What the Experts Say:
Structure/Agency, Disruption/Moderation and Social Movement Success
Contributors: Janneke Drent Ruud Wouters
Introduction
Does protest matter? Does it have any impact? Or, put differently and more precisely, what can be considered ‘movement success’, and which factors facilitate it? These are key questions that not only laypersons consider when protesters hit the streets, but that have also—and still continue to —puzzle scholars of social movements. The answers to these questions are fairly complicated. Naturally, there are many different outcomes that can be considered as movement success. Whether it’s the achievement of previously stated political goals, public position taking by elected officials, the mobilization of a large number of engaged protesters, realizing sustained wall-to-wall media coverage, or facilitating a shift in the attitudes of the broader public: many different metrics allow to gauge movement impact and all potentially contribute to ‘success’. Similarly, a wide variety of factors could potentially explain these different manifestations of movement impact, and certain factors may be more or less relevant for particular outcomes than others.
Some scholars argue that the success of a social movement is largely dependent on external factors, like the political system and societal structures in which protest emerges and with which it interacts (Jenkins, 1983). Scholars of political opportunity or political process theories stress that outside forces can either limit or enhance activists’ ability to mobilize, to exercise influence, to use effective strategies and to “affect mainstream institutional politics and policy” (Meyer & Minkoff, 2004). These scholars primarily stress that social movements do not hold absolute freedom of choice when it comes to making tactical or strategic decisions, and that they are to a high degree shaped by preexisting external, systemic factors. At the same time, other scholars emphasize the importance of large numbers of resources available to social movements as well as activists’ own agency—be that in their ability to persuade elite allies, to interact with the media and sympathizers, or to foster “inter-organizational competition and cooperation” (McCarthy & Zald, 1977). Next to this discussion on the relative importance of the internal versus external drivers of success, another key debate in the literature relates to whether strategies of disruption or rather ones of moderation prove more effective. For instance, are the persistent determination, large numbers, or displayed worthiness of peaceful climate demonstrators of Fridays for Future the drivers behind advances in public consciousness and political action? Or is it the disruption caused by groups such as Extinction Rebellion, who block oil company distribution centers, occupy the tarmac of private jet airports, and glue themselves to paintings, that shakes things up and advances societal change?
In this report, we revisit these key debates on structure/agency, disruption/moderation and movement success. We do so by means of an expert survey. We consider this a relevant instrument for several reasons. First, enormous empirical progress has been made over the course of the last three decades when it comes to scrutinizing the impact of movements and protest (Giugni, 1998; 1999; Amenta, Caren, Chiarello & Su, 2010; Amenta, Caren & Andrews, 2018). Whereas before the turn of the century, movement scholars were primarily occupied with studying movement emergence and mobilization, a steep increase in works on protest impact has occurred since then. We consider surveying experts as one way to take stock of the progress in the field. Interestingly, whereas for long movements and protest were pet topics of sociologists, with the turn to the outcome questions, the neighboring fields of political science, psychology and communication have also shown rising interest. Second, social movement research is often centered around case studies. Although case study work allows for in- depth analyses, a major downside is that it leaves researchers with a fragmented body of results that is hard to bring together. By asking movement scholars to complete the exact same set of questions, we sought to add a counterweight to this fragmentation. In doing so, we hoped to more systematically strike a balance in the abovementioned debates and to determine where the lines of conflict in the field are. To what extent, and for precisely which pieces of the puzzle, are experts on the same page, and at which points do they disagree?
In total, 120 social movements experts from a diverse set of disciplinary and methodological backgrounds, academic and national environments, as well as theoretical frameworks completed our survey. What movement and contextual characteristics matter according to them? How do they define ‘movement success’, and which trends do they see amongst recent successful movements? Besides the uniform set of close-ended questions, the survey also included a large number of optional open-ended text questions, where experts could balance out any potential oversimplifications by providing context or nuancing their answers. These open-ended questions, too, will be taken into account for this report. We believe that it is in this combination of the closed questions, where experts were forced to pick sides, and the open-ended ones, where experts could substantiate and nuance their position-taking, that the true added value of the survey and this report lies.
The report is structured in five separate sections. In a first section, we introduce the expert survey and its methodological details. In the following three sections, we deal with three key debates in the scholarly literature. We tackle the issue of structure versus agency—is movement success driven by external or internal factors, and how do those interact—; we revisit the debate on disruption versus moderation; and we wrap up with the experts’ takes on what have been the most successful movements of the past decades. This latter part allows for the integration and application of the forementioned debates to specific, real-life cases. We end this report in the final section with a conclusion featuring its main findings.
