Collaborative Research: The Dynamics of Collective Protest in the U.S., 1960-1980

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This is a study of collective protest in the United States during the period 1960-1980, with special emphasis on the Environmental Movement, the Women's Movement, and the Peace Movement. These years cover the peak and decline of the protest cycle of the 1960s and 1970s. Analysis will systematically test hypotheses derived from social movement theories, particularly those emphasizing the centrality of political opportunity, using longitudinal data generated from newspaper reports of protest events. In order to test political opportunity theory, protest event data must be placed in the context of ongoing changes, not only in dimensions of political opportunity, but also a host of other theoretically relevant "covariates." These covariates include changes in: public opinion, media attention, the structural "strain" or "demand" for protest activity, and the organizational strength of the movements themselves. Thus, besides assembling data on U.S. protest events from newspaper reports, this project will gather corresponding time-series data on each of these covariates. The project seeks to answer two fundamental research questions. First, net of other important covariates, do changing features of the institutional political environment --shifting political opportunities -- predict the emergence and subsequent development of protest activity in each of these three issue areas? Second, is protest activity positively related to issue-specific institutional outcomes in the U.S. during this period? If there is a positive relationship between protest and outcomes, the research will then examine the features of protest events (such as size or violence) and the mediating mechanisms (such as public opinion change or electoral shifts) that help explain the association. The research will make use of event-history analysis, a technique which is uniquely well suited to the study of changing social and structural conditions. This research examines the rise of the modern Environmentalist Movem ent in the United States, in comparison with two other movements of its period and in the context of formal theories of movement success. It will help us understand whether such movements really are the prime source of socio-cultural transformation and the degree to which they merely exploit political opportunities that exist for other reasons. Such knowledge is essential for a vigorous social science of global change.