Download IDEOLOGICALLY STRUCTURED ACTION: AN ENLARGED

IDEOLOGICALLY STRUCTURED ACTION:
AN ENLARGED AGENDA FOR SOCIAL MOVEMENT RESEARCH*
Mayer N. Zald'
The conceptual definitions we use in social science often need adjusting to allow scholars to
hone in on issues that are obscured under other definitions and to open research agendas.
Here it is argued that a focus upon social movements as ideologically structured action
accomplishes two objectives. First, it allows us to incorporate cultural/cognitive components
of action into our core definition. Second, it helps us to broaden our research agenda to
include a deeper and fuller view of socialization to social movement ideology and to social
movement-related action that takes place in a variety of institutional arenas, including
electoral competition, legislative processes, bureaucratic agencies, and executive ojfces.
Definitions, key concepts, and methodological/epistemic co mmitments provide opportunities
and constraints for communities of scholars (Zald 1995). They provide opportunities in that
they guide scholars to problems and help shape a research agenda. However, they also
provide blinders, limiting vision and excluding what may be important topics from
consideration. Roberta Garner (1997) has argued that the field of social movement analysis
has undergone noticeable shifts in its conception of its core object, both in response to
movement events in the society and to internal debates to the co mmunity of scholars.
In this paper I argue that the definitions, key concepts, and major concerns that have
served social movement scholars well for the last several decades have also led to some blind
spots. I will identify some of them and propose an alternative definition of our central
concerns.1 Growing in part from that redefinition, I will argue for an enlarged agenda.
In brief, I argue that a redefinition of social movement behavior as ideologically
structured action (hereafter ISA) opens up an agenda that extends the reach of social
* Revision of a paper delivered at the 1997 meetings of the American Sociological Association, in a session
organized by Paul Burstein. I am indebted to Jennifer Murdock and Genie Deerman for critical comments and
research assistance. Ken Goldstein, Mario Diani, Hank Johnston, John Kenny, Bert Klandermans, John McCarthy,
Doug McAdam. Susan Stokes and Sidney Tarrow provided valuable comments on earlier drafts. I am especially
indebted to the Comparative Politics Workshop at the University of Chicago for a most stimulating discussion.
†
Mayer N. Zald is Professor of Sociology at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. 48109-1382
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It is still the case that we often present definitions in an essentialist and naturalizing mode, ignoring that for
scholars they represent pragmatic and heuristic choices. Moreover, the potential extension of a term is often not its
actual extension. For instance, although it is common in the political process model to talk about social movement
activity as a group's "claims-making activity," it is the more disruptive, nonroutinized claims-making that has actually
been the focus of research. Koopmans and Statham (1998) have recently shown how including a broader range of
claims-making activity changes our characterization of social movement activity in different countries.
© Mobilization: An International Journal, 2000 5(1): 1-16
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movement analysis. On the micro and social psychological level, it opens up an extended set
of issues of how people are socialized to social movement ideologies. On the meso and macro
levels, social movement related behavior is found in the interplay of movements, parties,
bureaucracies and executive offices of government. I will argue that although there are some
problems in adopting this wider view of social movement activity, the gains from including
i mportant phenomena in our field of investigation well offset the dissolution of boundaries.
The two parts of the paper are not necessarily tightly entailed. That is, some readers
may accept the first part of the argument, but think I have used it to spread the field of
research too widely. Others may think I have highlighted important research problems, but
that a change in our core definition of social movements and our core focus, as is suggested,
is unnecessary and not adequately justified. For me, however, the conceptual shift that is
proposed makes it easier to bridge to the enlarged agenda. Consider the paper a contribution
to a conversation about our future.
THE CURRENT STATE OF THE FIELD OF PLAY
For close to three decades the collective action/resource mobilization framework has
provided an important and capacious paradigm for theorizing and research. It and its close
relative, the political process model, have been extraordinarily fruitful and elaborated
conceptual phenomena that had been largely overlooked or ignored in earlier approaches, and
in generating an empirical research agenda.
It is worth noting that the resource mobilization and political process approaches
focused largely on political movements, an important but by no means exclusive concern of
earlier theorists who would have been interested in theorizing, as well, the mobilizing, group
process, and societal acceptance and resistance aspects of religious, expressive, and individual
change-oriented movements. (Note, however, that the economistic version of RM represented
by McCarthy and Zald (1977), with its emphasis upon the supply and demand aspects of
movements, competition and differentiation within social movement industries, and so on, can
be and has been used to study religious and individual-change movements.)
It is also worth noting that the cultural turn had not yet hit the study of social
movements when these paradigms were first formulated. They emerged in a period when a
behavioral structuralist orientation in the social sciences had detached itself from the study of
ideas and philosophy and their embodiment in institutions and general epistemes. Thus, these
paradigms had difficulty in accommodating themselves to cultural concerns and were not very
receptive to the social movement aspects of the rise and fall of philosophies and ideologies.
Although scholars in other disciplines might see the movement aspects of the spread of
Enlightenment ideas, or the social processes in the growth and diffusion of liberalism,
socialism, and conservatism, that kind of social movement process was not on the agenda (but
see Wuthnow 1989).
