Contentious Choices

Author(s): Charles Tilly

Source: Theory and Society , Jun. - Aug., 2004, Vol. 33, No. 3/4, Special Issue: Current
Routes to the Study of Contentious Politics and Social Change (Jun. - Aug., 2004), pp.
473-481
Published by: Springer

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4144881

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Contentious choices

CHARLES TILLY
Columbia University

Abstract. Articles in this special issue address two choices faced by all ana
contentious politics: 1) which features of political processes the analysts single
description and explanation and 2) what sorts of conceptualizations and expl
of those processes they propose. On the first point, the articles split among a) v
and change in actors' strategies as well as consequences of those strategies, b) l
term transformations of political context and consequences, c) grounding of con
in local circumstances. On the second, they choose among a) very general expla
frameworks, b) particular causal mechanisms that produce similar effects acros
variety of political circumstances, and c) explanation by means of careful attach
episodes to local and regional settings. The articles therefore illustrate broad ch
in current studies of political contention.

Students who variously call their topic political conflict, protest,

tive action, social movements, or contentious politics face conten
choices. Each of these terms embodies its own vigorous vision
scription and explanation. Calling the subject "protest," for exa
centers the analysis on responses of relatively powerless peo
wrongs they have endured; it calls up images of people who mo
suffer without rebelling, but now and then band together to sa
have had enough. Calling the topic "collective action," in contrast
it into a wide range of coordinated efforts, many of them undertak
people who already wield considerable power. Indeed, specialists
topic debate repeatedly the conditions under which resource-poo
stituencies that endure exploitation or rejection - in contrast to
lished, resource-rich political actors - can ever act effectively tog

"Political conflict," to take a third term, overlaps with collective

but the concept shifts our attention to interactions between two or
politically relevant actors, and thus (unlike the pursuit of protest or
lective action) requires analysts to decide which interactions ar
are not political. To call the topic "social movements" (as reader
this symposium will see abundantly) plunges its students
definitional and explanatory controversies, but generally commit

Theory and Society 33: 473-481, 2004.

? 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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474

to distinctions among social movements as such, politics as usual, rev-

olutions, and a variety of other political change processes. In such a
conception, social movements become something like sustained, col-
lective, popularly based public making of claims short of armed rebel-
lion, or the people and organizations that mount such claims.

The program of studying contentious politics at large that

Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and I have proposed, finally, likewise
centers on collective claim making and actually recognizes the social
movement as a distinctive political form, but argues for explanation
of claim-centered episodes through identification of similar mecha-
nisms and processes across a wide variety of political forms having in
common their public character and their relations to governments of
one sort or another. Clearly, initial conceptual choices lead to different
methods, materials, explanations, and treatments of evidence.1

In the present set of articles on contentious politics and social change,

two kinds of choices figure prominently: 1) which features of political
processes the analysts single out for description and explanation; 2)
what sorts of conceptualizations and explanations of those processes
they propose. Quick descriptions of the articles will not substitute for
their individual reading, but will clarify the choices their authors have
made.

Mario Diani and Ivano Bison define their topic as "collective action
dynamics," concentrating on the place of social movement processes.
Defining social movement processes as formation and transformation
of informal networks among popular political actors who assert collec-
tive identities, they explicitly distinguish social movement processes
from coalitions involving little collective assertion of identity and from
organizational routines, even when the organizations in question pursue
programs commonly supported by social movement activists.2 They
apply these distinctions to close analysis of connections and interac-
tions among civic organizations of two British cities (Glasgow and
Bristol) that focused on ethnic, environmental, or social exclusion is-
sues between 2001 and 2002. In addition to a detailed description of
inter-organizational interactions in the two cities, the approach moti-
vates a claim for social movements as a distinctive, important, causally
coherent variety of politics.

Ludger Mees likewise distances himself from the McAdam-Tarrow-

Tilly proposal to treat social movements as a variety of contentious
politics. But he marches away in quite a different direction from Diani

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 475

and Bison. Mees insists that the "classic social movement agenda,"
with its emphasis on social change, structures of political opportunity
and threat, organizational bases, framing processes, and repertoires,
serves well to discipline inquiry into the history of Basque national-
ism. To bolster his case, he offers a brief, helpful sketch of the relevant
history from the later nineteenth century to the present. He matches
elements of his account to items on the classic agenda: social change,
opportunity structures, organizational bases, framing, and repertoires.
That matching, its distinction from conventional accounts of Basque
nationalism, and its application to the explanation of continuing vio-
lence in Spain's Basque regions then constitute Mees' brief on behalf
of the classic agenda, and the grounds for his resistance to assimilation
of Basque experience within a more general explanatory program. He
insists that Basque nationalism qualifies as a social movement, and
therefore benefits from the comparisons with other social movements
facilitated by the classic agenda.

