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Collaborative resource management institutions are growing in popularity in the U.S. While, a number of scholars have examined the emergence of local institutional arrangements for managing natural resources, such as watershed management partnerships, less attention has been paid to large-scale and complex resource settings. To advance our understanding of these institutional arrangements and to contribute to theories of collective action and policy change, this paper compares data on four regional governance institutions in the United States: the Northwest Power and Conservation Council?s Fish and Wildlife Program, the Chesapeake Bay Program, the CALFED Bay-Delta Program, and the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. Our findings speak to the importance of the role of science and information in defining the "problem-shed", which can serve as a key trigger for the emergence of collaboration in large-scale resource settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In 1989, former president Ronald Reagan famously predicted ?the Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip.? Nearly fifteen years later, it appears that Reagan’s sanguine assessment of the link between recent advances in information technology and democratization failed to take into account the ability of authoritarian states to adapt and hone their repressive capacities. At the same time, the widespread and growing use of the internet in contemporary China has already given rise to new forms of collective protest, political subversion and popular dissent. This paper examines the impact of information technology on both popular contention and state repression during the reform era, including the emergent phenomena of cyberdissidence, hactivism and ?electronic modes of contention,? in the PRC over the past decade. Drawing upon a series of recent cases involving quasi-traditional cybersects, including several qigong groups as well as other groups pressing for greater degrees of ethno-religious and political autonomy in China today, this study concludes that while the worldwide web has not dramatically undermined the power of the reform era state, it has certainly ushered in the formation of new transnational forms of protest that rely upon nodes and networks as tools for mobilizing dissent. The activities of mainland Chinese authorities and dissidents?operating both within and beyond state borders?represent an important case study of the power of global processes and technologies to transform and adjust existing patterns of popular dissent and state control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper starts from the position that the ?Transatlantic Crisis? of the early 2000s has also on the face of it been a crisis for EU collective action in external policy: instead of a ?Europe that can say no? in the light of US challenges, there appears to have been a failure to produce any consensus on policy. Most obviously, the chaos of EU Member State responses to the approach and conduct of the Iraq war raised questions about the continuing feasibility of EU collective action in such episodes, throwing doubt for some on the future development of ?European foreign policy?. But this turbulent episode must be placed within the broader context of developments in EU external collective action and EU-US relations, and can usefully be analysed through concepts of collective action theory. The paper pursues such an analysis, first by reviewing the implications of a ?Europe that can say no? to the US, next by briefly summarising the narratives provided by other approaches, and then by setting out relevant collective action concepts. It then argues that collective action possibilities and processes in EU external policy lie on a spectrum delineated by a number of key factors and that therefore analysis and evaluation should take account of the unevenness and variation between sectors of policy. In this light, the ?EU crisis? of the early 2000s becomes part of a much broader picture in which the EU has scored notable successes as well as policy failures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the law turn in American labor studies, which argues that a hegemonic judiciary now defines the boundaries of collective action in the United States. I argue that this ignores the impact of military suppression on collective action, as well as other institutional actors. I propose an alternative model that includes institutional facotrs (the presidency, party alliances, administrative capacities, and Congress), state interests (national defense and economic recovery), and societal pressures (labor insurgency and employer resistance). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical research on collective action must overcome two major obstacles: conceptual inconsistency and the scarcity of comparable data. The key factors expected to affect collective action and the outcomes of collective action are inconsistently conceptualized and measured. Inconsistent terminology and measurements may obscure consistent patterns or suggest patterns where none exist. Case studies can help clarify conceptual issues. Because case study authors tend to identify different variables to study and use divergent conceptualizations of key variable, findings from case studies are rarely directly comparable. We evaluate the relative merits of two strategies for obtaining larger sets of comparable data: meta-analyses based on existing case studies and large-N databases based on new field work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protest outcomes in rural China are typically an outgrowth of interaction between activists, sympathetic elites, targets and the wider public. Popular agitation first alerts concerned officials to poor policy implementation and may prompt them to take corrective steps. As a result of participating in contention certain activists feel empowered and become more likely to take part in future challenges, while others feel disillusioned and lapse into passivity. In the course of observing collective action, some onlookers are sensitized to protester?s concerns and public opinion is affected. Without popular action, better implementation, biographical change, and effects on the public would not emerge, but nor would they without involvement from above. Studying the impact of protest in rural China thus sheds light on two issues that have long troubled students