Lecture outline for Week 4. Social Movements When do social movements around

Lecture outline for Week 4.

Social Movements

When do social movements around a social problem emerge? What is a social movement? An organized effort to change laws, policies, or practices by people who do not have the power to effect change through conventional channels.

2. Although we tend to think of social movements as sudden and spontaneous, they rarely are. There are usually groups of people operating quietly to identify political opportunities for protest to have an impact.

African American activists had long fought against:

The Jim Crow laws that segregated transportation, workplaces, restaurants, theaters and other areas of public life.

The voting laws and policies that prevented African Americans from electing black candidates.

Systematic discrimination against African Americans in jobs.

Systematic violence against African Americans that made it dangerous to challenge white power.

3. But a mass movement only emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s. Why?

Three reasons:

Activists took advantage of new political openings or opportunities that suggested that national policymakers might be receptive to protest.

Activists drew on preexisting mobilizing structures to get people to participate.

Activists framed protest in a way that made it important and urgent.

4. Two political opportunities:

African Americans moved from the South to Northern cities, seeking job opportunities.

The United States was competing with the Soviet Union for the allegiance of nations in Africa and Asia.

5. Pressure on American government led to some victories:

1948: President Harry S Truman passes an executive order desegregating the military

1955: After a series of rulings progressively desegregating post-secondary education, the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board rules that segregated education is unconstitutional.

1957: Congress passes legislation intended to protect African Americans’ right to vote.

6. But the victories were also met with backlash:

In Little Rock, Arkansas, black students were met with jeering mobs when they tried to integrate the local high school.

White Citizens’ Councils and the Ku Klux Klan stepped up intimidation and violence. By 1958, the NAACP had lost 48,000 members and 246 branches.

Registrars in the South refused to register African Americans to vote.

7. Movement leaders had to force the federal government to intervene to protect African Americans’ rights to vote and to attend segregated schools, restaurants, bus stations, swimming pools, theaters, etc. To do that, they had to convince people to confront white power nonviolently. The strategy was one of nonviolent resistance using direct action. But how to get people to participate in the movement?

8. Mancur Olson described the “free rider dilemma” facing all social movements: Since you will benefit if the movement wins, whether or not you participate, it is more rational to “free ride” on the efforts of others than to participate yourself. But leaders need people to participate. What can they do?

Offer selective incentives.

Offer solidary incentives.

9. Many of the leaders of the direct action phase of the civil rights movement were ministers. Why? Because churches could offer solidary incentives to participate. People would participate in the movement because they owed it to congregation members, their ministers, and to God.

Movement leaders were able to draw on mobilizing structures within churches to persuade people to participate in dangerous activism.

10. Student sit-ins in 1960. Black colleges and universities were another preexisting mobilizing structure.

11. Movement leaders had to convince Northern whites to support the movement. They had to frame the oppression of African Americans as a national social problem. They decided that the movement was about civil rights, NOT power, and NOT economic justice. Were there costs to that decision?

12. Can you use the political process theory of social movements to account for the emergence of the Dreamers?

Political opportunities

Mobilizing structures

Persuasive frames

Lessons of social movements for studying social problems:

People may have been fighting against the social problem long before a mass movement emerges. Activists are always looking for the political opportunities that indicate policymakers’ likely receptiveness to protest.

Even if people are convinced that the movement’s success will benefit them, they have good reason not to participate. Activists can draw on or create mobilizing structures to provide people with solidary incentives to participate.

Activists must frame their demands in a way that is persuasive. But framing always comes with trade-offs.

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