Asked to name an activist, many people think of someone like Cesar Chavez or Rosa Parks—someone uniquely and passionately devoted to a cause. Yet, two-thirds of Americans report having belonged to a social movement, attended a protest, or engaged in some form of contentious political activity. Activism, in other words, is something that the vast majority of people engage in. This book examines these more common experiences to ask how and when people choose to engage with political causes.
Corrigall-Brown reveals how individual characteristics and life experiences impact the pathway of participation, illustrating that the context and period in which a person engages are critical. This is the real picture of activism, one in which many people engage, in a multitude of ways and with varying degrees of continuity. This book challenges the current conceptualization of activism and pushes us to more systematically examine the varying ways that individuals participate in contentious politics over their lifetimes.
Asked to name an activist, many people think of someone like Cesar Chavez or Rosa Parks—someone uniquely and passionately devoted to a cause. Yet, two-thirds of Americans report having belonged to a social movement, attended a protest, or engaged in some form of contentious political activity. Activism, in other words, is something that the vast majority of people engage in. This book examines these more common experiences to ask how and when people choose to engage with political causes.
Corrigall-Brown reveals how individual characteristics and life experiences impact the pathway of participation, illustrating that the context and period in which a person engages are critical. This is the real picture of activism, one in which many people engage, in a multitude of ways and with varying degrees of continuity. This book challenges the current conceptualization of activism and pushes us to more systematically examine the varying ways that individuals participate in contentious politics over their lifetimes.
Patterns of Protest: Trajectories of Participation in Social Movements
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Overview
Asked to name an activist, many people think of someone like Cesar Chavez or Rosa Parks—someone uniquely and passionately devoted to a cause. Yet, two-thirds of Americans report having belonged to a social movement, attended a protest, or engaged in some form of contentious political activity. Activism, in other words, is something that the vast majority of people engage in. This book examines these more common experiences to ask how and when people choose to engage with political causes.
Corrigall-Brown reveals how individual characteristics and life experiences impact the pathway of participation, illustrating that the context and period in which a person engages are critical. This is the real picture of activism, one in which many people engage, in a multitude of ways and with varying degrees of continuity. This book challenges the current conceptualization of activism and pushes us to more systematically examine the varying ways that individuals participate in contentious politics over their lifetimes.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804778190 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/14/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Patterns of Protest
Trajectories of Participation in Social MovementsBy Catherine Corrigall-Brown
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7410-9
Chapter One
A Model of Participation
IF IT IS TRUE, AS AMOS OZ SAID, that "activism is a way of life," how do people come to embrace this lifestyle? Dorothy typifies one pathway to participation. She was born in Brooklyn, New York, and at the age of ten, she moved with her family to a tenement flat on Chicago's South Side when her father lost his job. After graduating from high school, she received a scholarship to attend the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she became politically radicalized. After two turbulent years on campus, Dorothy dropped out and moved back to New York. She settled on the Lower East Side and took a job as a journalist for a socialist newspaper. During this period, she spent many weekends protesting against war and campaigning for women's rights. While attending one such rally outside the White House, she was arrested and went on a hunger strike with her fellow activists in prison until they were released. When her daughter was born ten years later, Dorothy began an intense period of spiritual awakening, which ultimately led her to embrace Catholicism. Her new involvement with the Catholic Church inspired her to write for Catholic publications and to work for social justice through her congregation. Her support for the peace movement remained strong and she also became actively involved in programs to feed and house the homeless. Throughout her life, Dorothy stayed fully committed to these causes—she was last arrested only five years before her death at the age of 75 for taking part in a picket line in support of striking workers.
Dolores also came to embrace activism as a way of life. She was born in New Mexico and raised in California by a single mother. Inspired by her politically active family, especially her grandfather, Dolores became engaged in a variety of causes at an early age: gathering food donations for the poor, protesting for women's rights, and organizing Mexican Independence Day celebrations and other cultural events. After earning a degree in education at a local community college, she embarked on a short-lived teaching career. Years later, Dolores reminisced that she "couldn't stand seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes. I thought I could do more by organizing ... workers than by trying to teach their hungry children." Over the course of her adult life, she was married twice and had 11 children. Despite the intense demands made on her by her large family, she maintained a passionate commitment to social and political change throughout her life. To date, she has been arrested 22 times and has on many occasions been the victim of police violence.
For many, Dorothy and Dolores are the quintessential activists, showing the exceptional dedication and perseverance often associated with contentious political engagement. Their biographies illustrate what some might call the nobility, and others might call the insanity, of activists. Indeed, they seem to be different from "regular people," who might care deeply about social and political issues but fail to dedicate their entire lives to a cause.