of contentious politics: 1) how to get a grip on indirect, mediated consequences, and 2) how to think about causality when change is a result both of popular action and openings provided by sympathetic elites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutionalists have both argued that institutions are endogenous, yet also analyzed Brazil?s electoral institutions, including open-list PR, as exogenous variables that inhibit national party unity to the point of precluding national party reputations. In an analysis of the two most recent periods of democracy in Brazil (1945-64, 1989-present), the paper demonstrates that in the current period, party leaders are now acting to mitigate the incentives of open-list PR by distributing valuable perks based on the degree to which rank and file vote with the party leadership. Electoral institutions are constant across the two periods, yet party leaders are now acting to promote party reputations, while they failed to do so in the earlier period. The paper resolves this paradox by developing a general theory of electoral competition based on two dimensions: whether voters choose direct (clientelistic) or indirect (programmatic/personal) exchanges with politicians, and whether electoral institutions are party or candidate-centered. The theory yields a four-fold typology of electoral incentives with distinct and observable implications for internal party delegation and behavior. The theory endogenizes electoral institutions to a more general theory of electoral competition, and provides an electorally-based explanation for why politicians chose unmitigated open-list PR in the earlier period, but now opt to modify its anti-party incentives in the current period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agency has been central to modern conceptions of politics but it is a complicated and contested idea that seems to have fallen into both theoretical and historical crisis. I explore the underlying ideas that have grounded it as well as some recent historical and theoretical challenges. I respond by advocating an ontological agnosticism regarding who or what exercises agency and suggest a spectrum of agentic capacities instead. Commending a phenomenological approach, I then suggest that agentic capacities emerge and interact across this spectrum. At one pole I envisage pre-personal, corporeal processes and at the other, a transpersonal, intersubjective interworld that requires a novel social ontology. I locate individual or collective agents in the middle of the spectrum where they emerge as contingent singularities. My aim here is to retain agency as a necessary ingredient of politics while eliminating the Cartesian presuppositions that have, for example, rendered the agency-structure debate irresolvable and supported a subjectivist account of agents that is no longer tenable. I show how all three dimensions of the spectrum have political significance and discuss examples to illustrate this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Bridging Social Capital and An Investment Theory of Collective Action: Evidence from The Concord Project Barbara J. Nelson Linda Kaboolian Kathryn A. Carver The question we posed in our research was how do cross-community organizations with their potential to generate bridging social capital form? More specifically, how do concord organizations start against the odds of daily conflict among racial, ethnic, and religious groups defined by too much particularistic history and too little common future? Concord organizations bring together people with fundamentally opposing views or identities for the purpose of promoting civil society while recognizing group differences. After investigating over 100 concord organizations in the US, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Palestinian and Israeli groups working in the US, our answer is that concord organizations form because potential collective actors see their actions as worthy long-term investments rather than short-term high prices. They are primarily investors rather than consumers. Each person who decides to work to create a concord organization calculates a net pro-social interest rate. This return on investment includes consideration of the danger, the pleasures, the obstacles, the immediate costs, the opportunity costs, and the benefits of action. In particular, investors are attentive to the opportunity costs of the status quo, that is, of not acting, which they considered to have a high and enduring price. Collective action to create concord organizations is an example of thick rationality, the kind of considerations made by people embedded in social systems with multiple personal, organizational, and communal values. Becoming an investor, especially with people who belong to disfavored groups, requires a special micromobilizing frame?a balancing frame. This frame balances an overarching shared value with the enduring opposing values of participants. Because concord organizations never solve the conflicts of values they embody, they are always to some extent in formation mode. Our research determined the ten design principles and necessary practices that allow a balancing frame to endure. Without adherence to principles and practices, antagonistic group values overwhelm shared values, and the organization fails to form or to continue to function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many argue that international pressures have severely restricted policy options and caught states in a ?race to the bottom?, forcing them to respond similarly to globalization. A closer examination of policy-making in Senegal, however, makes it clear that the constellation of domestic political pressures and social/economic forces plays a large role in how the state responds to international trade liberalization. These domestic factors determine how the Senegalese population, in particular its poor population, lives the realities of an international trade hierarchy in which they generally figure quite low. This paper examines how policy is made by the Senegalese government with regards to the imports of powdered milk and frozen poultry parts. It emphasizes the differences between formal and informal trade and official and unofficial responses. It also addresses the organizational and political capital of diffferent domestic actors to address why the state responds in certain ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Resource Mobilization perspective on