Participation And Protest

Using surveys, experiments, and fieldwork from several countries, this book tests a new theory of participation in elections and protests.

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.

The contributors to Beyond Civil Society argue that the conventional distinction between civic and uncivic protest, and between activism in institutions and in the streets, does not accurately describe the complex interactions of forms and locations of activism characteristic of twenty-first-century Latin America. They show that most contemporary political activism in the region relies upon both confrontational collective action and civic participation at different moments. Operating within fluid, dynamic, and heterogeneous fields of contestation, activists have not been contained by governments or conventional political categories, but rather have overflowed their boundaries, opening new democratic spaces or extending existing ones in the process. These essays offer fresh insight into how the politics of activism, participation, and protest are manifest in Latin America today while providing a new conceptual language and an interpretive framework for examining issues that are critical for the future of the region and beyond. Contributors. Sonia E. Alvarez, Kiran Asher, Leonardo Avritzer, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Andrea Cornwall, Graciela DiMarco, Arturo Escobar, Raphael Hoetmer, Benjamin Junge, Luis E. Lander, Agustín Laó-Montes, Margarita López Maya, José Antonio Lucero, Graciela Monteagudo, Amalia Pallares, Jeffrey W. Rubin, Ana Claudia Teixeira, Millie Thayer

The Occupy movement and the Arab Spring have brought global attention to the potential of social media for empowering otherwise marginalized groups. This book addresses questions like what happens after the moment of protest and global visibility and whether social media can also help sustain civic engagement beyond protest.

This book analyzes social movements across a range of countries in the non-Western world: Bosnia, Brazil, Egypt, India, Iran, Palestine, Russia, Syria, Turkey and Ukraine in the period 2008 to 2016. The individual case studies investigate how political and social goals are framed nationally and globally, and the types of mobilization strategies used to pursue them. The studies also assess how, in the age of transnationalism, the idea of participatory democracy produces new collective-action frames and mass-mobilization strategies. The book challenges the view that most social movements unequivocally seek to achieve higher levels of democratization. Instead, the authors argue that protesters across different movements advocate more involved forms of citizen participation, since passive representation through liberal democratic institutions fails to address mass grievances and demands for accountability in many countries.

An ideal introduction for undergraduate students of social movements in courses on sociology, social policy and political theory with a focus on collective action and social protest. The book provides accessible theoretical readings and case studies of particular movements concerned with women's rights, ethnicity and 'race', disability, peace, anti-privatization. It explores issues of youth and political involvement, free speech and unemployment and the role of voluntary and community groups in challenging traditional perspectives on democracy. There are contributions from writers at the cutting edge of recent empirical and theoretical work in these areas. Competition: Many texts focus on sociological approaches: (Nick Crossley, Making Sense of Social Movements, D Della Porta and M Siani, Social Movements: an Introduction; S Buechler, Social Movements in Advanced Capitalism). Our text will provide students with an accessible, clear and comprehensive introduction and critical analysis of new social movements and new social movements theory.

When the 2011 municipal takeover in Flint, Michigan placed the city under state control, some supported the intervention while others saw it as an affront to democracy. Still others were ambivalent about what was supposed to be a temporary disruption. However, the city's fiscal emergency soon became a public health emergency--the Flint Water Crisis--that captured international attention. But how did Flint's municipal takeovers, which suspended local representational government, alter the local political system? In Power, Participation, and Protest in Flint, Michigan, Ashley Nickels addresses the ways residents, groups, and organizations were able to participate politically--or not--during the city's municipal takeovers in 2002 and 2011. She explains how new politics were created as organizations developed, new coalitions emerged and evolved, and people's understanding of municipal takeovers changed. Inwalking readers through the policy history of, implementation of, and reaction to Flint's two municipal takeovers, Nickels highlights how the ostensibly apolitical policy is, in fact, highly political.

Why is social protest a normal, almost routine form of political participation in certain Latin American democracies, but not others? In light of surging protests in countries like Argentina, Brazil, and Peru, this book answers this question through a focus on recent trends in the quality of governance and socioeconomic development in the region. Specifically, it argues that increasingly engaged citizenries -- forged by economic growth and technological advances -- coupled with dysfunctional political institutions have fueled more radical modes of participation in Latin America, as citizens' demands for government responsiveness have overwhelmed many regimes' capacity to provide it. Where weak institutions and politically engaged citizenries collide, countries can morph into "protest states," where contentious participation becomes so common as to render it a conventional characteristic of everyday political life. Drawing on cross-national surveys from Latin America and a case study of Argentina, which includes a rich dataset of protest events and dozens of interviews with political elites and citizen activists, Mason W. Moseley tests his explanation against other leading theories in the contentious politics literature. But rather than emphasizing how worsening economic conditions and mounting grievances fuel protest, this book builds the case that it is actually the improvement of economic conditions amidst low quality political institutions that lies at the root of surging contention in the region. Protest State offers a comprehensive study of one of the most intriguing puzzles in Latin American politics today: in the midst of an unprecedented era of democratic governments and economic prosperity, why are so many people protesting?