infonet-economy

L'étude de l'action collective et des mouvements sociaux a été caractérisée par deux grandes écoles. La tradition culturelle et sociologique européenne, qui présente des traits de l'idéalisme allemand et du holisme méthodologique, a conduit à étudier l'action collective principalement sur le plan théorique et macro-sociologique. En revanche, la tradition américaine, plus axée sur le pragmatisme et l'individualisme méthodologique, a suggéré une analyse empirique se situant sur au niveau micro-sociologique. Le développement des principales approches de l'action collective - comportement collectif, mobilisation des ressources, processus politiques et nouveaux mouvements sociaux - a vécu cette double tension. Cependant, les tentatives de synthèse sont récemment devenues plus intenses et les deux écoles ont notamment trouvé un terrain commun dans le concept de structure des opportunités politiques. La rencontre de ces deux traditions est positive pour l'avenir de la recherche dans ce domaine.

This essay reviews recent and less recent literature on the consequences of social movements and protest activities. It focuses on three types of consequences: political, personal and biographical, and cultural. Political consequences and, in particular, policy outcomes receive most attention, as they are those which have been addresses most often by students of social movements. The review of existing work shows that the field is full of valuable works dealing with this crucial issue and is rapidly growing thanks in particular to a new wave of scholars interested in this topic. Further work should pay more attention to the unintended consequences of social movements, look also at other types of impacts, and carry more comparative analyses.

I confront three models of the policy impact of social movements with data on the mobilization of ecology, antinuclear, and peace movements in the United States between 1975 and 1995 by means of time-series analysis: the direct-effect model, the indirect-effect model, and the joint- effect model. My analysis suggests that social movements have little, if any, impact on public policy and that, if they are to have an impact, it depends on the combination of overt protest activities, the type of issues they raise, and external resources such as public opinion and political alliances with institutional actors. Thus, it appears that, if they are to have a policy impact, movements need the joint occurence of mobilization, support from political allies, and public opinion favorable to the cause.

Religion has often been found to be a strong predictor of political behaviour (Broughton and ten Napel, 2000; Lijphart, 1979; Lipset and Rokkan, 1967; Rose and Urwin, 1969; Rokkan, 1979; Tresch and Nicolet, 2010). Alongside social class and place of residence, religion was thought to be one of the primary sociological determinants of political behaviour and, especially, voting (Lazarsfeld et al., 1944; Converse, 1974). However, during the past few decades, it has become almost commonplace to stress the declining saliency of the religious cleavage and its diminishing impact on politics. In particular, a number of authors have pointed to the loss of influence of religion on voting and political attitudes (Dalton et al., 1984; Franklin, 1992; Norris and Inglehart, 2004). This diminished relevance would be the outcome of a process of secularization that has affected the entire western world (Berger, 1967; Bruce, 2002). At the same time, a process of individualization has produced a change in the forms of religious expression (Hervieu-Léger, 1999; Luckmann, 1967; Pollack and Pickel, 2007), leading to post-traditional forms of religiosity.

The point of departure of this book was twofold. On the one hand, we set ourselves the objective of describing and above all accounting for the political attitudes and behaviours of migrants in European cities. With this aim in mind, we suggested that we move away from a narrow approach focusing mainly or even solely on individual factors to embrace a broader and more integrated perspective. The previous chapters have focused in particular on three aspects which we believe need to be taken into account: (1) the human capital arising from the individual characteristics and resources of migrants; (2) the social capital resulting from their involvement in voluntary associations; and (3) the political capital provided by the opportunities stemming from the political-institutional context in which they live. On the other hand, we started from the assumption that the analysis of the political attitudes and behaviours of migrants tells us something about their degree of political inclusion or exclusion.

Studying the outcomes of social movements is important if we want to elucidate the role of collective action in society. While most works have addressed aggregate-level political outcomes such as changes in laws or new policies, a relatively small but substantial body of literature deals with the personal and biographical consequences of social movements at the micro-level, that is, effects on the life-course of individuals who have participated in movement activities, due at least in part to involvement in those activities (see Giugni 2004 for a review). In general, these studies converge in suggesting that activism has a strong effect both on the political and personal lives of the subjects. Most of the existing studies, however, share a number of features that limit the scope of their findings. First, they focus on a specific kind of movement participants, namely movement activists, most often New Left activists, who are strongly committed to the cause. Yet, as suggested by McAdam (1999a), not more than between 2% and 4% of the American population took part in New Left activism of the 1960s. As a result, we cannot directly generalize from these findings to the biographical impact of participation in social movements by less strongly committed people who, in addition, might belong to other ideological areas, not necessarily to the New Left. Second, they use only a limited number of subjects and often do not analyze non-activists. The possibility of generalizing the findings is therefore very limited due to the small samples used and the lack of a control group of non-activists. Third, they look at a specific geographical and area and historical period, namely the United States (or often even more circumscribed geographical areas) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As such, we do not know from these studies how movement participation may affect the lives of people more generally. Thus, overall, in spite of the crucial insights that these works provided, they have little to say about the effects of more “routine” forms of participation. In this chapter we try to go beyond the traditional focus on highly committed New Left activism to investigate the impact of protest participation on political life-course patterns amongst the general population. Our main research question is the following: Does participation in social movement activities, such as participation in protest activities, have an enduring impact on the subsequent political life of individuals?