social movements often depicts an oversimplified relationship between resources and collective action and has placed little emphasis on systematically developing theories of how that relationship works. Acknowledging that the costs of collective action and the values of resources vary significantly, this study examines the effects of organizational resources on rates of collective action vis-à-vis ecological models of the social movement sector. Recent research that assumes an ecological perspective suggests that tactical overlap between social movements influences rates of protest through processes of legitimacy and competition. However, this research does not simultaneously consider the role of resources and so cannot compare the relative strength of these two theories. Examining American social movement organizations of the 1960s and 70s and their tactical repertoires, I test resource mobilization and population ecology theories of protest rates using organizational-level data coded from the New York Times. Preliminary results suggest that effect of tactical overlap on rates of collective action is very weak when compared to that of organizational resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can poor neighborhoods mobilize, and if so how? This question is seldom posed in the literature on collective action and social movements. The attention in the collective action literature has always been on large scale, ?national? movements. Rarely has it focused upon mobilization at the city level, much less across neighborhoods. Likewise, the literature on urban inequality has rarely focused on how dimensions of poverty would affect a neighborhood?s ability to mobilize. Instead, it has focused on the detrimental effects of poverty on the individual. This project looks to combine these two literatures. I argue that though both literatures would argue that underclass neighborhoods would be unable to engage in collective, that instead there is variation in mobilization among underclass neighborhoods. To examine how poverty affects collective action, I examine Chicago from 1970-1990. Using the Chicago Tribune as a data source, I collect candidate events from newspaper articles. I depart from previous collective action research which has solely focused on protest, by also focusing on non-confrontational, or as I define them civic forms, of collective action. I combine the neighborhood event data with census data to examine the shifts in poverty and collective action at the neighborhood level overtime. I perform cross sectional regression analysis of the data and find that prior levels of action have a positive effect on mobilization, while inequality measures such as poverty and unemployment have no significant effect, in contrast to hypotheses of both the urban inequality and collective action/social movements literature [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work examines the dynamics of the relationship between state repression and collective popular action through time. The project focuses on how difference in magnitude and form of repression affect the incidence of different magnitudes and forms of collective actions, and how these relationships could be affected by time. In order to do so, a dynamic theoretical approach to the study of collective action and repression is proposed. Time and spatial decay functions and their effects on the relationship are explored, as well as short and long term effects of repression over violence. Event history analysis is used as a method to test the dynamic continuous-time models specified to allow for the time dependence of the hazard rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neo-institutionalists often take the organizational field as the unit of analysis, examining clusters of organizations that interact while engaged in a common venture (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). While the components of the structuration process that leads to field emergence have been well articulated, less research attends to the specific mechanisms through which the process takes place. I suggest that the concept of collective action frames (Snow et. al. 1986) from social movement theory is of use in understanding these processes. As an illustration, I offer the case of feminist bookstores in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political elites use deeply engrained beliefs regarding soldiers and citizenship to mobilize support for war and limit dissent. To analyze how the US peace movement has responded to this hegemony, we qualitatively and quantitatively analyze statements from up to 15 US peace movement organizations over three wars (the Gulf War, 9/11 and the War in Afghanistan, and the Iraq War). We find that PMOs altered their constructions of soldiering and citizenship in response to social history, elite counter-framing, shifts in the political and cultural climates, and to their organizational identities. Battling the mythology of being anti-soldier during the Vietnam era, PMOs have increasingly expressed support for soldiers while developing a discourse portraying pro-war elites as betraying soldiers. Mobilization late in a protest cycle, opening political opportunities and the public?s weariness of nationalism encouraged PMOs to challenge American identity during the Gulf War. In contrast, mobilization early in a protest cycle, rapid political closure and a hyper-patriotic, security conscious climate all encouraged PMOs to harness nationalism in the aftermath of 9/11. Promoting peace became the duty of American citizens. Splits within the UN and extensive transnational mobilization encouraged PMOs to strengthen international hegemony during the Iraq War. Our study highlights how the lessons of past contention combine with structural and culture changes to shape movement framing strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical sociologists have long studied the sociological importance of critical junctures in people?s lives, specifically with respect to the onset and diagnosis of chronic illness. The work of Mike Bury (1982: 1991) and others on ?biographical disruption? can be extended to explore the personal and phenomenological turbulence recounted by local, anti-toxics activists. Biographical disruption suggests that certain events have the potential to unseat taken-for-granted assumptions, breach explanatory mechanisms used to understand the world, and finally demand new routines as a result of changed