Most social scientists cling to a progressive image of history, in which one group after another organizes for various rights and interests, pursues them in a number of arenas until—often after much struggle and bloodshed—they gain the legal recognitions and influence on policies they seek. The circle of rights and recognition slowly and inexorably expands outward. Scholars of social movements, in particular, are committed to the idea that the protestors they study have a broad impact and play a key role in history. Their faith in this idea often outpaces the evidence and makes the proposition difficult to test.
Anyone who studies regimes that claim to be democratic faces a similar question: How do preferences among organized and mass publics work their way into political decisions and public policies? Or do they? Most current theories of political movements were formed during and inspired by the protests of the 1960s and 1970s, which kept the progressive vision alive despite occasional setbacks. Perhaps we need new theories that incorporate the lessons of the great backlash that began in the 1970s and entrenched itself in two globally powerful governments with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Has progress toward social justice stalled, or actually reversed?
The editors and contributors to Routing the Opposition (mostly political scientists and sociologists) examine the interaction between state and movement in some detail, across diverse American cases both historical and contemporary. These include struggles over worker compensation a hundred years ago; old-age pensions in the 1930s; benefits for veterans of the Civil War, World War I, and World War II; prisoners' rights during the last 30 years; regulation of organic agriculture; local antidrug activities; the inclusion of women in government offices; and the rights of legal immigrants in California. Many of the chapters are useful summaries of contributors' larger research programs and findings, and all are useful efforts to see whether and how movements affect policy. Such different mobilizations, with diverse goals, promise some comparative theory building.
Unfortunately, the theoretical terms and causal mechanisms uncovered are almost as diverse as the cases. Edwin Amenta presents a “political mediation model” in which challengers must match their strategies (more or less radical, essentially) to the political contexts they face. Frank Baumgartner and Christine Mahoney use the language of agenda setting. John McCarthy sees a “Velcro triangle” of “state-movement interpenetration” and “channeling.” For Lee Ann Banaszak, the attainment of “insider status” is a crucial form of “state-movement intersection,” while for Ryken Grattet, a “policy nexus” forms through networks of professionals. Suzanne Mettler looks for “policy feedback effects.” These are all reasonable metaphors and concepts, skillfully deployed, but it is not always clear if they also amount to different causal mechanisms that we could combine into broader models. Despite the editors' efforts, it is not clear how the different ideas are related to one another. As it stands, the book offers a rich but random grab bag.
Perhaps the editors and authors have set an impossible task for themselves. To address the “relationship” between states and social movements is, in the end, to reify each of them. A state is as much (or more) an arena for contestation as it is a player, and it is rarely a unified player at that. The same is true of movements, which are complex, tentative (and largely imagined) networks and cooperations among a variety of groups and individuals. Every government agency or protest group is also an arena of struggle among those individuals and factions with their own goals and favored means. Only if we forget this can we be surprised, for instance, at the degree to which members of a movement may also be government officials, or at coalitions between those who work for nongovernmental organizations and those who work for the state. Any number of players, with multiple and shifting goals, can occupy almost any positions inside or outside the state (an extremely porous boundary, as many of these authors show).
If we take strategy seriously, we need to rethink who the players are. We need to accommodate both individuals and compound players in our models, recognizing that compound players are at the same time arenas as well as players. We need to think in terms of actions and goals, rather than trying to assume these from players' structural positions. We need to look at strategic choices made at many different levels, and put aside metaphors of insider and outsider, as though the state were a fortress surrounded by movements battering at the portcullis—to add to the metaphors already used in this book to simplify a messy set of strategic engagements.
