Abstract
The chapter maps current research on social movements and protest in political science with a special focus on studies that do not fall under “social movement literature.” It examines topics and puzzles, theoretical and analytical approaches, and methods and data that appear in political science scholarship on movements and protest using content analysis of abstracts presented at two political science conferences (APSA 2015 and ECPR 2015). It shows that the two fields—political science and social movement literature developed mainly in sociology—could considerably contribute to each other by (1) combining methodological diversity and flexibility of social movement literature with political science focus on individual-level surveys and (2) by expansion of social movement literature’s focus on political actors and repertoires other than social movements and protest.
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Notes
- 1.
I also excluded a few APSA papers that did not have abstracts available in the archive.
- 2.
For instance, there were only three political scientists among 19 authors that contributed to two special issues in Mobilization on terrorism and political violence (published June 2007 and February 2012).
- 3.
For instance, social movements and political participation constitute the largest paper sections at the biennial European conference on Politics and Gender organized by the ECPR Standing Group Gender and Politics.
- 4.
Most of the classical authors in this sub-field of social movements are sociologists (e.g. Taylor, Bernstein, Epstein, Whittier, Staggenborg or Gamson) and only a few come from political science (e.g. Costain or Katzenstein), see Wulff et al. (2015).
- 5.
Only five abstracts studying women’s and LGBT movements used a strong version of interpretive/constructivist paradigm (i.e. not only seeing gender and sexuality as social constructs but also using interpretivist methods).
- 6.
The method used is indicated by the analytical approach used to study the main argument of the abstract; i.e. it is based on the unit of analysis and not on the unit of measurement, and is based on a general paradigm and a research tradition used. This means, for instance, that a study testing an argument about differences across four countries was coded as a case study method even though it uses a large number of measurement units (e.g. protest event analysis in the last 20 years in the four countries).
- 7.
For instance, they compile findings from different studies and reports with primary data from participant observation or a few semi-structured interviews, but do not explain how systematic the collection of data was, how they organized the field notes or how the respondents were selected, etc.
- 8.
Social movements are, for instance, defined as: “a distinct social process, consisting of the mechanisms through which actors engaged in collective action: are involved in conflictual relations with clearly identified opponents; are linked by dense informal networks; share a distinct collective identity” (Della Porta and Diani 2006, p. 20); “collective challenges, based on common purposes and social solidarities, in sustained interaction with elites, opponents, and authorities” (Tarrow 1998, p. 4); “collective and sustained efforts that challenge existing or potential laws, policies, norms, or authorities, making use of extrainstitutional as well as institutional political tactics” (Meyer 2014, p. 12); “first and foremost, they are challengers to or defenders of existing structures or systems of authority; second, they are collective rather than individual enterprises; third, they act, in varying degrees, outside existing institutional or organizational arrangements; fourth, they operate with some degree of organization; and fifth, they typically do so with some degree of continuity” (Snow and Soule 2009, p. 6).
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Acknowledgements
I am very thankful to Lorenzo Bosi, Ondřej Císař, María Inclán Oseguera, Craig Jenkins, Joost de Moor, and to the editors of this volume Conny Roggeband and Bert Klandermans for their opinions and comments. I gratefully acknowledge funding from the Czech Grant Agency (Grant “Protestors in Context: An Integrated and Comparative Analysis of democratic Citizenship in the Czech Republic”, code GA13-29032S).
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Vráblíková, K. (2017). Protest and Social Movements in Political Science. In: Roggeband, C., Klandermans, B. (eds) Handbook of Social Movements Across Disciplines. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57648-0_3
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