resources and physical circumstances. By drawing from this rich literature and applying it to retrospective interview data of local anti-toxics activism, this project looks at the complex effects on self, family and community that activism and social organization in response to toxics can have. This paper contributes to the growing body of work on the subjective experience of collective action especially around toxics, as well as emerging work on the role of emotions and narrative in social movement scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing theories of social movement participation elaborate important mechanisms and processes but cannot reliably predict or account for participation or non-participation in movements, because they generally ignore the sociohistorical contexts of participation decisions. This paper sketches an alternative approach to studying participation in movements that examines how movement actors succeed or fail in their attempts to solve problems posed by specific contexts of mobilization. Toward that end, the paper compares participation in four union organizing campaigns that took place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the late 1990s, demonstrating that the kinds of general mechanisms and processes social movement theorists have elaborated cannot account for the divergent outcomes of these four cases. It is argued instead that participation outcomes in these four episodes of mobilization can only be understood by examining how the activists involved solved ? or failed to solve ? the problems posed by legacies of business unionism ? the specific sociohistorical context of these two pairs of mobilization attempts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perceptions of HIV/AIDS in the early 1980s, for those who were interested in it at all, were shaped predominately by scant scientific data. Community organizing initially followed the criteria established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), generating new organizational efforts for each new crisis area only after it was officially identified. Later, as the community groups gained experience and expertise, they began to define the contours of the problem themselves, and to export their definitions and priorities to the public health sector. The purpose of this paper is to examine the interorganizational conditions that allowed a community of political outsiders to define the agenda in a policy domain that required both community and state participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins by contrasting two images of American politics (or democratic politics more broadly): one in which there is a great deal of political activity, much of it successful in changing policy, and a second, associated with theories of collective action, that predicts there will be little political activity, most of it having no impact on policy. The paper asks four questions: (1) What are our theoretical expectations about how much political activity there is? (2) What are our theoretical expectations about its impact? (3) What do the data show about the actual incidence and impact of political activity? (4) What are the implications of our findings for the study of democratic politics? It turns out that there are good reasons for expecting there to be little political activity and to expect it to be ineffective. Available data show that, indeed, there is less political activity of a variety of types (including lobbying, making contributions to campaigns, and peaceful and violent protest activities) than people believe. It may be that political activity often has little effect on policy because there is so little activity to begin with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The causes of revolts have long been a contentious debate in social science. The more basic idea that there even can be identifiable causes generalised from historical accounts has long yielded malcontent. Goldstone (1991) presented a theory claiming to broadly predict revolt in the Early Modern world and demonstrated it empirically for peak instances of collective action. This paper rigorously tests Goldstone?s model of revolt with more detailed data across all instances in Early Modern France. The influence of taxation and signalling, demonstrated as important by other theorists, is also tested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every ten minutes over a nine-hour period, trained observers recorded the proportion of people engaged in one or more of 45 elementary forms of collective action within a gathering of a half million Promise Keepers on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. There were no recorded moments of mutually inclusive collective action; rather, in the data reported here, there was alternation and variation across time in the proportion participating in these forms of collective action. These data, in conjunction with an analysis of C-SPAN’s continuous videotape of the six-hour rally phase of the gathering, constitute an unprecedented empirical record of the dynamic and complex nature of phenomena to be explained, a standard against which to assess the relevance and utility of traditional and contemporary explanations for collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper proposed a modified threshold model contrasting with Granovetter?s prototypical one (1978) by arguing that in collective action individuals are informed and concerned of the moves of limited range of others -- their neighbors. A neighbor is defined as the directly connected partner of an actor on social networks. The question that follows is how individuals, with different thresholds, would be positioned on networks to maximize the bandwagon. A computational experiment is conducted and it is uncovered that bandwagon level will be high if the rule is followed to moderately sorting together individuals with different thresholds ? the principle of moderate heterogeneity. Some quantitative evidence displays how the principle is characterized. Brief discussion is also presented to show how it helps explain some empirical cases such as earlier time?s rise of Christianity in Roman Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: Durkheim and others argued that deviance paradoxically promotes group solidarity by uniting individuals in moral outrage and enforcement of shared norms. Maintenance of social boundaries binds the group together and encourages contribution to collective