Course Expecations

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Introductions

About the Instructor

About the Course

About the Students

A Brief History of Social Movement Theory

A Brief Introduction to Historical Data and Methods

Discursive Fields and Cultural Schemata

Required Reading

• Armstrong and Crage (2006)
• Ghaziani and Baldassarri (2011)

Movements and Framing

What does framing refer to?

Frame Alignment Processes

Snow et al. (1986)

Core Framing Tasks

Snow and Benford (2000)

• Diagnostic Framing
• Prognostic Framing
• Motivational Framing

Methodological Issues

• What types of historical data contain frames?
• Where can we find it?
• How can we measure the types of frames discussed?

Movements and Collective Identity

Collective Identity

Conceptual Understanding (Snow 2001)

a shared sense of ‘one-ness’ or ‘we-ness’ anchored in real or imagined shared attributes and experiences among those who comprise the collectivity and in relation or contrast to one or more actual or imagined sets of ‘others.’

Collective Identity

Further Conceptual Understandings (Polletta & Jasper 2001:284)

an individual’s cognitive, moral, and emotional connections with a broader community, category, practice, or institution. It is a perception of a shared status or relation, which may be imagined rather than experienced directly, and it is distinct from personal identities, although it may form part of a personal identity. A collective identity may have been first constructed by outsiders (for example, as in the case of ‘‘Hispanics’’ in this country), who may still enforce it, but it depends on some acceptance by those to whom it is applied. Collective identities are expressed in cultural materials – names, narratives, symbols, verbal styles, rituals, clothing, and so on – but not all cultural materials express collective identities. Collective identity does not imply the rational calculus for evaluating choices that ‘‘interest’’ does. And unlike ideology, collective identity carries with it positive feelings for other members of the group.

Collective Identity

• Contrast with individual identity
• An interactive process, not an attribute
• Contested and orients conflict
• Primordial, structural, and constructivist approaches

Collective Identity

Key Questions (Snow 2001:2216-8)

• How is it created? Expressed? Sustained? Modified?
• How is it aligned with individual identities?
• How is it bounded?

Movements and Culture

Movements and Culture

As Context, Toolkit, Target, and Outcome

Movements and Culture

How do we approach culture as an object to study?

Laboratory

Case Selection, Source Materials, Content Analysis, and Recent Advances

Case Selection

• Bound one or more cases by time and space
• Logic of cross-case selection strategies
  • Theoretical reasons
    • Typical, Diverse, Extreme, Deviant, Crucial test, Pathway, Most-similar, Most-different
  • Practical reasons
    • Language, Data availability, Theoretical background

General Approach

• Conceptualization
• Locate evidence
• Evaluate evidence
• Organize evidence
• Synthesize findings
• Narrative

After selecting a case, how do we find materials?

Practical Tips

• Retain as many materials as possible
• Look widely, keep an open mind, and browse related materials
• Over-organize
• Leverage open source and public domain materials
  • Copyright laws
  • Proxy servers
• Ask for help
• Be willing to pay money for services, archival trips, etc.

Content Analysis

Content Analysis Collects Data from "Texts"

• What could a "text" be?
• Advantages?
  • "Dead"
  • Reliable
  • Replicable
• Disadvantages?

Content Analysis Steps

Krippendorff (2004:83)

• Unitizing
• Sampling
• Recording/Coding
• Reduce Data
• Infer Context
• Narration

Recent Advances

Exploratory Application

Let's find some data related to an historical social movement.

Exploratory Application

Look for representative information. Evaluate primary and secondary sources. Convenient places to start:

• Archive.org
• Project Gutenberg
• Google Books

E.g., Knights of Labor. 1878. Record of proceedings of the General Assembly of the Knights of Labor. Reading, Pa: The Assembly.

Exploratory Application

Some Possible Questions to Ask

• Does the text include tables?
  • E.g., p. 4
• Does the text include proper nouns?
  • E.g., p. 26
• Does the text include organizational features?
  • E.g., p. 29-38
• Does the text include text that represents the movement's identity?
  • E.g., Preamble, p. 28-29

Exploratory Application

How can we automate the data extraction process?