For variety of reasons, events and processes in the world of movements and in the
world of scholarship have lead the resource mobilization/collective action program (hereafter
RM/CA) to become widely criticized and alternative paradigms or approaches to be
developed.2 Social movement events and processes occurring in society provided one source
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In what follows I do not present all of the criticisms that have been made of either RM/CA or of political
process models; rather I focus on those most relevant to the direction of this paper. John McCarthy and I are
preparing a "reply to critics" as part of an assessment of the current status of the RM program. Jeff Goodwin and
James Jasper (1999) have recently critiqued the political process approach, with replies by David Meyer, Charles
Tilly, and Sidney Tarrow.
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of criticism. The rise of new social movements revolving around identity consciousness and
programs of life-world commitments led many scholars to argue that the RM/CA program
was irrelevant to those kinds of movements. Early on, analysts of new social movements
argued, we needed to know more about the processes of collective identity formation and the
relationship of collective identities to the transformation of modem society, not political
processes and resource mobilization, if we were to understand the current turn in social
movements. Later, it was recognized that NSMs also developed political programs and that
there was a complex interaction of identity formation, mobilization, and political process.
Melucci's (1996) most recent comprehensive analysis masterfully attempts to
integrate the dominant themes of NSM analysis with RM/CA. Nevertheless, the analysis of
identity formation and identity maintenance processes leads in a different direction than the
main thrust of RM and political process research programs (but see Bernstein 1997).
Intellectually, the cultural turn in the social sciences has also hit the study of social
movements (Johnston and Klandermans 1995). It is clear that RM/CA has to stretch to take
cultural concerns seriously. Culture, discourse, ideology, and frames introduce a cognitive
/cultural set of concerns that seem to run orthogonally to the structuralist/political concerns
of RM/CA. Although scholars such as David Snow see framing activities as a complement
to RM-type analyses, exactly how they are to be integrated remains an open question.
McAdam, McCarthy and Zald (1996) published a collection of theoretical and empirical
analyses that explicitly juxtapose cultural and framing concerns with mobilizational and
political opportunity processes and structures. However, juxtaposition is not the same as
integration. (For other papers that look at the relationship of framing to opportunity structures
see Benford 1997; Diani 1996. See also Sherkat 1998b, who melds framing and resource
mobilization via structuration theory.)
Nevertheless, RM/CA and political process approaches constitute a vital paradigm.
The study of protest events, one of the defining features of the CA program, remains healthy
and, in the hands of the international team of Neidhardt, Rucht, McCarthy, McAdam, Olzak
and Soule and their students, may be entering an exemplary normal science phase, with a well
institutionalized replicable set of procedures for using newspaper reports as core data,
supplemented by many other indicators.
Moreover, many issues raised to the forefront by RM/CA theory remain to be
studied. My general sense is that we have been better at studying the micro-mobilization
processes of individual effort than the mobilization of financial support; better at studying
more disruptive aspects of movements than other forms of claims-making; weaker on studying
cadre and professional careers and dynamics than studying participation of activists in general;
and more likely to study individual movements than engage in comparative studies of
movement families or industries. There are exceptions to each of these assertions, yet they
represent the general strengths and weaknesses of the current state of play.
It may well be that the political process approach has supplanted earlier RM/CA
formulations. Still, they are alive and well, with research in many countries guided by its
analysis of the structural and process concatenations of the political context of movements.
Thus, I do not want to argue that we need a wholesale rejection of what remains a vital
paradigm. Instead, I want to argue for a change in our angle of vision. We need to consider
the behavior of social movement adherents as ISA as a focus of our theorizing and research.
ISA AND MOBILIZED MOVEMENTS
Ideologically structured behavior is that behavior which is guided and shaped by
ideological concerns-belief systems defending and attacking current social relations and the
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social system. Ideological concerns may be manifested in elaborate, relatively coherent, and
integrated systems of beliefs that have long histories and are widespread in a civilization, or
they may be manifested in catch-phrases and metaphors that have mainly local resonance.
Cadres and leaders of social movements are likely to have more developed and coherent
systems of beliefs than casual adherents, sympathizers, and by-stander publics.
To attribute ISA to a movement does not imply full consensus on the ideological
core. Although social movement organization (hereafter SMO) may generate positions and
documents that seem to articulate coherent ideologies, activists in that SMO may not all share
a commitment to that ideology. Moreover, the ideological base of action may be less explicit
and less coherent in different phases of a movement and its related parts. When movements
emerge from quotidian grievances (Snow et al. 1998), for instance, and less immediately tie
to large ideological programs, ideology may be emergent, tied to cultural attribution
processes, but fractured, changing, and contradictory. Still, ideologically related concerns
shape the behavior of all levels of movement participants and many people in the larger
society touched by the ideology (Snow and Benford 1988; Zald 1996).
ISA should not be seen as antithetical to the rationality assumptions of RM/CA
analysis, but as building in the valuational and cognitive /belief components that inform the
choice processes central to RM/CA analyses. Moreover, ideologically structured action is a
function not only of socialization and inculcation but also of reactions to current situations,
and to the responses of publics and authorities to the prior ideologically informed actions of
movement actors. Ideology both emerges from and manifests itself in practice.