welfare. Durkheim?s reliance on ?social facts? as an explanatory tool, however, left the mechanisms behind this phenomena poorly specified. In contrast, rational choice models clearly specify mechanisms that induce actors to contribute to collective action, but assume opposition only hinders collective action and thus fail to address the Durkheimian possibility that opposition may help collective action by encouraging enforcement. Using a model of bounded rationality, I show support for Durkheim?s primary claim and explore its limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the impact of local initiative elections on a particular area of policy that is characterized by minority tyranny. Elected officials, sports commissions, economic elites and the media routinely endorse and pass legislation for public funding of sports stadia. The range of beneficiaries is narrow, has access to legislators, and is well-funded while the taxpayers are a dispersed majority. Yet the combination of the small scale of cities and the institutional tool of the referendum allows opponents to overcome the financial resources of the minority and problems of collective action. Original case studies of Minneapolis, St. Paul, and San Francisco sports stadia referenda constitute case study evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We know a considerable amount about the political activities of individual corporations in the US. However little, if any, systematic research on the lobbying and campaign financing activities of business groups has been done. Scholars have long held well-defined theoretical expectations about which groups are likely to be most active. Collective action theory is quite specific about the market structure that should facilitate the formation and endurance of these sorts of groups, but empirical work remains to be done. In this paper we analyze lobbying, PAC and soft-money contributions of business associations for the 1999-2000 election cycle. With support from the Joyce Foundation and the help of the Center for Responsive Politics we have data on all business associations and their levels of political activity. We will examine both economic and political explanations of associational activity. Are more concentrated industries more likely to generate politically active associations? What other industry characteristics influence a ssociation political activity? What influence do other groups in the interest group system have on association activity? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since being added to the Endangered Species Act by amendment in 1982, habitat conservation plans (HCPs) have become a controversial instrument for species preservation. Providing greater flexibility for landowners, HCPs allow a limited degree of habitat destruction or harm to listed species in exchange for other actions taken to mitigate those impacts. Besides providing regulatory flexibility, HCPs were promoted from the outset as a mechanism for large-scale, integrated habitat protection at an ecosystem-scale, something conservation biologists increasingly recommend to avoid species extinction. As specific plans encompassing multiple landowners, dozens of species, and millions of acres have emerged, some have expressed optimism about the ability of HCPs to play this integrated planning role, while others remain more pessimistic. This paper hypothesizes that collective action problems should significantly limit the number of integrated, multi-actor, large scale HCPs that will be organized voluntarily, and then asks under what conditions are plan applicants able to overcome these collective action barriers. The analysis begins with a quantitative summary of the Fish and Wildlife Service database of HCPs, confirming that large-scale, multi-species and multi-actor plans remain uncommon despite the growing popularity of HCPs overall. The paper then investigates two specific multi-actor HCPs and asks how each one at least partially solved the collective action problem. The answers are a mix of traditional and non-traditional solutions to collective action barriers, but in both cases rely on relatively uncommon factors that make a wider replication of this pattern seem unlikely for HCPs nationwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While particular occurrences of revolt behavior may vary widely in their specifics, they betray certain generalities that are only imperfectly described by extant explanations of such phenomena. I propose an agent-based model of citizenry and state that recovers such commonalities as the unexpectedness of revolution and its relative historical scarcity, while maintaining enough diversity in the underlying population so as to make the theory generally applicable. Using this model, I explore both the effect a wide variety of interpersonal network structures can have on the likelihood and the form of revolt, and the way in which revolution, and an oppressive government's attempt to stifle it, can alter the shape of society. My findings suggest that the exact structure of social networks matters substantially. In particular, violent reaction by the state to unrest is seen to have far more of an effect on revolt dynamics in a segmented, village-like society than in a more connected, modern one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigrants comprise growing populations in advanced democracies, and engage in a range of political activities. However, it is unknown whether the same mechanisms that mobilize native citizens into different types of collective action also hold for more recent immigrants. This paper compares mobilization into various forms of collective action between two distinct populations: immigrants versus native citizens of democracies. Using World Values Survey data, two models of collective action are tested for each group: the resource model (developed by Brady, Verba, and Schlozman, 1995), and the more recent blame attribution model (developed by Javeline, 2003). The results suggest that although both immigrants and citizens are mobilized by resources and blame attribution, the specific sets of resources and targets of blame systematically vary across groups. This results in substantially different patterns of collective action by immigrants compared to citizens, suggesting the need to refine existing models. Moreover, the evidence presents a variegated pattern of political participation stratified along the lines of socio-economic status, reflecting substantial differences between immigrants and citizens in access to the resources that foster democratic participatory values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an analysis on collective action problems in Russia. Analysis of collective goods in the realms of budget policy and export policy; Business organizations' activities and export regulation; Fragmentation of rights and responsibilities between administrative agencies; Effect of the use of multiple networking strategies in politics on the Russian economy.

