Social Movements. Donatella della Porta

Of course, their networks of interaction favor the formulation of demands, the promotion of mobilization campaigns and the elaboration and diffusion of beliefs and collective identities. These factors all, in turn, contribute to redefining the cultural and political setting in which the action of interest representation takes place. However, when we focus on the function of interest representation in strict terms, we do not look at the way “the movement” performs this function. We look at the way different specific social movement organizations do this. Whether or not they decide to include participation in elections within their repertoire of action is dependent upon several factors including external opportunities, tactical and/or ideological considerations and their links to other actors in the movement. The mere fact that they decide to do so, however, will not automatically exclude them from the movement. Rather, they will be part of two different systems of action (the party system and the social movement system), where they will play different roles. The way such roles are actually shaped will constitute a crucial area of investigation (see e.g. della Porta, Fernandez et al. 2017).

      1.2.5 Social Movements and Protest

      Until the early 1970s, debates on social movements emphasized their non‐institutionalized nature (see e.g. Alberoni 1984). Even now, the idea that social movements may be distinguished from other political actors because of their adoption of ‘unusual’ patterns of political behavior is still very popular. Several scholars maintain that the fundamental distinction between movements and other social and political actors is to be found in the contrast between conventional styles of political participation (such as voting or lobbying political representatives) and public protest (Rucht 1995). Protest is undoubtedly a distinctive feature of political movements, on which we shall largely focus in this book; while it is less conspicuous among movements focusing on cultural and personal change, like religious or countercultural ones (Snow 2005).

      There are some objections to considering protest a core feature even of political movements. First, public protest plays only a marginal role in movements concerned with personal and cultural change, in religious movements, and the like. Cultural conflict and symbolic challenges often take forms such as the practice of specific lifestyles, the adoption or certain clothes or haircut, and the adoption of rituals that can only be regarded as protest if we stretch the concept to a very considerable degree (Snow 2005). Moreover, even in the political realm it is increasingly debatable whether protest can still be considered an “unconventional,” or even violent or “confrontational” activity. Various forms of political protest have become, to an increasing degree, part of the consolidated repertoire of collective action, at least in Western democracies. In general, protest seems no longer restricted to radical sectors, but rather, an option open to a much broader range of actors when they feel their relative position in the political process to come under threat (Dalton 2008; McCarthy, Rafail, and Gromis 2013).

At the same time, however, public protest still differentiates social movements from other types of networks like those referred to as ‘epistemic communities’ (Haas 1992, 2015; Keck and Sikkink 1998). These communities are organized around networks of individuals and groups with specific scientific and/or managerial competences in distinct policy areas. Like social movements, their members share a common frame of reference and take side on conflictual issues. The forms of structural ties and exchange of resources within those networks are however different from those that tend to characterize social movements. Epistemic communities involve actors usually endowed with decision‐making power and certified knowledge, as well as, often, electoral accountability. Instead, social movement actors usually occupy a peripheral position in decision‐making processes, and need to mobilize public opinion to maintain their pressure capacity. Even if some forms of protest are “normalized,” social movements tend to invent new disruptive forms of action—challenging the state on issues of law and order. It is true that, thanks to new communication technologies, forms of protest online have developed alongside more conventional ones, as illustrated by mail bombings or anonymous hackers entering protected sites of government or corporations (Coleman 2013; McDonald 2015). However, as the waves of collective mobilization at the turn of the century and from 2011 have confirmed, social movement politics is still to a significant extent “politics in the streets” (Gerbaudo 2012; della Porta and Mattoni 2014). The use of protest as a major source of pressure power has relevant effects on the structure and strategy of social movements.

1.3 IN THIS BOOK

      In this chapter we identified four broad questions that have recurrently attracted the attention of analysts of social movements since the 1960s. These refer to how changes in the social structure in Western countries, most specifically the passage from an industrial to a post‐industrial mode of social organization, might affect the forms of collective action (section 1.1.1); how cultural and symbolic production by social actors enables the identification of social problems as worthy objects of collective action and the construction of collective identity (section 1.1.2); how organizational and individual resources make collective action not only possible but also successful, at least potentially (section 1.1.3); how the forms of action adopted by social movements, their developments over time, and their clustering in broader waves of contention are all affected by the traits of the political and social systems in which social movements operate (section 1.1.4).

      For each of these questions we have also identified some of the most influential answers provided by social movement scholars over the years. This has enabled us to introduce, if briefly, the main approaches that have characterized the field in the last decades: most particularly, if not exclusively, the new social movements, the collective behavior, the resource mobilization, and the political process approach. While none of these perspectives can be reduced to just one of the questions we identified, they all speak more neatly to one of such questions. The new social movements perspective can be regarded first and foremost as a theory of how the stakes and the central actors of social conflict are modified under changing structural conditions; the collective behavior approach mainly theorizes the role of symbolic production in shaping collective action and the conditions for the emergence of new issues and/or identities; resource mobilization theory explored the conditions leading to the emergence of collective action among people who might have more than one good reason not to engage in it; finally, the political process approach looks at the forms of collective action and their variation across different political regimes and different points in time.

In the second part of the chapter, we have showed how social movements may be regarded as distinctive social and political processes. In particular, we have identified their distinctiveness in their consisting of informal networks, linking individual and organizational actors engaged in conflictual relations to other actors, on the basis of a shared collective identity (section 1.2.1). This has enabled us to differentiate social movements from a number of other related processes and phenomena. These include collective actions oriented to non‐conflictual goals, e.g. in the field of charity work (section 1.2.2); the differences between movements and coalitions, mobilizing on specific issues or events (section 1.2.3); the relationship between political organizations such as parties and traditional interest groups and social movement processes (section 1.2.4); and the role of protest in contemporary movements (section 1.2.5).

      As we have repeatedly argued, the questions we have identified are neither restricted to nor specific of social movement analysis, and can be of interest to a much broader spectrum of social and political analysts. At the same time, they are surely central to social movement research as it has developed