Popular accounts of activism as well as scholarly studies often focus on the actions of a few inspirational individuals like Dorothy and Dolores, who are in fact Dorothy Day (1897–1980), the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, and Dolores Huerta (born in 1930), the cofounder of the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez. In fact, examining the number of books written about these inspiring individuals shows that interest in charismatic leaders far outstrips attention to their movements as a whole. The focus on the lives and work of this type of inspiring activist is clearly far greater than the attention given to the movements as a whole in which they engaged.
The problem with this focus on long-term, committed activists such as Dorothy and Dolores is that it misses the true story of social movement participation, substituting a charismatic leader for the movement and minimizing the significance of the vast majority of social movement participants. This clouds our larger understanding of contentious political activity and the mechanisms of social change because it implies that change results primarily from the actions of a small, homogeneous cadre instead of from a large, diverse group of individuals.
In this book I show that social movement participants are not just the dedicated few. Approximately two-thirds of the respondents from the nationally representative longitudinal study of Americans used in the analyses presented in this book have belonged to a social movement organization, attended a protest, or engaged in other forms of contentious political activity at some point in their lives. Activism, in other words, is the realm of the many. In addition, and contrary to what is sometimes assumed, social movements are not populated solely by lifelong activists. Many participants engage for only a short time and then leave altogether. Others move from group to group or reengage after a lull in participation. This is the real picture of activism, one in which many people engage, in a multitude of ways, and with varying degrees of continuity.
Karen exemplifies this type of contentious political participation. In 1974, Karen joined a student group at her high school that helped organize a march for disarmament. While working on this project, she met volunteers in the United Farm Workers, a group she would later formally join after high school in 1978. In 1982, Karen moved to Florida to help establish a National Farm Worker Ministry. However, starting in 1986, she took a long break from activism. In fact, she did not participate in social movements or contentious politics at all for 14 years. During this period, she moved to Europe, started a family, and began raising three children. Upon her return to the United States in 2000, Karen again took up the cause of social justice: she founded a Farm Worker Ministry in her church, which she still leads today.
Amy's experience is similar. In 1981, she joined a homeowners association in Santa Monica, California. This group was fighting for stricter regulation of a large homeless population in the city. Amy was on the group's board of directors and also wrote and distributed its newsletter. In 1996, she left the association after a dispute with another board member. Although there are several other similarly oriented groups in the city that she could have joined, Amy never formally returned to this cause despite her continuing concern with the large homeless population in Santa Monica. She did, however, become active in another local group that lobbies for increased funding for local schools. She continues to participate in the educational group today and also volunteers in the office of an elected state official.
The biographies of Karen and Amy give a picture of activism that is very different from that portrayed by the narratives of Dorothy and Dolores. More important, Karen and Amy are much more typical activists—as the results presented in this book show, it is far more common to follow an episodic and intermittent trajectory of engagement in contentious politics than to persist over time. Like Karen and Amy, most participants move from one group to another or disengage temporarily from participation only to return later in life. Individuals follow these more intermittent trajectories as a result of both their personal characteristics and the structure and nature of the organization in which they are involved.
Thinking of activism as a process whereby people participate with varying degrees of continuity, it becomes clear that social movements and contentious political activity are part of the lives of many ordinary people. This view of social movements represents a more engaged and participatory model of democracy, one in which many individuals actively construct social change. By examining individuals who follow varying trajectories of participation, moving in and out of groups and organizations, this view also helps us to understand the rise and fall of large-scale movements over time.
Yet this type of episodic engagement is rarely the focus of studies of social movements and contentious politics. The current study reconceptualizes contentious political participation as following one of four main trajectories. Past research has identified two main trajectories of participation, which I term persistence and disengagement. Since these two trajectories are extreme opposites, they fail to capture the behavior of most participants. Therefore, I propose that there are two additional, intermediate trajectories of participation that individuals can follow: individual abeyance and transfer. These two trajectories are exemplified by Karen, whose political participation was episodic, and Amy, who transferred from group to group.
An individual's trajectory of participation is the result of her ideology, resources, and biography. In addition, that trajectory is affected by the nature and structure of the social movement organization in which she is involved, which works to shape an individual's participation and the continuity of her involvement. To assess the effect of organizational structure on individual involvement, I examine three elements of organizational context: level of hierarchy, issue scope, and intensity of social interaction. Some groups are very hierarchical, while others are more egalitarian. In addition, while some groups focus on a single issue, others are based on a larger ideology that brings together a number of specific issues of concern. Finally, groups vary in the level of interaction they require; while some are based on frequent and intensive interactions, others involve only irregular and casual social contact. These three elements of organizational structure are critical for shaping the social ties and identities of participants. In turn, these ties and identities affect the length and continuity of an individual's participation.
