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Many Western democracies have seen an increase in extreme right mobilization over the past several decades but extreme right mobilization is not a new phenomenon when we look historically. In this paper, we examine fifty years of white supremacist protest in the United States to help shed light on the factors that explain variation in levels of right-wing mobilization. Using annual time-series analysis, we find that traditional strain explanations do not explain these protests but that threats to the traditional economic, political, and social power of whites were critical. Ethnic competition associated with black population growth and political threats stemming from the political power of northern Democrats, a divided federal government, and civil rights protest stimulated this mobilization. These findings support a broadened ethnic competition/power devaluation model of right-wing mobilization that emphasizes the mobilizing effects of economic and political threats to a relatively advantaged group.

Although hundreds of American college students are the victims of bias-motivated verbal and physical assaults every year, little research explores whether there is a systematic pattern to the hate crimes that occur on college campuses. In this article, we study why some campuses experience more racist hate crimes than do others. We explore how campus demographics, tuition increases, and the presence of fraternities influence reported hate crime incidence. Through a statistical analysis of the hate crimes reported to the FBI by 349 colleges, we find that ethnic-/racial-bias hate crimes are more likely to be reported on predominantly White college campuses and those that have a large Greek population. We contribute to theory on hate crime by illustrating some of the social characteristics that make hate crime more likely in certain geographic areas than others.

Social movement scholars have long been skeptical of culture's impact on political change, perhaps for good reason, since little empirical research explicitly addresses this question. This article fills the void by examining the dynamics and the impact of the month-long 2004 same-sex wedding protest in San Francisco. We integrate insights of contentious politics approaches with social constructionist conceptions and identify three core features of cultural repertoires: contestation, intentionality, and collective identity. Our analyses, which draw on rich qualitative and quantitative data from interviews with participants and movement leaders and a random survey of participants, highlight these dimensions of cultural repertoires as well as the impact that the same-sex wedding protest had on subsequent activism. Same-sex weddings, as our multimethod analyses show, were an intentional episode of claim-making, with participants arriving with a history of activism in a variety of other social movements. Moreover, relative to the question of impact, the initial protest sparked other forms of political action that ignited a statewide campaign for marriage equality in California. Our results offer powerful evidence that culture can be consequential not only internally, with implications for participant solidarity and identity, but for political change and further action as well. We conclude by discussing the specifics of our case and the broader implications for social movement scholars.

University campuses experienced a surge in protest activity around labor issues during the late 1990s, highlighted by several high-profile graduate employee unionization campaigns. Some scholars and activists attribute these developments to notable changes in the academy, while others note that this wave of activity coincided with revitalization efforts by the broader U.S. labor movement that included reaching out to new constituencies and college students in particular. The authors advance this discussion by analyzing the factors leading to graduate employee union organizing campaigns between 1996 and 2001. They draw from social movement and labor research to suggest how shifts in the nature of academic labor markets, local resources and opportunities for activism, and increased links between organized labor and college campuses influence the timing and location of organizing campaigns. Results from an event history analysis of campaign activity largely support these claims and highlight the importance of local resources and opportunities for campus organizing.

During the late 1990s, college students across the United States mobilized around labor issues. Our research explores whether this explosion of student protest activity was generated, in part, by concerted efforts of the AFL-CIO through its Union Summer college student internship program. A statistical analysis of factors influencing the location of Students Against Sweatshops chapters and student labor protest confirms that the Union Summer program has successfully mobilized a generation of college students for labor activism. This research extends the labor literature by providing evidence of the revitalized labor federation's success in forming bridges to non-traditional constituencies. Our findings inform social movement scholarship and studies of inter-organizational influence by demonstrating that a professional social movement organization can strategically generate mobilization among a new constituency.

Gender dynamics have historically shaped the gay and lesbian rights movement, with gay men and lesbians working together more during some time periods than others. In this article, the authors explore how changes in the sociopolitical context influence the gendered collective identity and gender composition of the gay and lesbian rights movement over time. The authors use data on the gay and lesbian rights movement in Columbus, Ohio, from 1970 to 2000 and interviews with twenty-four movement participants. They find that shifts in the sociopolitical context, including the activity of movement opponents, change the salience of gender and other identities for movement participants, thereby leading to changes in the movement's collective identity. They contribute to the literatures on gender, sexuality, and social movements by demonstrating that countermovements can mobilize stigma in a way that heightens identity salience and alters collective identities.