Jack Goldstone takes a very different tack. He closes in on two con-

tentious problems in the analysis of contemporary social movements:
whether the spread of democratic institutions eventually accelerates
or retards social movement activity, and what might better specify
the set of causes that the classic social movement agenda called po-
litical opportunity and threat. On the first issue, Goldstone counters
the common assertion that social movements, as poor substitutes for
routine politics, will fade away as political participation expands.
On the contrary, argues Goldstone, democratization simultaneously
makes social movement claim making available to expanding seg-
ments of the citizenry and establishes them as important complements
to party-based campaigns, interest group maneuvering, and backroom
influence.

With regard to the second issue, Goldstone proposes a three-way dis-

tinction: first, conditions that facilitate social movement claim making
in general; second, conditions that promote the emergence of particu-
lar movements; third, conditions that govern the success or failure of
movement claims. According to Goldstone, causes that previous ana-
lysts have lumped together as political opportunity structure (POS) -
shifting political alignments, divisions among elites, influential allies,
and so on - actually have different effects with regard to facilitation,
emergence, and success. He suggests that future analysts will better
deal with these distinctions by abandoning POS conceptions in fa-
vor of identifying variable relations of movement actors to "external

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476

relational fields" by means of rigorous quantitative analyses covering

multiple movements.

Although he has elsewhere dissented vociferously from the McAdam-

Tarrow-Tilly proposals for analysis of contentious politics,3 here Ruud
Koopmans lays out his own distinctive analysis of relations among
claimants, authorities, publics, and media in contemporary politics.
Following a path opened earlier by Todd Gitlin,4 Koopmans exam-
ines the feedback from the (widely studied) selective process by which
media report on movement activities to the (neglected) impact of infor-
mation about social movement participants that other political actors
and participants themselves glean from mass media reporting. He treats
movement activism and media representations as co-evolving through
selective mechanisms he calls discursive opportunities. He also joins
a recent interpretive stream by arguing that increasing communica-
tion within and about social movements by means of electronic media
is significantly altering relations between social movements and their
publics.5

In that recent literature, two interestingly different versions of the ar-

gument cross each other. The first says that electronic mediation so
lowers coordination costs for collective action that the scale and likely
impact of social movements are growing apace. The other makes quite
a different claim: to the extent that movement visibility and success
depend on media attention, older social movement organizations and
strategies depending on personal ties and local mobilization lose their
effectiveness, and new forms of popular politics emerge. Koopmans
stresses the second line of argument. Although one might connect his
argument with Goldstone's relational fields, far more so than Goldstone
he stresses how mass media themselves channel perception and inter-
pretation of opportunities for collective political endeavor.

My co-editor Maria Kousis strikes out in yet another direction. Ten-

tatively accepting the idea of political opportunity structure, she uses
close studies of environmental politics in Greece, Spain, and Portugal
to show how parallel opportunities and threats arise in political and
economic processes. Her intellectual strategy then consists of showing
that processes already reasonably well described in political terms -
opportunity-threat spirals, governmental repression-facilitation, bro-
kerage, and more - have close parallels in the economic sphere.
From there she proceeds to show that differing economic contexts
in these three countries shaped significantly different environmental

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 477

movements. Although governments stood behind a number of eco-

nomic opportunities and threats (for example, through their offering
and withholding of public subventions), Kousis traces how even those
flows of resources exerted an influence partly independent of govern-
mental political programs. Finally, however, she calls for a synthesis
between analyses of political and economic contexts of social move-
ments.

At first glance, Javier Auyero's essay comes from a separate world: the
world of grassroots participation in social movements. Auyero's vivid
portrayal of Argentine local conflicts relies on close ethnography rather
than on systematic comparison of numerous cases and locales. Yet he
makes it perform conceptual work that takes his analysis back onto the
explanatory terrain occupied by this symposium's other contributors.
He concentrates on one element in the classic social movement agenda:
the repertoire. Auyero follows the subtle interdependence among phe-
nomena that other social movement analysts have often sensed were
related, but have rarely articulated so clearly: the array of available
means for making collective public claims (the repertoire), adaptations
of those means to local circumstances, collective self-representations,
collective self-conceptions, routine social life, and individual life
histories. Eventually he poses for all analysts of contentious politics
a question that remains mostly implicit in the other articles: Exactly
what causal connections exist between everyday social arrangements
and active participation in collective making of claims?

