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Without question the Civil Rights movement has been the engine behind much of modern social movement theorizing, from resource mobilization to political opportunity models. Given the sheer scale of this movement, most theoretical work has tended to focus on movement emergence and success. However, like all social movements, Civil Rights activity has waned since the mid-late 1960s. Here we seek to develop a coherent theoretical model of movement decline that both reformulates existing theoretical perspectives and other factors that may increase the likelihood of demobilization. Our results indicate that decline is not merely the flipside of emergence, and that predictors other than lack of resources and opportunities caused the Civil Rights movement to exit from the national stage. While we recognize the unique features of this particular social movement, we believe our findings can be used as the basis for a more general model of movement decline. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 1970s, the U.S. has experienced a period of deregulation, increasing corporate political power, expanding income inequality, and declining political opportunities for many social movements. A growing body of studies ties these trends to the growth of corporate-targeted protest (CTP), arguing that such changes lead outside challenging groups to increasingly engage in attempts to disrupt corporations' resource flows and tarnish their reputations. However, no study to date has analyzed this question in systematic fashion. Using a unique data source of CTP events in U.S. states over the period in question, this study examines the impact of earlier economic, political, regulatory, protest, and civic conditions on the occurrence of collective claims-making against businesses using fixed-effects panel models. The study finds, first and foremost, that corporate-targeted protest declined significantly during the 1972-1990 period. Second, although certain factors associated with the political process model shape CTP, such explanations come up short. In accordance with the growing "multi-institutional" politics approach to social movements, the findings suggest that certain institution-specific factors significantly influence CTP, such as the presence of large business organizations. Further, the study finds that economic effects on CTP are conditional: anti-corporate marches, rallies, leafleting, and movement-initiated lawsuits are more likely in periods of economic expansion, whereas boycotts are more likely during downturns. Overall, the findings support the notion that CTP follows after state-targeted protest, although it appears to have little connection to either the changing regulatory climate or the growth of citizens' groups in recent decades. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of social movements have long called attention to the differences between those protest events that gain media coverage and those that are not covered. However, although we know much about which protest events are covered in the media, we know considerably less about the differences in prominence among those events that do gain coverage. We extend the literature on mass media coverage of social movements by examining how event characteristics affect page location within a newspaper by examining protest events covered in the New York Times between 1960 and 1990. Using multinomial logistic regression, we develop an account of the editorial decisions regarding the placement of an event within the paper's pages. We find that such decisions are most heavily influenced by the amount of conflict associated with the event (violence, property damage, arrests, and the use of contentious protest tactics). Importantly, we also find that larger events and those located in the nation's capitol are more likely to be placed on the front page, whereas corporate-targeted events are generally kept off of the front page. Overall we find that the Times editors tend to highlight disruptive protest, while downplaying anti-corporate claims-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizations active in low- and moderate-income communities face a series of obstacles in their advocacy and service provision efforts: a lack of community financial and political resources, difficulties in training and retaining staff members, and maintaining member interest and commitment. How, then, do such groups continue to exist as viable - even thriving - organizations, despite these challenges? We explore this question by examining the patterns of organizational survival among a sample of poor people's social movement organizations between 1990 and 2004. More specifically, we expand upon earlier research (Walker and McCarthy, 2007) by examining how a wide variety of factors have shaped the survival patterns of such organizations: in particular, their resources and social capital. We find that those community groups that are older, wealthier, or part of an organizing network were among the most likely to survive. Importantly, we found little evidence to suggest that rural and urban community groups have differential rates of survival, although urban groups did fare slightly better. Similarly, interfaith congregation-based groups did not have a significantly higher rate of survival than individual membership organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research examining the political outcomes of social movement activities has been characterized by a nearly exclusive focus on the final stage of the political process, the passage of laws, as well as a limited conceptualization of how movements affect that process. Here, we empirically assess, for one social movement, the importance of organizational capacity, protest and institutional activities, public opinion, and political opportunities in garnering policy-maker attention to movement-salient issues at two distinct stages in the policy making process. Our findings strongly suggest that environmental movement organizational capacity as well as protest and institutional activities directly influence agenda setting stages in the political process. While we find only limited evidence that the environmental movement directly influenced the passage of federal environmental laws, there is some indication that successful agenda setting facilitated this outcome. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although differential participation has been largely ignored by social movement scholars, it is important in conceptualizing the life cycle of movements, and in evaluating movement successes. This paper addresses the gap in the literature through an analysis of differential participation among leaders of a nurturing social movement. Organizational demands (chapter complexity and victim focus), social constraints (number of children in the home and employment status), and victim status were all found to be significantly associated with the number of hours volunteered by chapter presidents each week. A by-gender analysis illustrates important disparities in the correlates of male and female participation. While women are highly motivated by chapter complexity, this was not significant in the male model. Conversely, men seem to be largely influenced by personal constraints, such as outside employment, while women had only weak associations with these variables. Both genders were influenced by victim status, although men were much more likely then women to increase their weekly volunteer effort as a result of being a victim of drunk driving. The results of this study give support to the notion that gendered studies of social movements should be undertaken with more regularity. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within social movement research, there is increased interest in how movements use repertoires of action strategically to achieve stated goals. Much attention has been paid to characteristics of the actors themselves, and there is considerable debate if more formalized actors prefer the use of more conventional protest tactics. Yet the selection of repertoires depends not only upon the type of actor or the claim that actor makes, but the specific target of protest. While the state is generally regarded as the primary granter of new benefits for movements, many movements - from organized labor to the environmental movement - target corporate, educational, and other institutions. Employing a unique dataset of all protests reported in the New York Times between 1960 and 1990, we examine how repertoire choice is, in part, contingent upon the target in question. Although educational institutions and corporations are targeted by a narrower range of social groups who make a more limited variety of protest claims, the repertoires used to pressure these two institutions are much less conventional and more diverse than those used against the state. We offer some possible explanations for this phenomenon, including the role of the state in shaping the institutionalization of insurgent protest forms. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Membership-based organizations of the poor, to be effective, must survive. Although numerous analyses have considered the organizational factors that shape a social movement group's risk of mortality, no existing analyses have systematically considered this process with respect to poor people's social movement organizations (SMOs). Using a unique data source based on the successful grant application files of such groups to a major United States funding agency, we assess the likelihood of a movement organization's mortality over a period of approximately 12 years. We take into consideration factors such as an organization's membership composition, organizational age and size, diversity of previous funding sources, organizational structure, non-profit incorporation, and position within larger regional and national networks of poor people's SMOs. We find that although membership structure is related to survival, its effects work primarily by way of affiliation with organizing networks and a group's ability to garner substantial and diverse resources. We then discuss how these findings shape our understanding of the factors involved in developing an autonomous voice for the poor in political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]