Using the lens of ISA is one way of breaking the dualism of culture and structure and
of integrating culture and action. Inherently part of culture, ISA leads us to look at the
concrete symbols and beliefs manifested in particular movements at particular times. A focus
on ISA is compatible with a dialogic, discursive approach to movements (Steinberg 1998).
In contrast to frame analysis, ISA is both more apparently tied to culture and more
systematic, though not without contradictions, inconsistencies, and blind spots. Stated another
way, as I see it, frame analysis is sometimes detached from culture and downplays the
organization of frames into larger symbolic and representational systems.
In no way is this meant to deny the importance of frames, narrowly conceived, in
shaping responses to key events or policies or in guiding perceptual and behavioral responses.
For instance, Kinder and Sanders (1990) study of responses to affirmative action policies
showed how wording survey questions in terms of an "unfair advantage" frame as contrasted
with a "reverse discrimination" frame elicits different patterns of support for the same social
policies. Rooted in signs and symbols, and inherently based in culture, frames may have
affects independent of their ties to explicit ideologies. Nevertheless, I am arguing, beginning
with ISA will give a more capacious entry point for linking culture to movement action.
A focus on ISA will change the angle of vision from which we approach the study
of social movements. The core of the study of social movements has been the study of
mobilized action, and especially action made visible by protests of some kind. Mobilized
action has been both dependent and independent variable. That is, we have been concerned
with the processes leading to different levels of mobilization of different kinds of resources,
the tactics and repertoires of contention, and in the consequences or outcomes of
mobilization-for participants, for authorities, for public opinion, for SMOs, for public
policy, and even for culture. Since public protests are often created by informal networks of
activists or SMOs, one has to study the structure and activities of activists even when they
are not engaged in public protests. And some social movements may be oriented towards
changing society and social arrangements, but engage in protest activity that is less publicly
disruptive, such as lobbying activities, letter writing campaigns, and press conferences.
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Lobbying activities may be considered a form of claims making. Although many students of
social movements may focus upon the forms of collective action that seem to be the epitome
of contention-boycotts, demonstrations, marches, vigils, sit-ins, and the like-still,
conceptually they may recognize that these less disruptive forms of protest are also forms of
claims-making based upon mobilization of resources.
If one is mainly concerned with the forms of protest, the mechanisms for mounting
protest, and the changes in the forms and organization of protest, it may be possible to ignore
the protest's content, to ignore the kinds of claims that are being made and the views of what
is wrong with the world and how to make it right that are contained in movement ideologies.
Just as we can talk about the transformation of capitalism, or the transformation of the
structures of political parties as long term structural matters, so, too, can we talk about the
long term transformation of repertoires of contention, or the long term trends in levels of
mobilization, without discussing ideology. That is, there are many theoretical and research
questions that can studied without talking about how the issues being contested shape the
nature of the conflict-who participates, with what programs, and with what aspirations.
Similarly, many of the propositions in McCarthy and Zald (1977) are about factors that shape
the supply and demand for movements, and their organizational and industry composition,
without regard to ideologically related differences.
On the other hand, if your goal is to describe and analyze specific movements or
families of movements, then it is highly likely that you must take into account the ideological
diagnoses and prognoses that shape movement adherents' world view and programs of action.
Roberta Garner (1996) has recently published a survey of social movements of the twentieth
century. Without ignoring mobilization, tactics, and organization, Garner makes ideology the
center of her analysis. Garner's book is intended as an introduction to contemporary
movements for undergraduates. It describes the core ideologies and organizations associated
with general and long-standing ideologies such as liberalism, conservatism, and socialism as
well as more recent ideologies and movements-fascism, nationalism, environmentalism, and
feminism. While it is possible to introduce students and lay people to the analysis of
movements via generalized and abstracted aspects of contention and mobilization, as soon as
you begin introducing them to specific movements, the analysis ends up introducing the
layered and textured distribution of ideologies and frames and associated action in the groups,
individuals, and organizations that comprise what we label as the movement.
Moreover, as Dalton (1994: 13) notes, even researchers interested in core issues of
the RM/CA or the political process program end up introducing ideologically related issues
through the back door when they "code" or analyze specific issues, conflicts, and movements.
Although systems may have generally more or fewer resources available for movements and
political systems may be more or less generally open, as McAdam (1982) argues, there is
likely to be variation in resource availability and the system's openness, depending upon the
specific targets and ideologies of movements and movement factions. The political opportunity
structures for particular movements or parts of movements are in fact created from the
interaction and response of authorities and others to the ideologically shaped action of
movement adherents. Aspects of ideology end up as empirical parameter constraints for
structural analyses. That is, structural and mobilizational dynamics are analyzed within a
relatively fixed ideological context. If, over time, the ideological alternatives of a movement
shift, so too do the mobilizational and structural potentials. Furthermore, broad formulations
such as anticommunist or democratic ideologies provide the more general ideological context
in which specific movements with specific agendas make their claims.
