Testing the impact of disruption

Some scholars test the argument of PPM by “boiling down … the rich, political linkage mechanisms of Piven and Cloward's thesis” to, for example, “the homicide rate times the percentage of the population black.”²

Some early studies reached negative conclusions but were sharply limited in space (the state of Mississippi)³ or time (1964 to 1969)⁴ and included fewer variables than did later efforts. More elaborate tests have found significant support for Piven and Cloward's analysis by using crossnational data from 18 countries,⁵ national data for the United States,⁶ and subnational data for the 50 American states.⁷

Some important data are unavailable. At the height of the welfare rights movement, Piven and Cloward reported “hundreds of sit-ins and confrontations at the district welfare offices.” They added: “Scores of arrests occurred, although generally city officials were loath to arrest recipients in those turbulent times; instead they issued checks” (303). In a recent article, Richard Fording notes that these “relatively disruptive yet nonviolent protests by various welfare rights groups … did not receive much attention from the major news media, and they are not included in this analysis,” although he acknowledges that these events are “potentially relevant.”⁸

Using data from a number of sources, variously operationalized and controlled, scholars have found significant support for the “substantial impact” Piven and Cloward attributed to “mass rioting throughout the nation” (272). Whether measuring riots in terms of their severity or their frequency, whether using the number of incidents or the natural logarithm of that number, whether lagging by one year or two, scholars have shown the success of disruption for the welfare rights movement.⁹

Adding federalism to the analysis, Sanford Schram and Patrick Turbett document a “two-step process of national liberalization of welfare policy and active implementation of such changes by riot-torn states,” and they suggest that the results are contingent as well on partisan competition.¹⁰

Electoral calculation

Fording creatively develops the analysis of the electoral context, considering “the extent to which the insurgent group has effective access to electoral institutions” both in voting rights and apportionment,¹¹

but more work is needed in this area. Piven and Cloward sometimes shortened the phrase “only when the calculus of electoral instability favors the protestors” to simply “electoral instability” (32, 64). Clearly they intended to distinguish between occasions when electoral instability favors those who protest and when it does not. Varying rates of change in the interacting mixes of campaign appeals by candidates, voter loyalties, and electoral participation make the concept more complicated than the closeness of election results and the extent of electoral participation by the aggrieved.

Reverberations of protest

Sidney Tarrow's important work on “cycles of contention” draws attention to the larger context of movement activity: “The outcome depends less on the balance of power between and the resources of any pair of opponents than on the generalized structure of contention and the responses to it of elites, opponents, and potential allies.”¹²

Piven and Cloward's emphasis on the “political reverberations of … disruptions” should be considered in light of that observation. Responses to the welfare rights movement, for example, should be examined in the context of other movements, such as disruptions within the armed forces. A 1970 article in the Naval War College Review raises concerns about the loyalty of “Negro military personnel” in the context of “the coalition of civil rights organizations and the antiwar organizations,” as well as “racial disturbances, riots, urban unrest, … other recent disorders associated with the Negro movement.”¹³ Piven and Cloward observed that movement “[i]nfluence depends, first of all, on whether or not the contribution withheld is crucial to others” (25), and this varies over time. Disruption by the welfare rights movement had greater influence when authorities feared the reverberations of such protest in the armed forces.

Although even the best of the quantitative tests do not address the whole complex argument of PPM about disruption, the electoral context, and the reverberations of protest, they represent thoughtful efforts to address difficult methodological problems and offer reasonable conclusions in support of Piven and Cloward's analysis.

Varied methods

Just as the diversity of operationalizations and control variables in the quantitative efforts lends credence to Piven and Cloward's argument about the importance of disruption, so do similar conclusions from different methodologies.¹⁴

Using qualitative comparative analysis¹⁵ to focus attention on the interaction of major explanatory variables, Robert Biggert also finds support for the importance of disruption in combination with crisis and partisan conflict in a study of the success of the labor movement.¹⁶

The final chapter of PPM presented a different kind of test using a different methodology: theoretically informed reflection on participant observation. As participants in the welfare rights movement who “had been studying earlier efforts,” such as those of the unemployed in the 1930s, Piven and Cloward observed a striking “parallel with the relief movement in the Great Depression” (279, 353). Their work in, and analysis of, the welfare rights movement thus tested with a different case the set of arguments they developed in their historical analysis. Their intense involvement in the emergence and decline of the welfare rights movement provided depth to their analysis that critics have often missed.