Social capital is expected to help achieve superior outcomes over multiple issue-areas and different levels of societal aggregation, but is it the same social capital that operates in all of these different arenas? To what extent social capital is fungible across different levels and issue areas is explored here through an examination of literatures related to social capital and collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movements reflect the attempt of a challenging group within society to affect change and achieve goals in a variety of ways, some of which include protest, petition, violence, and pressure techniques outside traditional political channels. The social movement must not only motivate and mobilize a significant segment of society under a common cause or identity but also force or convince those in power to remedy the problem that drives the challenging group. This requires a strong understanding of political opportunity. In this paper, I explore the importance of opportunity and its relationship to common views of strategies used by social movements as discussed in the literature. Strategy reflects the attempts by a movement to circumvent established barriers in political institutions or in the social norms of the political community at large to achieve its objectives. In this context, opportunity creation is defined as strategic action taken by a social movement to reshape those norms and established power alignments by modifying institutional constraints to its own advantage. These constraints are not fixed; they are instead created and subject to constant change. I propose that social movements can effectively build opportunities for themselves by forming alliances within the existing power structure and attempting to function within the institutional constraints instead of challenging them as political outsiders. In this way, they are not dependent on the government, external alliance shifts, or a changing political climate to gain the opportunity needed to press their claims. To illustrate this general claim regarding social movements, I will employ content-analysis of cartoons, leaflets, and broadsides to examine the choices of the woman suffrage movement in America from 1850 to 1919 as it evolved from an ideologically based appeal for woman’s political participation in earlier years to a pragmatic and expediency-driven strategy to gain voting rights during the later years of the movement. The course of this social movement clearly reflects the successes and advantages that stem from a strategy of opportunity creation, including increased leverage over those in positions of social and political influence and a broader base of popular support. Finally, I draw some broader conclusions regarding the impact of opportunity creation on social movements in general and suggest that a movement need not present a challenging framework to achieve results; a policy of frame expansion can be equally if not more effective when combined with opportunity. I also note that successful opportunity structures point to the eventual death of a movement, highlighting the temporal nature of the social movement as a form of political action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic Liberalization and the Propensity for Ethnic Conflict: Political Entrepreneurs, Ethnic Mobilization and Economic Resources Since 1945, two processes have indelibly marked countries: the continuing increase in the levels of economic liberalization and the explosion of interethnic, intra-state conflict. Many scholars have argued that economic liberalization leads to greater levels of economic development and by implication to more effective democratic institutions. Similarly, many scholars have argued that ethnic conflict is the result of low-quality democratic institutions and low levels of economic development. This paper synthesizes these two bodies of literature and investigates the causal mechanisms between economic liberalization and ethnic conflict. Using large-N quantitative methods scholars who stress the causal links between factoral models of trade integration and occurrences of state disintegration in multiethnic have argued that economic liberalization and ethnic conflict are positively and linearly linked. Alternatively scholars who stress domestic-level explanations have argued that economic liberalization leads to state shrinking, especially of social safety net policies, thus inducing mobilization along ethnic lines and ultimately conflict. However, the empirical record for this conventional wisdom is often spotty and subject to methodological biases, especially in their measurement of economic liberalization. Using a large-N multivariate statistical method combined with two intensive case studies (Sri Lanka, Bulgaria) we argue that the relationship between economic liberalization and ethnic conflict in multi-ethnic societies is a non-linear, inverted-U shape. We measure economic liberalization in a composite index manner and we show that it leads to ethnic conflict in the countries that have undergone medium levels of economic liberalization. Our argument conceptualizes ethnic mobilization as a collective action problem, thus investigating both the role of political entrepreneurs as leaders of the mobilization drive as well as individual ethnic group members as potential participants in this mobilization. Both in conditions of low and high economic liberalization, political entrepreneurs cannot credibly provide their potential members with significant material benefits, i.e. the payoff structure of the individual members, because of the inherent uncertainty over the success of the ethnic mobilization and the limited resources of the political entrepreneurs, cannot be credibly altered. At low levels of economic liberalization, the state dominates the mechanisms of resource allocation and at high levels of economic liberalization, the market dominates the mechanisms of