Russell Dalton (1994), who to my knowledge first uses the term "ideologically
structured action," demonstrates the usefulness of combining an RM approach with the choice
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criteria that develop from ideology in order to understand the varieties of environmentalist
groups and their behavior in Western Europe. He moves ideology from its usual status as a
descriptive element in social movement studies to a causal element in explaining agendas,
tactics, and movement outcomes. Dalton does not discard the theoretical frame offered by RM
or NSM: he does, however, significantly enlarge the scope of these approaches. Beginning
from the different ideology espoused by environmental groups, Dalton argues that an SMO's
ability to perceive and take advantage of political opportunity and its ability to acquire
resources are profoundly conditioned by the world view of SMO leaders. For example,
contrasting Greenpeace with the Royal Society for Nature Conservation, it is clear the two
organizations would attempt to acquire resources in very different ways, use different tactics,
and would relate to authorities in different ways. Dalton explains this variance in terms of
contrasting ideologies. Thus, he avoids the tendency of RM and NSM approaches to analyze
movement behavior without regard to ideology, in the former case, and without regard to
political opportunity and context, in the latter case.
In one sense his results seem somewhat obvious; in another sense they are stunning.
Empirically there are large differences in the strategy and tactics of environmental groups that
are reasonably well-explained quantitatively by both their resources and political opportunities
and their ideological base and commitments. Correlation and factor analysis demonstrate that
variance in SMO political action is the result of ideological orientation. Contrasting ecology
groups (identified with an ideology challenging "politics as usual") and conservation groups
(identified with establishment politics), Dalton demonstrates that ideology more effectively
predicts SMO behavior than the predictors emphasized in RM and NSM.
Using a more differentiated model of environmental movement discourse to study
American environmental SMOs, Robert Brulle's (1995, 1996) analysis essentially confirms
Dalton's approach for the American case. Where Dalton uses a dichotomous classification of
environmental SMOs, Brule shows that a more fine-grained analysis of differences in ideology
have substantial consequences. His analysis yields six types—preservationism,
conservationism, ecocentrism, political ecology, deep ecology, and ecofeminism.
It seems to me that it is relatively easy for social movement theory and research to accept
Dalton's major premise. Putting ISA at center stage makes it easier to understand mobilization
processes. We assume that it is easier to recruit from groups with similar values and
ideologies than from groups with conflicting values and ideologies-indeed, when we use the
terms "sympathizers" or "latitude of acceptance" that is precisely what we mean. Similarly,
in understanding alliance formation or political opportunity structure we are often indexing
ideological sympathy on the part of alliance partners or political officeholders. What may be
more difficult to legitimate in the community of social movement scholars is research that
looks at social movement-related action in venues that we have not usually considered sites
of social movement action. In the next section I argue that our agenda has been too narrow:
ISA occurs in many venues.
FAMILY, SCHOOL, AND STATE ACTION
Earlier I mentioned that we have had as our core concern the visible mobilized
portion of social movement activity and the processes and time periods in which the
movement first emerged. It is common to argue that the less mobilized phases of movement
activity deserve more attention, but that usually means paying attention to abeyance structures
(Taylor 1989) of well constituted movements. We have been less likely to examine the
processes of fractionalization and dissolution of movements (but see Gitlin 1980; Klatch
1999). While it is still true that we would benefit from more studies of movements when they
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are not emerging, and/or at high tide, here I want to argue in a different direction. Namely,
our core concerns have led to too narrow a vision of how social movement action connects
to activity in other venues. In particular, two questions are raised: 1) At the microlevel, how
do individuals develop ideological commitments and how do they maintain them? 2) At the
institutional/political level, how does ISA permeate and penetrate political parties and
governmental action?
The Family and the Classroom
Because we study movements in their mobilized and mobilizing phase, and because
we often have disconnected movements from larger ideological and historical movements, we
have tended to assume the ideological/value commitments of possible participants. Our
theories have been about already-socialized adolescents and adults. We do not ask how
sympathetic bystanders become sympathetic. What life processes have led them to identify
with the movement's beneficiaries, with the movement's diagnoses? Even when we study
conversion processes, where a transformation of commitments is seen as part of the
recruitment process, the convert's prior life and commitments are a small part of the story,
as are the ideological surrounds of that prior life. Ignoring the processes of socialization to
ideology may not have large costs in thinking about de novo movements that spring up around
specific and hard grievances. (Although the attributions of blame and the definitions of
problems, even for movements developing around specific hard grievances, always involve
shared understandings and cultural beliefs.) However, in understanding larger movements that
tie to historic cleavages and ideologies about the structure of society, about how society ought
to be governed, the relationship of individuals to each other and to the state, the relationship
of human beings to the environment, understanding the ways in which ideological
commitments are transmitted and formed deserves more attention than we currently give it.
Happily, we do not need to invent a new sub-field, the field of social movement
socialization. A parallel discipline exists at the borders of political science, psychology, and
social psychology that focuses on political socialization (Jennings and Niemi 1974, 1981). It
is striking how little attention is given to this field by sociologists studying social movements.