Staging events with a large number of participants is a central means by which collective action movements exercise power. Creating broad coalitions that cut across movement boundaries is one way to mobilize these large numbers. In spite of this fact, most studies of social movement coalitions focus on individual movements, analyzing them in isolation. This article explores the conditions under which organizations form alliances across movement boundaries, and examines whether these cross-movement coalition events are facilitated by the same factors that inspire coalition activity among organizations active within a single movement. I use event history methods to analyze data on 2,644 left-wing protest events that occurred on college campuses between 1930 and 1990. I find several differences between the factors that facilitate cross-movement and within-movement coalition events. The availability of resources is important to within-movement coalition events but not to cross-movement coalition formation. Local threats inspire within-movement coalition events, while larger threats that affect multiple constituencies or broadly defined identities inspire crossmovement coalition formation. The activity of multi-issue movement organizations is associated with higher levels of all forms of protest, including single and cross-movement coalition events. This research contributes to social movement theory by demonstrating that political threats sometimes inspire protest, and that organizational goals influence strategic action.

In the 1990s, a widespread patriot/militia movement emerged in the United States. Although patriot/militia organizations exist in all 50 U.S. states, some states have higher levels of patriot/militia organization than do others. We examine the factors that account for this variation, including the possibility that mobilization occurs in response to threats produced by structural social changes. We conduct a negative binomial regression analysis of state-level counts of patriot/militia organizations and find support for the argument that structural transformations can spark the mobilization of reactive social movements. We show that economic restructuring, measured by a decline in manufacturing jobs and the decline of the family farm, influences the mobilization of patriot/militia groups in the U.S. in the mid-1990s. We confirm these state-level findings with an analysis of patriot/militia organization in 300 U.S. counties.

Social movements rely on coalitions to help mobilize the mass numbers of people necessary for success. In this article, we review the literature on social movement coalition formation, longevity, and success. We identify five factors critical to coalition formation: (a) social ties; (b) conducive organizational structures; (c) ideology, culture, and identity; (d) the institutional environment; and (e) resources. Next, we explore the extent to which coalition survival is influenced by these same factors and argue that emergent properties of the coalition, such as commitment and trust, also facilitate longevity. Our review of the literature reveals that two factors specific to coalitions influence their success: coalition form and the nature of institutional targets. Interaction, communication technology, and the availability of physical and virtual spaces that facilitate communication are themes that run throughout our discussion, as they undergird many of the elements that shape coalition formation and survival. We conclude by evaluating the state of the research area and suggesting directions for further research.

A prevalent theme in the public forum on the recent wave of black church arson in the United States is that the events are part of an overarching conspiracy on the part of hate groups to start a race war. In attempting to discount this theme, critics have concluded that events of black church arson are not racially motivated, and instead are random acts of insurance fraud and delinquency. We argue that competition theory sheds light on these recent events by moving us away from both sides of this debate. We argue that, in the absence of good data on connections between various hate groups, it is useful to consider this wave of ethnic violence as a result of ethnic competition for economic and political resources. Using yearly event counts and time-series cross sectional data, we test hypotheses derived from competition theory. We conclude that competition for both economic and political resources increases the yearly counts of black church arson.

Some colleges and universities stand out in the popular imagination as hotbeds of political activism, while others do not. In this paper, I examine the factors that account for this variation in campus activism: why student activism occurred on some campuses during the 1960s and not others. With some notable exceptions (e.g., Soule 1997) theoretical developments and insights in the social movement literature have not been applied to student activism. In addition, most existing studies of student protest are ahistorical. They examine protest only within one time period, failing to recognize the influence of history and culture in fostering protest activity. I use social movement theory to explore the factors that influence the location of student protest, and develop the hypothesis that a history of activism is strongly associated with student protest. I also demonstrate that locations that have protest around one issue are likely to have protest around multiple issues. I suggest that this is due to the influence of activist subcultures, which underlie movement families within a protest cycle, influencing the ideology and tactics of activist organizations. A sample of 423 colleges forms the basis for these analyses, conducted using logistic and OLS regression models.