resource allocation. In the former case the political entrepreneur cannot credibly promise his members a greater share of allocated resources and in the latter case, the political entrepreneur cannot promise his members a greater share of allocated resources. It is in conditions of medium-level economic liberalization, that political entrepreneurs can provide their potential members with significant and credible material benefits because it is at these levels of economic liberalization that potential members rationally perceive that ethnically-based political mobilization can alter profitably their payoff structure, i.e. there is a greater chance that by joining this type of ethnically-based political mobilization organization that they can positively acquire a larger share of allocated resources since there exists a significant amount of resources under state control. The policy implications of this paper concern the effects of political mobilization upon ethnic conflict as well as the link between economics and politics in determining the effects of institutional constraints upon political action in democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I advocate an analytical shift in the way we think about international-political change and the dispute between the paradigms. I argue that both the structure of units and of international political systems can be understood in relational terms–as the consequence of underlying patterns of political networks and categorical identities. Actors positioned in particular locations within political networks have access to structural resources that provide different capacities and trajectories of collective mobilization, whether for economic activity, security, or conquest. Specific forms of political networks carry with them regular and identifiable proclivities for transformational and reproductive collective mobilization. Because the network structures of international systems are closely related to the network structures of the polities that inhabit them, the nature of unit organization profoundly shapes pathways and dispositions for collective mobilization and international political change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The election of President George W. Bush in 2000 signaled a new partnership between religious institutions, community organizations, and the federal government regarding the delivery of social welfare programs to the public. Theoretically, we might expect that churches are equipped to implement faith-based initiative programs. Conventional wisdom suggests that the federal bureaucracy consists of a large set of complex organizations that slow the implementation of public policy. Moe attributes this problem to the idea that ‘American public bureaucracy is not designed to be effective’ (Moe 1989, 267). However, why should scholars and public officials assume that church organizations are more effective than the federal bureaucracy in dispensing social welfare programs? Religious groups can encounter similar types of organizational problems that impact public or private organizations, such as free riding and a lack of financial and human resources, that limit their ability to manage their organization. Organizational problems also pose serious problems for church leaders seeking to increase the level of civic engagement in their congregations. We use survey data that we collected from congregations in the Phoenix-metropolitan area to analyze whether religious organizations have the administrative capacity and resources to mobilize for political and social issues within their community. Our study addresses three questions. First, does the organizational structure of a religious institution influence the level of participation among its members in community and social causes? Second, do churches that exist within hierarchically organized denominations experience higher levels of free riding than churches within more egalitarian denominations? Finally, do congregations encounter problems of free riding that significantly hinder their ability to mobilize for political and social causes? Our purpose in exploring these questions is to move beyond current studies on religion and politics that focus on political behavior by incorporating an institutional approach to understand the political role of churches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will compare cases of rescue in Nazi-occupied Denmark, France, and the Netherlands, asking why collectively organized rescue operations emerged to save persecuted groups at certain times and in certain locales, while elsewhere rescues were absent or initiated by individuals acting alone. In the early fall of 1943, the threat of deportation of Danish Jewry provoked something resembling a popular movement, involving all parts and strata of society in a successful effort to bring the 7,000 Danish Jews to safety in Sweden. Previous explanations have revolved predominantly around individual altruism, ?national character,? and responses to genocidal policies at the level of the nation state. Comparing the Danish case to the community-based rescue effort in the French village of Le Chambon and to individually initiated rescues in the Dutch city of Amsterdam, this project will focus specifically on the level of collective action. Drawing on the literatures on moral exclusion and mobilization, it will place particular emphasis on interpretive dynamics of constituency-building and the structure and quality of social networks conducive to high-risk, clandestine mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the cultural production of the rhetoric of slavery and its impact on the collective identity of the African-American community. Through a rhetorical analysis of mainstream and African-American print media articles on the issue of slavery in Sudan from 1992 to 2002, this study advances framing research by contributing the concept of the ?trigger word? to explain the power of ideographs (McGee, 1980) such as ?slavery? to mobilize action. The analysis reveals four primary narratives: 1) slavery exists in Sudan and must be stopped; 2) slavery does not exist in Sudan; 3) slavery exists in Sudan and must be stopped, regardless of the color of the perpetrators; and 4) slavery exists in both Sudan and American and must be stopped. Based on the results of this study, this paper reaffirms the role of the media in the cultural production of trigger words to stimulate collective action. In