I suspect that many of the findings will translate directly. For example, family socialization
and the social position and ideology of parents will correlate with younger generation's
commitments. Richard Flacks (1971) talked about the Red Diaper babies as the source of
activism in the student and anti-Vietnam War movement, but few followed his lead.
There are some interesting issues that emerge if one juxtaposes movement and
political socialization. For instance, generalized identification with a movement may parallel
identification with a party. That is, one may self label as an environmentalist or a feminist
just as one does as a Democrat or Republican. Familial transmission of political identifications
may parallel familial transmission of movement identities.
Yet, identification with movements may not be the same as identification with parties,
and/or generalized ideological identities such as liberal and conservative. Compared to social
movements, in most nations institutionalized politics is a larger part of everyday life. Election
rituals are collective phenomena that appear to have a more explicit place in family discourse.
Elections demand decisions-whether to vote at all, and whom to vote for. Many social
movements may not get in the door. This is all hypothetical: although we know something
about how the population perceives social problems and social issues over time, we do not
know much about the population's consciousness of movements and how it compares with the
consciousness of institutionalized politics.
It is important to distinguish between identity transmission and ideology transmission,
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though the two are connected. That is, one can develop an identity as a feminist or an
environmentalist, or even as a radical feminist or radical environmentalist, and yet differ in
the basket of policy choices that are roughly associated with the identity. Political socialization
studies find that the family has a more substantial impact on partisan identifications than on
attitudes and policy orientations; the latter are more open to experience and societal events.
Does the same hold for social movement identities and policy attitudes?
A second related issue is the maintenance and erosion of co mmitments and ideology.
Phil Converse (1969) published a model of the maintenance and erosion of commitment to
political parties. Converse noted that the emergence of new parties intersects with the
emerging commitments of people choosing identities for the first time, and those converting
to the party. If the party persists, as people age their identification becomes more stable. New
cohorts entering the political arena will have different patterns of identification than earlier
cohorts. The Converse model has been applied in many countries (Converse and Pierce 1986).
Partisan realignments are accompanied by older cohorts' weakening co mmitments as well as
a change in the recruitment of younger cohorts (Beck 1976).
There are parallel problems, often noted but rarely studied, in the transformation of
commitments to social movements. If we were to apply Converse's model to social movement
identifications and ideological commitments, we would need data on how co mmitments and
identifications with movements shift over time. (Converse's model is in fact narrower, applied
only to party identification.)
We do know something about these questions for activists. Although not directly
designed to get at the issues posed by Converse, we have studies that show how movement
participation (which can be considered a proxy for co mmitment and identification) bears on
later commitments and identifications. Thus, a line of research (Fendrich and Tarlau 1973;
McAdam 1989) explores how activists' later lives have been affected by participation.
Whittier (1995) has studied how the micro-cohorts of generations of radical feminist activists
in Columbus, Ohio shifted in their perspectives as the movement went through phases and
experienced disjunctive events. Similarly, in an in-depth analysis of activists of the 1960s,
from both left (SDS) and right (YAF), Rebecca Klatch (1999) shows how succeeding microcohorts differed in their perspectives on society and the movements with which they affiliated.
She also shows how participation in movement fragments shaped later lives.
However, to my knowledge we do not have parallel studies of the transformation of
commitments of bystander publics and sympathizers. Yes, we track public opinion over time,
which can be seen roughly as an index of commitment to movement goals, but not at much
depth. We have few studies that unpack over time identification with movements and the
shifting acceptance and rejection of movement goals and ideology in mass cohorts. For
instance, in comparison to 1970, today it would appear that many more people accept some
notion of equal pay for equal work, or gender-blind access to jobs, yet we probably have not
had an expansion in the proportion of the population that identifies as feminist.
Socialization takes place not only in the family and in peer groups, but also in the
classroom. Nobody viewing the debates over multiculturalism in the curriculum can fail to
see that commitment to alternative ideologies and world views are at stake in those debates.
The schools teach hegemonic ideologies. Movements of any duration breach the curriculum
as adherents who are educators reshape the curriculum. The parts of movement ideologies that
achieve high consensus in the population are especially likely to become part of the explicit
curriculum, and even more conflictual versions of the ideology are likely to enter the
curriculum in schools catering to the part of the population that is especially drawn to the
ideology. Today, ecological concerns and versions of environmentalism are systematically
taught. Twenty years ago they were not. Black History Month may be given cursory attention
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some schools, but in African-American high schools it is likely to get major play. The school
curriculum, in conjunction with family, community and media, contributes to the spread of
a movement ideology far beyond the initial group of cadre and activists. Put another way,
changes in the curriculum are an outcome of social movements; in turn, socialization in
school helps to create the reservoir of sentiments that are mobilizable at later stages of a
movement.
Of course, the ideological socialization that occurs in family, peer group, and school,
does not automatically translate into behavior. One of the oldest lines of research in social
psychology has to do with the conditions which facilitate or inhibit the translation of attitudes
into action. It even could be argued that one of the great contributions of social psychological
studies of micro-mobilization actually has been a specification of the behavior/attitude
interaction for the specific case of social movements. What are the conditions for the
translation of sentiment pools into action (Klandermans 1997)? Moreover, participation in
movements shapes ideology. This is a recursive process. Nevertheless, understanding where
ideological attitudes and beliefs come from should be a more prominent part of the agenda.