Insurgent consciousness

“For a protest movement to arise,” Piven and Cloward explained, “people have to perceive the deprivation … they experience as both wrong … and subject to redress”—that is, as “unjust and mutable” (12). This important formulation is quoted in the foundational work on collective action frames; it is the earliest of William Gamson's four sources for the concept he labels “injustice frames,” and is cited as well by David Snow and Robert Benford when they write that “collective action frames … redefine as unjust and immoral what was previously seen as unfortunate but perhaps tolerable.”¹⁷

Piven and Cloward are quoted at length by Doug McAdam, who gave the name “cognitive liberation” to the crucially important process by which people “define their situations as unjust and subject to change.”¹⁸

Citations alone do not indicate the extent of PPM's influence. Without citing Piven and Cloward, Bert Klandermans writes that McAdam “describes cognitive liberation as a change in consciousness in three ways: (1) the system loses legitimacy, (2) people who are ordinarily fatalistic begin to demand change, and (3) they develop a new sense of political efficacy.”¹⁹

Compare that with the following passage, written 15 years earlier by Piven and Cloward: “The emergence of a protest movement entails a transformation both of consciousness and behavior…. First, ’the system’ … loses legitimacy…. Second, people who are ordinarily fatalistic … begin to assert ‘rights’ that imply demands for change. Third, there is a new sense of efficacy” (3–4).

A sense of efficacy requires confirmation in action. Piven and Cloward observed meetings “full of indignation and full of joy that the occasion had finally come for the people to rise up against the source of their indignation,” and they noted how the confrontations that followed “heightened the feeling that group struggle was effective” (292, 298). They recounted how the “exemplary actions” of the civil rights movement cadre “inspired … mass mobilization” (223–4). Piven and Cloward also showed the importance of cadre in “action mobilization”²⁰

and the combination of changed beliefs and changed behavior among the unemployed, describing how “Communist agitators” succeeded in turning “distress … to indignation” and involving others in effective “mass resistance to evictions” (52–5).

The importance of cadre

Typifying the condemnation of Piven and Cloward's alleged “animus against organization,” William Gamson and Emilie Schmeidler criticize PPM for “neglect[ing] to mention” the role of the NAACP in the Montgomery bus boycott and sit-ins in the 1950s.²¹

But Gamson and Schmeidler overstate the role of organization, obscuring a major, and underappreciated, agreement about the role of cadre. They rely on Aldon Morris's work, but Morris himself explains that Montgomery activists “did not organize the boycott through the NAACP,” which he terms “a concrete example of how a bureaucratized organization was inappropriate in the early mobilization stage of a mass protest.”²² Gamson and Schmeidler assert that “[t]he NAACP initiated sitins” in the late 1950s; they quote Morris attributing the early sitins to “[o]rganizational and personal ties.”²³ Theory pointed Morris to organization, evidence to personal ties. He explains that “NAACP activists built networks that bypassed the conservative channels and organizational positions of their superiors.” A network of activists linked to Clara Luper, Morris reports, initiated all but one of the early sit-ins. Quoting James Lawson, he adds: “The NAACP opposed [sit-ins]. The parent body, the branch body, chastised the school teacher [Luper] who was responsible for it, chastised them, told them to desist.” Further, Morris points out: “The national office of the NAACP and many conservative ministers refused to back the Greensboro sit-ins. The NAACP's renowned team of lawyers did not defend the ‘Greensboro Four.’”²⁴ Piven and Cloward remarked that many challenger organizations are “committed by the exigencies of their own survival to more cautious tactics” (26); and indeed, Morris documents attacks on the NAACP that constrained its role in the movement.²⁵

Morris notes that he and Piven and Cloward reached “a somewhat similar conclusion that bureaucratic organizations are incapable of generating and sustaining mass collective action,” but emphasizes his disagreement with the view that “formal organizations in general … prevent mass insurgency” (a view that Piven and Cloward did not actually hold). Morris, like Piven and Cloward, discusses problems with mass-membership organizations and identifies a similar alternative. Recounting disunity and factionalism, and the importance of newcomers free from entanglement in previous quarrels, Morris stresses the role of “local movement centers,” such as the Montgomery Improvement Association. Like the local movement centers, which became affiliates of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), “[t]he SCLC was not an individual-membership organization”; it was an “organization of organizations” (emphasis added).²⁶

Similarly, Piven and Cloward observed how the problem of incentives for both leaders and participants limited the effectiveness of mass-membership organizations, as did the needs of organizational maintenance. They urged as an alternative “a national network of cadre organizations,” an “organization of organizers” (284, emphasis in the original). Much as Morris would later describe the movement, Piven and Cloward described the SCLC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Congress of Racial Equality as cadre organizations effectively mobilizing “through segregated institutions where people were already ‘organized’: the black colleges, churches, and ghetto neighborhoods” (223–4).²⁷

In sum, convergence on the conclusion that “self-conscious organizational cadre played a crucial role”²⁸

is more important than overstated differences among these analysts. Cadre effort alone, however, does not a movement make.