In the final substantive article, Sidney Tarrow shifts both the scale and
the historical context of the discussion dramatically. Yet eventually his
analysis, too, bears on the explanation of collective political processes
and their outcomes. Tarrow rightly points out that my own treatment of
changes in European states after 990 A. D. provided no clear account
of why Italy's wealthy, powerful Renaissance states neither became
dominant political powers in post-Renaissance Europe nor evolved
into more massive centralized structures on the models of a Prussia, a
France, or a Great Britain. He therefore undertakes to repair my own
account, ironically, by adopting a perspective I have often employed
in other work: looking closely at intersections between state structures
and contentious politics.

A state that quite effectively linked mercantile interests with govern-

mental institutions, Tarrow argues, inhibited the very sorts of collec-
tive action that elsewhere in Europe renegotiated relations between

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478

rulers and ruled. Thus, in company with Mees, Goldstone, and Kousis
(and in no outright opposition to Diani, Bison, Koopman, or Auyero),
Tarrow insists on the grounding of collective claim making and its
consequences in changing political structure. Perhaps that insistence
seems obvious. But, as Tarrow says in detail elsewhere, it calls at-
tention to a shared position across the symposium: all of our authors
have rejected earlier traditions that derived collective action, protest, or
contention directly from either the stresses of social change or from in-
terests generated by locations within social divisions by class, gender,
race, ethnicity, religion, or region.6

Nevertheless, the full array of articles reveals genuine, consequential

differences with regard to the two sets of choices I identified earlier: 1)
which aspects of political processes the analysts single out for descrip-
tion and explanation; 2) what sorts of conceptualizations and explana-
tions of those processes they propose. On the whole, Mario Diani, Ivano
Bison, Ruud Koopmans, and Maria Kousis concentrate on explaining
variation and change in the strategies adopted by potential social move-
ment actors as well as the effects of those strategies under varying or-
ganizational circumstances. Although extrapolation of the trends and
variations detected by this first group of authors easily produces predic-
tions concerning long-term transformations of public politics, Ludger
Mees, Jack Goldstone, and Sidney Tarrow undertake more deliber-
ately to describe and explain longer-term transformations of political
context and consequences. Javier Auyero's analysis certainly invokes
explanations of variation and change in strategies, but roots them much
more deeply in local circumstances than do his colleagues. Collective
strategies, long-term change, and local grounding set quite different
explanatory challenges. None of these choices trumps the others, but
they clearly lead to different modes of explanation.

As for explicit conceptualization and explanation, differences among

our authors occur at two different levels: theoretical and meta-
theoretical. Despite the fact that Goldstone has carried on massive, con-
crete historical studies in other contexts,7 for example, his current essay
differs fundamentally in analytical style from those of Mees and Tar-
row, both of whom seek to ground particular historical episodes in more
general explanatory frameworks. Again, Goldstone and Koopmans es-
pouse models of deliberate strategic action that differ significantly from
the organizational-process models informing most of the other articles.
Mees, for his part, energetically rejects the sorts of mechanism-based
political process explanations adopted by Tarrow and Kousis; for him,

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 479

organizational continuity, regional culture, and collective memory play

larger explanatory roles than they do for any of his fellow authors. On
the terrain of public politics, we see sharp choices concerning the lines
of conceptualization and explanation that are likely to enrich future
knowledge.

Behind those theoretical differences loom meta-theoretical choices.

Let me distinguish only four possibilities, all of which cast shadows
on the collected articles:

* Regardless of whether we call the general phenomenon under ex-

amination political conflict, protest, collective action, social move-
ments, or contentious politics, we can seek to establish general laws
of its operation. Across all time and space, for instance, we can seek
to identify universal relations between repression or facilitation, on
one side, and political action, on the other. No covering law zealot
figures among the contributors to this symposium-unsurprisingly,
given its context and origin. But among our authors, Jack Goldstone
gestures more generously in this direction than his companions.
* Alternatively, we can try to identify particular mechanisms andpro-
cesses that operate in similar fashion across a wide variety of social
and economic settings. Thus, we can trace analogies to the oppor-
tunity spirals Kousis analyzes in today's Mediterranean into other
settings without claiming that contemporary Mediterranean envi-
ronmental politics conforms in most or all regards to the politics of
Renaissance city-states. As a widely read advocate of mechanism-
process analyses, Sidney Tarrow obviously counts as a representative
of this view.
* We can also decide that distinctive forms of popular politics such
as social movements, contested elections, and nationalism exhibit
historical continuity and constraint such that established precedent,
law, memory, and social relations endow them with special properties
separating them from each other, hence that cross-category analo-
gies and comparisons do more harm than good. We sense Ludger
Mees pulling us in this direction, although with a historian's discreet
skepticism.
* Finally, we can decide that the essential work of analysts in this
field consists of placing specific important episodes within their
immediate social contexts for explanation, drawing only with the
greatest caution on broad concepts and explanations. Despite his deft
employment of tools from general analyses of contentious politics,
Javier Auyero shows us the attractions of this perspective.