Moreover, recently we have been presented with a model of how early socialization
and later participation in institutions can help explain adult attitudes and behaviors. In a series
of articles, Daniel Sherkat and his collaborators (Sherkat 1998a; Sherkat and Blocker 1994,
1997; Sherkat and Ellison 1997) explore how family of origin and participation in religiouslyaffiliated schools combine with participation in religious institutions to shape behavior and
readiness to participate or not in left- and right-wing movement-related behaviors. Using data
from the 1965-1982 Youth Parent Socialization Panel Study, for instance, they are able to
substantially explain participation in the counter-culture of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Sherkat's aim is to develop and test models of social movement and religious participation that
link early socialization, cognitive and emotive components of beliefs and behavior, and
situational constraints that affect choice (see Sherkat 1998b).
My hunch is that we have a great deal to learn by asking how much the study of
political socialization can be borrowed to illuminate social movement socialization. We also
have a great deal to learn from thinking about how school curricula reflect the ideologies of
movements long after the movements have crested. School curricula are part of the stock of
culture. One of the less-noticed outcomes of social movements may be the impact of
movements on culture through the curricula. This cultural stock helps create the sentiment
pools for later action.
Extending the Research Agenda to the Polity and State
It is common, especially among proponents of the political process approach, to
argue that political movements are politics by other means, or that social movements represent
a vehicle for access when formal institutions deny access; one turns to movements when
access to routine politics is denied, or when one cannot achieve one's objectives there. But
the converse is less often argued-routine politics are often an extension of social movement
ideologies by other means (Tarrow 1998). Although the exigencies of electoral politics,
administration, and rule may compromise purer forms, ideologically structured action is
carried out in institutionalized politics, and administrators and politicians with commitments
to movement ideologies interact with the movement in a myriad of ways. By stopping our
analysis at the gates of office, or at the end of a lobbying session, we miss a lot of the action.
It is not that ideologically structured action is the same when it occurs in party,
legislative, bureaucratic, or executive arenas. Of course, it is shaped by the exigencies and
norms of each arena. The logics of action in a dedicated SMO, or in an informal network of
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activists will be different than the logics of action in a party or a legislature. Rather, it is
argued, actors with similar ideological commitments in different arenas shape their sense of
friends and enemies, of alliance partners and opposition, of right and wrong behavior and
choices because of their shared commitments. Bureaucrats, legislators, jurists, and executives
identify with movements and share ideologies with those we label activists and leaders.
Let me state the issue even more provocatively: Does anyone believe that Ronald
Reagan was part of the conservative movement before he ran for the presidency and not after?
Or, to take a more recent example, does the promotion of a world-wide agenda on the rights
of women by Hillary Clinton and Madeline Albright (Newsweek 1997), as well as other
agencies of the U.S. government, not count as part of the feminist movement? Such action
may well be part of an American/Western hegemonic project, but it is also part of the action
repertoire of a feminist movement. While there may be some analytic and disciplinary turf
issues involved in spreading the social movement net deeper into routine politics, (issues to
which I will return later), I hope to make clear that there are some advantages. Five key
issues are addressed. The first three issues all involve the relationship of movements to
parties: (1) decisions to work within the electoral system versus outside of it; ( 2) the
consequences of working within the party system; 3) movements and parties when their
agendas closely overlap. Issues four and five focus on other levels of governmental action:
(4) ISA and bureaucratic participation; 5) state leadership and ISA.
Movements inside or outside the party system. If social movements are politics by
other means, an important question becomes when do people organize outside of the party
system, when do they attempt to achieve their ends by forming new parties, and when do they
attempt to gain influence within established parties? When the RM/CA program was initiated,
leading scholars such as Tilly and Gamson took the position that a group mobilized outside
of routine politics when it was denied access or had little influence. Certainly that is part of
the story, but not the whole one. Recently, political scientists, historians, and sociologists
have begun to reveal a more complex set of scenarios. Work on the Christian Right and the
Republican Party (Oldfield 1996; Usher 1997) and work on the transformation of the
party/movement interface (Aminzade 1995; Hanagan 1998) in European politics reveals a
range of options that we need to take seriously. Let me give a historical example and a crossnational structural constraint that reveal the complexity of the movement/party interface.
Ron Aminzade (1995) shows how nineteenth-century French Republicans faced the
question of whether they should take to the streets and attempt to mobilize a revolutionary
takeover, or work within the legislative system. It was no longer a question of whether their
supporters had the right to vote (they had already gained access), but whether the legislative
system, which they deeply distrusted, could be responsive. That is, did access and
representation by itself mean anything? Aminzade describes a cycle of working within versus
out of the party system. It was ideologically structured action whether it was inside or outside
of the party system. I suspect a host of parallel within/outside choices can be found in other
countries-whenever it is easy to form parties that can gain representation and where the
system is believed to be unresponsive and difficult to change.