addition, this study advances research on collective action frames by suggesting the possibility of a ?collective inaction frame? that stymies action in a collective identity based not on injustice, but comparative oppression and victimhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My focus in this paper is on the relative importance of collective actors--social movements, advocacy groups, health voluntary organizations, and the like--in Canadian as compared with U.S. public health policy making and implementation. In both countries, non-governmental organizations played critical--although differently structured--roles in development and implementation of tobacco-control policies. However, while policies and actions to limit HIV/AIDS in injection drug users originated at the grass-roots in the U.S. (and have been highly localized and often underground), advocacy groups in Canada have (until very recently) played little or no role in this domain; policy responses have been pushed primarily by local public health officials and funded by national, provincial, and local governments. Based on my analysis of these differences, I argue that collective action in response to disease threats is powerfully shaped by state structure (including both political structure and the structure of medical care) and by how the threat, and its actual and/or potential victims, are perceived by policymakers and the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last decades of the twentieth century in Canada, the members of many First Nations took part in an unprecedented wave of collective action. This paper uses group analysis to further our understanding of the relationship between demographic, socio-demographic, economic, cultural and political group characteristics and involvement in collective action. This approach enables comparisons between mobilizing and non-mobilizing groups located within the same political context. To date, the collective action literature has focused on macro conditions that originate outside the mobilizing group and has compared across differing political contexts. In this study, data was gathered on instances of First Nation collective action and on all First Nation characteristics irrespective of mobilization. Multivariate analyses indicate that First Nation demographic, economic, and political characteristics all have important effects on participation in collective action. This study also shows that the relationship between some group characteristics (economic and political) and collective action vary over time while others (demographic) do not. Future studies need to consider characteristics at the group-level as these provide important information about group involvement in collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COLLECTIVE ACTION FRAMES IN THE DISCOURSE OF EZLN Aquiles Chihu Amparán The purpose of this article is to analyze the discourse of the Zapatista Army (EZLN). We consider that the speech constitutes a privileged field for the analysis of the identities for in this field an actor defines itself and his enemies, he speaks about his problems, the goals outlined to solve those problems and he addresses an audience. As a methodology, we use frame analysis. Framing means to include certain aspects of the reality perceived in a text with the purpose of arriving at a definition of the protagonist, of the antagonist, a definition of the problem, a causal interpretation, a moral evaluation, and to recommend alternatives for the solution of the problem. Our model of analysis has five dimensions: the protagonist, the problem, the antagonist, the objectives, and the audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do non-governmental organizations (NGOs) facilitate and expand citizen participation in the political process in Mexico? What role do they play in the mediation between citizens and local and state level government? Using multiple data collection techniques, including in-depth interviews, participant observation, and archival research, I answer these questions with respect to political participation in one Mexican city in a country whose political and economic terrain has undergone dramatic changes in the past two decades. While collective action has escalated in Mexico since the mid-1980s, in Monterrey it has became more docile as fragmentation and co-optation of leadership into official channels of politics characterized the political landscape. Certainly political resistance and challenges still exist in Monterrey, but what form has it taken in Northern Mexico, how does culture inform mobilization, and what strategies and tactics do NGOs use to challenge the government in an effort to expand citizenship rights? My findings suggest that rather than traditional, radical strategies of mobilization, NGOs in Monterrey are developing alliance networks and unique ways to confront various inequalities because of the culture of conservativeness that characterizes the city. Despite the diversity based on identity and citizenship demand, I argue these organizations are challenging what should be included in the political arena as well as confronting traditional notions of political participation and citizenship. The degree of visibility of the NGOs varies considerably, but I illustrate in this paper that while large-scale structural change remains a distant goal, they are undoubtedly impacting local politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes how peer-to-peer sexual harassment rapidly was transformed from an unremarkable reality of secondary school life into a serious social and legal problem. First, it shows how organizations and professionals served as an entry-point for social change and legal mobilization. I argue that schools were quick to address peer sexual harassment because activists framed it as a moral and pedagogical issue that resonated with educators’ deeply held professional values. Second, the paper shows how law and organizations develop endogenously. Without any legal mandate, schools created and institutionalized harassment policies. Courts then looked to these organizational practices to determine the content and scope of Title IX. In this way, schools literally "enacted" the law through their practices. This finding goes beyond previous work on endogeneity in that school policies influenced law at the level of doctrine, not simply at the level of meaning, enforcement or application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]