John D. McCarthy

Social movements often seek to draw attention to issues they deem important by organizing public demonstrations with the aim of attracting mass media coverage. But only a small proportion of all public demonstrations receives any media attention. This article asks whether even the minimal coverage that demonstrations receive reveal any influence of social movements in shaping how issues are framed by the mass media. Analyzing newspaper and television news stories on Washington, D.C. protests held during 1982 and 1991, we ask whether news reports on protests are framed in ways consistent with the aims of protesters. Do demonstrators receive media coverage that highlights the issues about which they are concerned, or does coverage focus on the protest event itself, to the exclusion of the social issues that movements target? Our results support much of the surmising among media scholars, that even when movements succeed at obtaining the attention of mass media outlets, media reports portray protests in ways that may undermine social movement agendas. Despite this obstacle to communicating protest messages through demonstrations, movements engage in other forms of communication that can affect public interpretations of mass media frames.

Social capital plays a central role in facilitating the mobilization of social movement organizations (SMOs). Do the initial mobilization advantages of social capital persist, however, as movement organizations evolve? And do the strategies pursued by social movement organizations affect these advantages? We investigate these questions through a broad empirical analysis of factors affecting the short-term persistence of local chapters of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). Reasoning that multiple forms of social capital would each have a positive impact on survival, we assess the independent effect of several indicators of social capital with mixed results. Consistent with prior research, we find that access to patronage at founding and a greater stock of weak ties in the community confer survival advantages. Yet SMOs that emerged from preexisting groups and those with leaders previously tied to one another through civic engagement were less likely to persist, raising a first cautionary flag about the generality of advantages of resource co-optation and “bloc recruitment.” The effect of preexisting, strong ties among group leaders varies by how much emphasis the group placed on victim aid activities. Those ties conferred expected survival advantages on groups that did not strongly emphasize victim aid activities. The implications of these results are discussed.

Expectations about police responses to disorderly campus gatherings are explored here using details about nearly 400 disorderly convivial gatherings and confrontational protests that occurred during recent decades. Past work suggests that protests may represent threats to authorities, but protests also are privileged by the First Amendment, yielding conflicting expectations about the forcefulness of police responses. In contrast, convivial gatherings, even those that breach the public order, may be less threatening to authorities, while at the same time more difficult to police because of their comparative lack of social organization. Analyzing details of the gatherings, we find that while police frequently attempt to disperse disturbances of both kinds, they use force in only a small minority of them. However, police are substantially more likely to use force when protest participants also use force than when convivial participants do, suggesting that the relationship between threat and police response is heavily contingent upon the nature of the event as well as the behavior of participants. The findings highlight the interplay between the internal dynamics of gatherings and the way they are perceived by authorities.

This study builds on political mediation and movement infrastructure models to highlight contingent and synergistic ways in which social movements may impinge upon the U.S. national policy-making process. Analyses employ a variety of datasets to examine the role of environmental movement organizational capacity, protest and institutional activity in garnering Congressional attention to, and action on, salient issues from 1961 through 1990. We find all types of movement activity, but especially the development of national organizational infrastructures, to be positively associated with the convening of Congressional hearings on the environment. Only when there are high levels of both protest and institutional activity is there any evidence that the environmental movement directly influences the passage of environmental laws.

Organizations active in mobilizing low- and moderate-income communities make considerable efforts to combat inequalities and build voice for citizens, despite inherent challenges of obtaining resources, maintaining member interest, and retaining staff. How, then, do such groups remain viable—even thriving—organizations? Building upon research on organizational theory and social movements, we examine patterns of survival among a sample of community-based organizations (CBOs) between 1990 and 2004, thus providing the first systematic study of their long-term mortality processes. More specifically, we test how organizations' sociopolitical legitimacy and resources (and strategies for cultivating both) influence survival, finding that the legitimacy of organizations in low-income areas is a double-edged sword, as embeddedness in resource-deprived local environments confers both benefits and disadvantages. In particular, we find the strongest support for the notion that, beyond the considerable effects of externally obtained resources, CBOs also benefit considerably by engaging in even a small amount of grassroots fundraising. Further, although we find significant effects of extra-local legitimacy in the baseline models—through organizations' affiliation with national or regional organizing networks—we find evidence in additional analyses that the survival benefits of network affiliation are largely mediated by resources. We also find sizable but marginally significant effects of local legitimacy, and significant positive effects of organizational age and urban location. Overall, our findings suggest that although cultivating resources is the surest path to survival, organizations that build their legitimacy will be in a better position to compensate for structural resource deficits.

Why do some social movement leaders work harder than others? And, how does gender affect the patterns we uncover? Utilizing historical case study evidence of local chapters in the emerging movement opposing drinking and driving we are able to develop and test theoretical expectations about predictors of weekly effort among MADD and RID leaders. Taken together, our model explains 45 percent of the variation in leadership effort. We find bureaucratic complexity and victim support activities are more powerful predictors of effort than are individual leader characteristics, although all are important. Further analysis reveals that gender almost wholly conditions the strong effect of bureaucratic complexity on leadership effort so that increasingly complex chapter structures are associated with substantial increases in work hours for women but not men.