There are also structural and legal constraints on the decision to form movements
outside of parties, or to create new parties. Movements in America face a two-party system
with plurality rules that make it very difficult for small parties to gain representation. Thus,
movements in America face extreme difficulty in organizing parties. At least since Maurice
Duverger wrote his great book Political Parties (1954) political scientists and political
sociologists have known that electoral rules (e.g., plurality of votes, majority rule, run-off
systems as well as size of district, numbers elected from a district, etc.) can encourage or
discourage multiple parties. In Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in World Electoral
Ideologically Structured Action
11
Systems, Gary Cox (1997) shows in detail how electoral rules shape the coordination problems
and party possibilities for different levels of government. Cox's work shows how electoral
rules set upper bounds for the number of possible parties.3
The smaller the proportion of the vote that enables a party to gain representation, the
easier it is for interests with a small base to gain party status and representation. Kim and
Ohn (1992) have shown that the geographic concentration of minorities and parts of the
population defined by significant social cleavages increases the probability that a nation will
have a multi-party system. In multi-party systems, small parties can sometimes have
disproportionate weight in the formation of ruling coalitions.
In the contemporary period, it is clear many movements which in the United States
are organized outside of the party system are organized in conjunction with parties (not
exclusively) in other countries. Environmental movements, nativist movements, far right
movements, peace movements, far left movements, and so on all take on a different
organizational mode depending upon the ease of gaining electoral system representation. That
ease of gaining representation fundamentally recasts the problems of activists and movement
organizations. How a movement relates to other parties not as clearly identified with it, how
much it focuses on electoral politics, how much ongoing strategy is shaped by the needs of
the identified party, how tightly tied movement action outside the party system is to action
within the party system, all are configured by the party system.
The consequences for movements of party and electoral politics. Commitment to
winning elections and to participating in legislative politics creates fundamental dilemmas for
movements and movement activists. On the one hand, unless the party's electoral base is very
secure, the need to win elections forces parties and office seekers to compromise programs.
On the other hand, once in office, legislative processes force pragmatic compromises, logrolling, and attention to other issues that more purely ideologically focused members may find
abhorrent.
Two brief comments: First, the dominant model of office seeking purveyed by
American political science has been that the guiding rule of politics is to win election to
office. Thus, office seekers are seen as driven to the center of their districts. Office-holders
are also always seeking reelection. Thus, they too are driven to the median voter position.
Recently, John Aldrich (1995) has argued that while the office seeking premise should not be
ignored, it can be significantly modified by the policy preferences of office seekers. That
suggests that there is now an opening for students of social movements to join with students
of legislative politics in thinking about the way in which ideologically structured action shapes
the operation of legislatures.
Second, ideologically structured action within legislatures creates a dynamic of
compromise that tests ideological commitment. Herbert Kitschelt's book, The Logics of Party
Formation: Ecological Politics in Belgium and West Germany (1989), has the virtue of
convincingly exposing the alternative role orientations and ideological conflicts that are
presented to office holders. A legislator with deep concern about movement goals, but little
commitment to maintaining the party in a governmental coalition, is going to face very
different decisional conflicts and career choices than a legislator with a pragmatic orientation,
or one with a commitment to a political career.
Movements and parties sharing common ideologies. There is an interaction among
parties and party factions committed to a particular ideological formation and the SMOs and
3
Of course, not only electoral rules determine the number of parties: rules and processes for funding elections,
the degree of control of candidate selection by party elites, the extent to which established parties have become
discredited, all influence decisions to accept the current array of parties or attempt to establish new ones.
12
Mobilization
activists outside of parties and government. Parties depend upon the movement organizations
and their constituents for support, and the SMOs pressure the parties for action and tactical
maneuvers to achieve movement goals. There are also reciprocal attempts at social control.
Movement organizations can embarrass parties. Unencumbered by the need to get elected,
their tactics and actions can make the party look too radical from the electorate's and other
parties' point of view. Radical flank effects occur not only in the interaction of parts of a
movement external to government, but in relationship to allies within the state.
Diarmuid Maquire (1995) documents these relationships for the case of the Italian
and British peace movements in relationship to the PCI (Italian Communist Party) and British
Labor Party, respectively, of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Maquire focuses on a case in
which the party is in the minority. The two cases differ profoundly, since the PCI had more
a more movement-like quality, had little chance of electoral victory, and directly controlled
the peace movement. Maquire applies his analysis to left movements and left parties in the
minority. I would only add that the same kind of analysis can apply when the party is in the
majority and on the right. Except in parliamentary systems that are dominated by majority
parties with very strict discipline, few parties can fully enact their platforms when they are
elected. Thus, a continuing dialogue about the speed and depth of governmental action is
likely to take place between the movement in government and the movement in society.