Structure and opportunity

Seeing Piven and Cloward as determinists, Steve Valocchi writes that they rely on “the sheer magnitude of economic collapse” to explain the emergence of the unemployed workers’ movement and that they fail to give sufficient credit to the efforts of radical organizations, including Communists.²⁹

While acknowledging that “Communist organizers worked vigorously,” Piven and Cloward pointed out that they had been doing so “without much success” for nearly a decade (68). Since those efforts failed in some circumstances and succeeded in others, they cannot alone show how the movement came into being. Consistent with Piven and Cloward's analysis, Harold Kerbo and Richard Shaffer conclude from an examination of five decades of the politics of the unemployed that neither “organizational effort” nor “the unemployment rate” explains the emergence of the movement of the unemployed. They identify the crucial changes in circumstances as “perceived opportunities for change” generated by elite disunity, elite discourse favorable to the aggrieved, and contested elections.³⁰

The more elaborate model

In the “inexorable” process of movement decline, Piven and Cloward emphasized concessions redressing some grievances, channeling protest into less disruptive forms, and transforming the larger political context.³⁴

These were not mutually exclusive categories since “concessions are rarely unencumbered…. [T]hey are usually part and parcel of measures to reintegrate the movement into normal political channels and to absorb leaders into stable institutional roles” (32). In the case of the civil rights movement, the effective enfranchisement of African Americans simultaneously redressed movement grievances and channeled protest into less disruptive forms. Piven and Cloward observed that in the case of the franchise, as in others, reforms “were drawn from a repertoire provided by existing traditions” (33).³⁵ Channeling regularly included co-optation of the rank-and-file as well as leaders, government initiatives that narrowed the scope of conflict, and decisions by movement organizations that minimized their disruptive activity.

Piven and Cloward explicitly asserted that “the more farreaching changes do not occur within the movement, but in the political context which nourished the movement in the first place”: political opportunities narrow, in part owing to a backlash against the protesters led by electoral contenders and groups hostile to the movement, echoed in the press and public opinion (34). Movement successes lead some beneficiaries to fade away, and the “display of government benevolence stimulates antagonist groups and triggers the antagonistic sentiments of more neutral sectors” (34). Mirroring the role of elite discourse and the framing of grievances in movement emergence, transformation of elite rhetoric signals and contributes to changes in the political environment: “Where once the powerful voices of the land enunciated a rhetoric that gave courage to the poor, now they enunciate a rhetoric that erases hope, and implants fear” (34). Political leaders, antagonistic groups, and the media reframe political problems. Reversing the perceptions of electoral opportunities in articulating movement grievances, the calculus of electoral advantage shifts against the movement, not only in terms of the votes of movement adherents but in expectations about swing voters.

The model applied

In the case of the industrial workers' movement, as in each of the other cases they considered, Piven and Cloward explained movement decline in terms of concessions, channeling, and constraining changes in context. Concessions from employers and from the government provided workers with better wages and hours through new contracts and the Fair Labor Standards Act, as well as support for unionization through the Wagner Act. Critics sometimes do not notice that Piven and Cloward clearly saw these as “a workers' victory … worth winning” and asserted that workers are “better off with [unionization]” (146–7, 174).

Channeling the movement away from disruption, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) provided “the substitution of orderly procedures for trials of combat”; the Supreme Court barred sit-down strikes (157).³⁶

Unions moved away from disruption, through contracts that limited strikes, even before the no-strike agreements of the Second World War.

Constraining changes in context, as identified by Piven and Cloward, included the rise of the conservative coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans in Congress, which permitted anti-union legislation enacted in many states and nationally (over the vetoes of both Presidents Roosevelt and Truman), as well as the NLRB's increasingly antilabor composition and conduct. Piven and Cloward also pointed to the attacks on the labor movement by antagonistic groups and the government, and the echoes of those attacks in the press. They cited the attacks on the Congress of Industrial Organizations made by the National Association of Manufacturers and the House Un-American Activities Committee, the accompanying “assault by unfavorable press and radio commentary,” and the reframing of “questions of labor policy as questions of patriotism” (165). Further, the calculus of electoral advantage changed as the labor vote stabilized in support of the Democratic Party.

PPM presented a much more elaborate model than critics realize. Over the first 25 years of scholarly reassessment, the book's argument has stood up to repeated and varied tests. As noted in the American Political Science Review when PPM was published, it “will undoubtedly structure discussion of this subject for years to come.”³⁷