place.
A third important level of analysis consists of the organizational factors which allow both the production of meaning and the mobilization of resources necessary for action. We take into consideration both informal networking and the more structured component of the organizational dimension. Chapter 5 deals in particular with the analysis of individual participation. We look at the mechanisms behind individual decisions to become engaged in collective action and to sustain their commitment over time, but we also look at how individuals create, through their participation, several opportunities for the development of networks that keep social movements and oppositional milieus together. Chapter 6 concentrates on certain properties of movement organizations, discussing the factors – internal and external – which influence the adoption of certain organizational models, and the consequences that follow for mobilization. It draws in particular our attention to the difference between “organization” and more general principles of “organizing,” meaning by that the broader mechanisms through which social actors coordinate their behavior.
The fourth crucial dimension is the interaction between movements and the political system. Movements represent innovative, sometimes radical, elements both in the way in which the political system works, and in its very structure. The characteristics of the political system offer or deny essential opportunities for the development of collective action. It is, furthermore, in reference principally, if not exclusively, to the political system that it becomes possible to value the impact of protest movements and their consequences in the medium term. In Chapter 7, we reconstruct some of the properties of protest cycles which have marked the history of recent decades, and the repertoires of collective action that were formed within these. In Chapter 8, we present certain aspects of the relationship between the configurations of political opportunities and the development of mobilization. In Chapter 9 we discuss, finally, the problem of the effects of movements. While the center of our analysis is represented by political change, we try, however, to pay attention also to the impact of movements on the social and cultural spheres.
CHAPTER 2 Social Changes and Social Movements
The austerity policies implemented during the financial crisis, which from the United States spread to Europe around 2008, have triggered an intense wave of protest, against cuts in public expenditures that added up to privatization of public services and the deregulation of financial and labor markets. Intensifying especially in 2011 in the so called ‘Occupy movement’, contention has diffused globally in the following years, involving also countries which, as Brazil or Turkey, had been considered on the winning side of neoliberal developments (della Porta 2015a, 2017a).
Beginning with Iceland in 2008, and then spreading to Egypt, Tunisia, Spain, Greece, and the United States, among others, protests targeted the corruption of the political class, seen in both bribes in a concrete sense, and in the privileges granted to lobbies and collusion of interests between public institutions and economic (often financial) powers. In the years to follow, most recently in Perù, Brazil, Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey, France, citizens took the street against what they perceived as a corruption of democracy, defined as source of inequality and people’s suffering.
Data collected on the social background of those who protested do not unequivocally confirm either the thesis of the mobilization of a new precariat, or that of a middle‐class movement. In all protests, a broad range of social backgrounds is represented, from students, to precarious workers, manual and non‐manual dependent workers, petty bourgeoisie and professionals. Over‐proportionally young in terms of generation, the protests also see the participation of other age cohorts whose high educational levels do not correspond to winning positions in the labor market. As Goran Therborn (2014, p. 16) noted, in different combinations, the critique to neoliberalism came from pre‐capitalist populations (as indigenous people), extra‐capitalist “wretched of the earth” (as casual laborers, landless peasants and street vendors), but also workers and emerging middle‐class layers. In sum, an alliance needed to develop between pre‐capitalist populations, fighting to retain their territory and means of subsistence; surplus masses, excluded from formal employment in the circuits of capitalist production; exploited manufacturing workers across rustbelt and sunbelt zones; new and old middle classes, increasingly encumbered with debt payments to the financial corporations – these constitute the potential social bases for contemporary critiques of the ruling capitalist order.
Anti‐austerity protests developed indeed during the Great Recession. Beginning in the 1980s, the core capitalist states experienced a turn toward more free market in so‐called neoliberal capitalism and then its crisis. First, the United States and Great Britain, led respectively by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, moved toward cuts in the welfare state as justified by an ideology of the free market. As increasing inequalities and reduction of public intervention risked depressing the demand for goods, low interest rates were used, in a sort of private Keynesianism, to support demand – ultimately fueling the 2008 financial crisis. In fact, in that year, the failure of Lehman Brothers produced such a shock that governments decided to come to the rescue, with increasing government debt. Given economic decline in the United States and United Kingdom, coordinated market economies like the EU and Japan – where firms rely more on non‐market relations to manage their activities – seemed to demonstrate equal or even superior competitiveness as compared to the liberal market economy, which