Bureaucratic agencies and control. Social movements generate a demand for new
policies and for new agencies of government (Skocpol 1992). Not only are new agencies
created but there may be a continuing battle for control and support. One of the perquisites
of executive office is the ability to appoint sympathizers to key administrative positions. Not
all administrative positions are equally important to movements, depending upon their distance
or closeness to programs, policies, and issues implicated in the movement's ideology. But for
those that are implicated, the appointment of administrative cadres is a major way that the
movement's programs get implemented. The appointment of sympathetic cadres is important,
especially where agencies and departments have substantial administrative discretion and their
actions are not tightly constrained by law. Few students of social movements have pursued
this line of analysis. Thus, aside from Richard Gale's (1986) provocative analysis of the
contest for control of agency policies in relationship to the environmental movement, we have
to rely on largely anecdotal evidence (but see Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockman 1981).
Bureaucratic agencies not only have networks of constituents and clientelistic
relationships from which administrative cadres are selected, they also, in the American
context, have triangular relationships with legislative committees and constituent groups. By
taking control of appropriate departments and agencies, bureaucrats committed to a movement
ideology may achieve movement goals even if the legislature blocks new programs. It is
important to remember that in a large fragmented government, counter-movement groups may
also have a foothold in the legislature and in administration. The conflict of movement and
countermovement may be carried on within government as it is in society.
State leadership. There are special advantages that come to state leaders, those who
hold the highest offices and speak for the state. In complex societies they have access to the
trappings of power and to the mass media in a way that few others do. The focus of the
media on executive pronouncements means that movement ideology has a forum for broadcast
well beyond what can be commanded by almost any other participant in political life.
Many issues in the relationship of movements to parties, bureaucracies, and
legislatures apply also to the relationship of movements to state leaders. The movement gains
reflected glory. Movement activists and others claim a mantle of legitimacy not only if they
have a direct authorization from state leaders, but if the power of the state is seen as fully
aligned with the movement. Of course, it is possible that movement supporters get falsely
Ideologically Structured Action
13
reassured by the election of someone identified with them to the highest office. Just as at the
legislative level, the logics and constraints of action in the executive arena mean that
executives cannot always deliver an outcome that a purer commitment to ideology would
demand. Yet, I suspect that having a chief of state identified with movement ideology leads
groups and individuals relatively neutral to the movement to align themselves with presumed
commitments of the leader. Moreover, those close to the leader can use their positions to
articulate movement ideology and programs, even if a specific program of political change
is not taken forward.
CONCLUSIONS: THE ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF ISA
I have argued for a redirection of social movement analysis to ideologically
structured action. We already assume that ideology shapes many of the processes involved in
social movement activity-from the choice of coalition partners and alliance formation, to
understanding the choice of tactics, to understanding the latitude of sympathizers' acceptance
of these. Recognizing that social movement action is ideologically structured action makes
more explicit what has been implicit. Moreover, it provides a linkage to cultural and framing
analysis while retaining the emphasis upon choice that was important to the RM/CA agenda.
Beyond making ideology a more explicit part of our analysis, I have argued that it
opens up the possibility of an expanded research agenda. On the more micro and social
psychological side, I have argued that it opens up both the issue of SM socialization and the
issue of movement identification in a potentially fruitful way. It also opens up a window to
the relationship of movements to parties, to legislative activity, to bureaucratic politics, and
to governmental rule that extends our agenda. Especially in advanced western democracies
where protest is less violent and more assimilated within the polity (see Mayer and Tarrow
1998), treating social movements as outside of the polity makes less sense than it once did.
A focus on ideologically structured action helps us untangle the common threads.
I believe a focus on ISA represents a corrective of the field's over-identification with
protest events-a key phenomenon which the CA program has tended to lock onto. Especially
for periods and for movements where the most significant acts are not in public protest,
marches, demonstrations, etc., a focus on ideologically structured action allows us to follow
movement action wherever it occurs and whatever form it takes. Our own period is one in
which there continues to be a great deal of movement activity, even though much of it is less
visible than, say, the 1960s. Indeed, as Kelly Moore (1996) shows, one of the residues of
periods of high protest may be the institutionalization of ideologically structured action in
pressure groups and professional organizations.
I have not discussed the intersection of social movement analysis with interest group
analysis that has largely been the province of political scientists. But established interest
groups are often born of social movements and embody their ideologies. Thus, the work of
political scientists on the lobbying and mobilization strategies of different kinds of interest
groups becomes relevant to social movement analysis.
Some readers may argue that a focus on ideologically structured action as a defining
feature of movements merges movement analysis with politics in general. That is a possible,
but not necessary consequence. All of politics and government is not about ideological
matters; there are degrees of ideology and ideological structuring. Ideologies and political
programs differ in the extent of transformation that are imagined and in the amount of
consensus and resistance that they call forth. As exemplified in Dalton's (1994) and Brulle's
(1995, 1996) work, a focus on ideologically structured action helps us understand many of
14
Mobilization
the traditional issues in the study of social movements. It also opens up a wide agenda that
we have barely touched.
Because of the division of labor that exists between political science and sociology,
it is likely that many social psychologists and sociologists who write about social movements
will continue to focus upon movement-related activity that occurs outside the context of party
and state action; the focus will be on mobilization for change outside of the formal political
arena. By no means would that be a disaster, but it would represent a self-imposed limit that
truncates our understanding of how movements are involved in social change.
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