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480

These choices certainly qualify as contentious, but we will not resolve

them by straightforward comparison of competing theories, much less
simple matching of data on contentious politics with tightly formulated
hypotheses. They depend on understandings of how the social world
works in general. This symposium's many virtues include the way these
understandings direct the attention of contentious politics' analysts
to profound, contentious choices in their definitions of what they are
actually trying to explain, how, and why.

Notes

1. I have recently had my public say on these conceptual, methodological, and ex-
planatory issues at length in Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, Dy-
namics of Contention (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and in
"Processes and Mechanisms of Democratization," Sociological Theory 18 (2000):
1-16, "Mechanisms in Political Processes," Annual Review of Political Science
4 (2001): 21-41, "Event Catalogs as Theories," Sociological Theory 20 (2002):
248-254, "Grossdimensionale Gewalt als konfliktive Politik," in Wilhelm Heit-
meyer and John Hagan, editors, Internationales Handbuch der Gewaltforschung
(Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2002), "Agendas for Students of Social Move-
ments," in Jack A. Goldstone, editor, States, Parties, and Social Movements
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), The Politics of Collec-
tive Violence (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Contention
and Democracy in Europe, 1650-2000 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), Social Movements, 1768-2004 (Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Press,
2004), "Lullabies, Chorales, and Hurdy-Gurdy Tunes," in Roger Gould, editor,
The Rational-Choice Controversy in Historical Sociology (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004), and "Repression, Mobilization, and Explanation," in Chris-
tian Davenport, Hank Johnston and Carol Mueller, editors, Repression and Mo-
bilization: What We Know and Where We Should Go from Here (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2004). I will therefore resist the temptation to seize
this pulpit for yet another sermon,
2. They also cross-classify each of these processes as conflictual or consensual. In the
present analysis the distinction provides ideal types for the characterization of dif-
ferent networks and justifies concentrating on the conflict side of social movement
activity. For a more extended treatment of conceptual matters, see Mario Diani, "In-
troduction: Social Movements, Contentious Actions, and Social Networks: 'From
Metaphor to Substance'?" in Mario Diani and Doug McAdam, editors, Social Move-
ments and Networks. Relational Approaches to Collective Action (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003).
3. Ruud Koopmans, 2003. "A Failed Revolution-But a Worthy Cause," Mobilization
8 (2003): 116-119.
4. Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching. Mass Media in the Making and Unmak-
ing of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
5. For contending views, see Lance W. Bennett, "Communicating Global Activism,"
Information, Communication & Society 6 (2003): 143-168; Neera Chandhoke,
"The Limits of Global Civil Society" in Marlies Glasius, Mary Kaldor, and

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 481

Helmut Anheier, editors, Global Civil Society 2002 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002); Ronald J. Deibert, "International Plug 'n Play? Citizen Activism, the
Internet, and Global Public Policy," International Studies Perspectives 1 (2000):
255-272; Paul DiMaggio, Eszter Hargittai, W. Russell Neuman, and John P. Robin-
son, "Social Implications of the Internet," Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001):
307-336; Caroline Haythornthwaite and Barry Wellman, "The Internet in Every-
day Life: An Introduction," in Caroline Haythornthwaite and Barry Wellman, edi-
tors, The Internet in Everyday Life (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002); Ann Pettifor,
"Why Jubilee 2000 Made an Impact" in Helmut Anheier, Marlies Glasius and
Mary Kaldor, editors, Global Civil Society 2001 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001); Vicente Rafael, "The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the
Contemporary Philippines," Public Culture 15 (2003): 399-425, Sean Scalmer,
Dissent Events. Protest, the Media and the Political Gimmick in Australia (Sydney:
University of New South Wales Press, 2002); Jackie Smith, "Globalizing Resis-
tance: The Battle of Seattle and the Future of Social Movements" in Jackie Smith
and Hank Johnston, editors, Globalization and Resistance. Transnational Dimen-
sions of Social Movements (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); Sidney
Tarrow, "The New Transnational Contention: Social Movements and Institutions
in Complex Internationalism," Working Paper 2003.1, Transnational Contention
Project, Cornell University, 2003.
6. Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement. Social Movements and Contentious Politics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
7. See, e.g., Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), "Efflorescences and Economic
Growth in World History: Rethinking the 'Rise of the West' and the Industrial
Revolution," Journal of World History 13 (2002): 323-389.

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