• Cleaning tables
  • Object character recognition
  • Regular expressions: find and replace
  • Save as a delimited text file
• Cleaning text
  • Remove "noise"
  • Unitize
  • Organize
• Advanced software
  • E.g., http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/

Exploratory Application

1. Break into groups
2. Apply the above steps to a movement organization of your choosing
3. Report your findings to the class

Movements and the Media

Problems Receiving Scholarly Attention

• Data
• Movement Outcomes
• Media Work
• Technology

News Media as Data

• Counting Protest
• Bias
  • Description
  • Selection (e.g., Oliver and Maney 2000, Myers and Caniglia 2004)
    • E.g., legislation, size, police involvement, day of week, counterdemonstrations, amplification, holidays and annual events, distance from news outlet, city population size
• Protest Forms

News Media Coverage as Movement Outcomes

• News media as venue for contention
• Operationalizing coverage
  • Counts
  • Editorial priority
  • Sentiment
• Implications from "fame" (e.g., van de Rijt et al. 2015)

News Media as Movement Work

• Resource mobilization
  • Movements actively work to gain coverage
  • News media preferences (Andrews and Caren 2010)
    • Likes: large, professional groups; advocacy tactics; overlapping interests with newspaper
    • Ambivalent: confrontational tactics, volunteer-based, novel issues

Social Media and Movements

• Movement tool (Bennett and Segerberg 2012)
• Discursive venue (Roscigno and Danaher 2001, DiGrazia et al. 2013)
• Social laboratory (Golder and Macy 2014)
  • Potential issues
    • ​Privacy
    • Measurement
    • Parallel Universe
    • Methods, Skills, Training

Exploratory Application

Ways to Collect Online Data

Easiest to Hardest

1. Copy/paste/download
   1. E.g., Google Trends, Ngram Viewer, CrunchBase
2. API
   1. Service, e.g., TwitterFaces, Timeu, Netlytic, or VKMiner
   2. Create an account and make "requests."
      1. Twitter, NYT, Yahoo!, Reddit, DBPedia, CrunchBase, etc.
3. Web scraping
   1. Service, e.g., Kimono or Import IO
   2. Code your own scraper, e.g., BeautifulSoup

Politics, Opportunities, and Macroprocesses

Protest Cycles

Mobilization/Demobilization

Tarrow (1989)

Political Opportunity

A Collection of Contextual Factors

Political Opportunity

Opportunity and Threat

Political Opportunity

Political Opportunity

• Structures vs. Signals
• Issue-Specific vs. General Opportunities

(Meyer and Minkoff 2004)

Political Beneficiaries and Outcomes

• Outcomes vs "Success"
• Recipients of outcomes
• Inclusion vs "Acceptance"
• Do movements actually matter?
  • Often, but contingent upon political conditions. No "recipe" for success.
  • Political mediation model: political actors benefitting from movement support.

Amenta et al. (2010)

World's first illegal fishing treaty comes into force

Campaigners say first-ever global treaty to stop illegal fishing is a welcome step, but not enough.

Application

Considerations for Measurement

• Unit of analysis
  • Longitudinal?
  • Cross-sectional?
  • Aggregate data
• Cross-national political research

Popular Sources

• Cross-national
  • World Bank, CIA World Factbook, Polity Series, European Elections Database, ElectionGuide, PARLINE, ILO, OECD, Transparency International, etc. 
• National
  • E.g., U.S. Census, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey

Open Government Data

• Cities
  • E.g., Moscow, Chicago
• Nation-States
  • E.g., Russia, United States, France
• Sub-national states, regions, provinces
• Etc.

Non-Political, Contextual Data

• Polling, values, attitudes, identity
• Cultural (e.g., religion, art, language, fashion, music)
• Education (e.g., opportunity, level, quality, practices)
• Economic, agricultural, and resource management
• Ecological and environmental

Task for your Case

• Find at least one indicator of mobilization as well as relevant political opportunity and/or threat indicators.
  • Data needs >= 5 observation points
  • Needs structure, signaling, issue-specific, and general
• Identify multiple aggregate units with variability that can speak to these observation points. They must share a common time, location, or both.
• Time permitting, create a bivariate visualization.
• Is the scale appropriate and meaningful? What are the data's strengths and weaknesses?

Organizations, Networks, and Participation

Resource Mobilization

Movements as Organizational Phenomena

• Social movements as organizations
• Social movements targeting organizations
  • States
  • Businesses
  • Education
  • Religion
• Social movements depending on organizations

Resource Mobilization

McCarthy and Zald (1977)

• Business Metaphor
  1. Social Movement Organizations (SMOs)
  2. Social Movement Industries (SMIs)
  3. Social Movement Sector (SMS)
• Competition
• Resources include money, personnel, capital

Multi-Stage Participation

Klandermans and Oegema (1987)

1. Mobilization potential: agreement
2. Targeted by movement: network interaction
   1. Shared time, space
   2. Overlapping organizations
3. Motivated to join
   1. Selective incentives
   2. Sanctions
4. Overcoming barriers
   1. Biographical availability
   2. Socio-demographics
   3. Age, period, cohort effects

Social Movements as Networks

Traditional Themes

• Recruitment
• Protest diffusion
• Coalitions and overlapping
  • Members
  • Events
  • Issues
  • Tactics
• Implications for collective identity
• Other implications?