In this book I develop and test a model that explains who will follow each of these four pathways of engagement: persistence, transfer, abeyance, and disengagement. I examine this model through the use of two complementary data sources. In the first half of the book, I provide quantitative analyses of panel data originally collected by Jennings and Stoker (2004) on participation over the life course. This survey follows a nationally representative sample of high school seniors from 1965 to 1997. Through the use of these data, I examine broad predictors of initial engagement and trajectory of participation in contentious politics. In addition, I conducted 60 intensive life-history interviews with participants in four social movement organizations: a Catholic Worker group, Concerned Women for America, the United Farm Workers, and a homeowners association. These interviews allow me to examine, in greater breadth and depth than would otherwise be possible, how organizational and relational context leads individuals to follow different trajectories. These organizations and interviews are the focus of the second half of the book.
The State of Research on Participation
Scholars have consistently found that social movement participation has long-term transformative effects for individuals. Compared to nonparticipants, individuals who join social movements are likely to continue to engage in political organizations and remain consistent in their ideology over time (Downton and Wehr 1997; Giugni 2004; Klatch 1999). Previous studies, however, have largely focused on high-risk, high-cost movements and the participants who populate them, and therefore this research may not be representative of all types of engagement. Given that high-risk, high-cost activism constitutes only a small fraction of all social movement organizations and activities, it is questionable whether these findings generalize to participation as a whole. In addition, while past studies have compared individuals at two points in time, once at initial engagement and once at the time of the study, they have yet to trace trajectories of participation over the life course.
While research on the consequences of social movement engagement points to the potentially transformative, long-term consequences of engagement, popular opinion continues to regard social movement participation as an activity confined largely to the young. Adolescents and young adults are thought to hold more radical beliefs and to be more likely to engage in elite-challenging behavior, including joining social movements. These "radical youth" eventually develop more moderate views and leave movements as they grow older (for discussions of this popular hypothesis, see Fendrich 1993; Jennings 1987; McAdam 1988). According to this perspective, contentious participation is the result of biographical availability, and individuals are expected to move beyond this life stage as they age.
A weakness in much of the established literature is the tendency to emphasize only one phase of participation—initial engagement. This occurs despite the fact that various scholars recognize at least three stages of engagement in social movements—initial engagement, sustained participation, and disengagement (Klandermans 1997). There is, however, little research that systematically examines how and why individuals reduce their involvement in social movement organizations and protest activities. Moreover, the leaving process is simply treated as identical to the joining process, only in reverse. For example, Sandell (1999, 3) states that "the decision processes concerning leaving and joining organizations are mirror images" (see also Toch 1965; Vall 1963).
This hypothesis is questionable. While there are similarities between joining and leaving a social movement organization, there are also important differences. As Veen and Klandermans (1989, 184) state, "During the period that people are associated with a movement, qualitatively new dimensions are added to being a member, so that the reasons for quitting are not the same as those for joining." Analogous situations make this point clear. For example, leaving a job is not simply the reverse of starting a job, and getting divorced is not the reverse of getting married. The emotions, relationships, and material changes associated with each transition are fundamentally different. In the same vein, increasing and decreasing one's participation in contentious politics are not mirror experiences. Hence, merely applying what we have learned about the joining process to the leaving process obscures important elements of the latter.
Rethinking Engagement: Four Trajectories of Participation
Work on the biographical consequences of participation suggests that some individuals remain active and engaged over the life course, while others leave after one episode. In this book, I present the following four prototypical trajectories that individual participants can follow after their initial engagement in contentious politics.
1. Persistence: Individuals remain in their initial social movement organization (SMO) and/or continue participating in protest activities over time.
2. Transfer: Individuals disengage from their SMO or protest activities but become active in another SMO or cause. These individuals disengage from the original movement organization but not from contentious political participation.
3. Individual abeyance: Individuals disengage from their SMO or protest activities but return to participation later in life.
4. Disengagement: Individuals permanently disengage from their SMO and from participation altogether. These individuals both leave their SMO and stop participating in collective action.
Persistence and transfer are similar to the processes described by McAdam (1988) in his influential study of the Freedom Summer campaign. In this campaign, mainly elite white American college students traveled from the northern states to Mississippi to register African Americans to vote during the summer of 1964. This was a transformative experience, inspiring many of the volunteers to remain politically active over the course of their lives. It is difficult, however, to assess the extent to which this experience is representative of social movement participation more generally. This campaign was extremely high in cost and risk; many volunteers experienced threats, beatings, and harassment. Three volunteers were murdered. The unusually high intensity, cost, and risk associated with this campaign suggest that it is not typical.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Patterns of Protest by Catherine Corrigall-Brown Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations....................ixAcknowledgments....................xi
1 A Model of Participation....................1
2 Getting In: Initial and Shifting Engagement....................16
3 Trajectories of Participation....................39
4 Social, Political, and Organizational Context of Participation....................59
5 The Ties That Bind? The Effect of Social Ties and Interaction....................82
6 We Are Not All Activists: The Development and Consequences of Identity....................105
7 Beyond the "Activist"....................123
Appendix: Methodology....................139
Notes....................149
References....................159
Index....................171