Scholarship has left the study of the consequences of social movements in the background for a long time, focusing instead on movement emergence, characteristics, and dynamics. Since the mid-1970s, however, scholars have paid an increasing interest in how social movements and protest activities may produce change at various levels. The existing literature can be ordered according to the kind of consequence addressed. In this regard, one can roughly distinguish between political, biographical, and cultural outcomes. Political consequences are those effects of movement activities that alter in some way the movements’ political environment. Biographical consequences are effects on the life course of individuals who have participated in movement activities, effects that are at least in part due to involvement in those activities. Although their contours are less easily defined, cultural outcomes can be seen as the impact that social movements may have in altering their broader cultural environment. The bulk of the existing works have dealt with policy outcomes, which can be considered as a subcategory of political outcomes. Biographical outcomes are less numerous, but they form a substantial and quite coherent body of literature. Cultural outcomes have been studied much less often. More recently, scholars have started to investigate the effects that social movements and protest activities may have on other aspects of society, such as the economy and market-related institutions, or on other movements. In addition, one should also consider the distinction between internal and external outcomes as well as that between intended and unintended consequences. Both distinctions partly cross-cut the typology of political, biographical, and cultural outcomes, although one might think of political outcomes as mostly external and more intended, biographical outcomes as mostly internal and unintended, and cultural outcomes as both internal and external and mostly unintended.
Many scholars have recently argued that nation-state—centered approaches in comparative sociology and political science are obsolete. In this view, we have entered, or are about to enter, a new “postnational” or “transnational” era characterized by complex and qualitatively new patterns of multilevel governance, in which the nation-state still plays a role, though a drastically reduced one.1 This decline of the nation-state’s sovereignty is said to be accompanied by a growing importance of supranational and transnational actors, institutions, legal norms, and discourses, on the one hand, and increased local autonomy from national constraints, on the other. Given the inherently transnational nature of migration, it is not surprising that this critique of national approaches has been particularly prominent in this field of study.
A partir du constat d'une certaine démobilisation, dans les années quatre-vingt, au sein des nouveaux mouvements sociaux, les auteurs analysent le développement, en Suisse, des quatre plus importants d'entre eux et ce au cours des quinze dernières années. Les résultats démontrent d'abord que le nombre général des actes de protestation a tendance à augmenter, bien que chaque mouvement présente une évolution spécifique. Ensuite, ils indiquent qu'il y a eu démobilisation au niveau du taux moyen de participation, qui a nettement diminué au cours de la même période. Ce phénomène est à mettre en relation avec l'institutionnalisation progressive des nouveaux mouvements sociaux, notamment du mouvement écologiste. Enfin, ces résultats laissent la porte ouverte à des perspectives différenciées selon les mouvements.
The authors investigate the impact of direct democracy on aspects of the political process in Switzerland. They dwell in particular on the concrete use of the instruments of direct democracy by organized groups of citizens, and on the effects of this use on collective protest movements (or social movements) at the local level. The essay divides into three parts. The first briefly describes the institutions of direct democracy. The second deals with the concrete use of the instruments of direct democracy. The third examines the effects of direct democracy on the political process and on social movements. The authors highlight the paradox of direct democracy, at both the local and national level, between consensus and polarization with respect to the action of social movements.
This article engages with the systematic analysis of two main dimensions of political opportunities—namely institutional opportunities and discursive opportunities—so as to appraise their impact upon claim-making in the field of Islam. We account for cross- national variations of claim-making in terms of (1) visibility of Muslims, (2) use of collective action, and (3) salience of cultural issues in five main European countries of Muslim settlement, that is Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. In addition, we propose a conceptual framework that tackles a crucial conundrum that one finds in the scholarly literature, namely the variable (dis)alignment that may exist between the restrictive/expansionist stance of institutions and policy actors on the one hand and the restrictive/expansionist discursive position that prevails in the public domain on the other hand. Emphasis is also placed on a number of unexpected findings, such as the divergence between Britain and the Netherlands, the not so universalistic approach of French republicanism, and the small steps that Germany has walked towards multiculturalism.
Dans la perspective du second conflit mondial, la Suisse s’est engagée dans la production massive d’armements militaires. Épargnée par la guerre, elle procède à partir de 1948 à la réduction de ses stocks en privilégiant le rejet des munitions dans ses lacs plutôt que de les faire exploser à ciel ouvert ou de les recycler. Malgré le retour sur la scène publique des munitions immergées, aucune controverse n’a éclaté dans un pays pourtant sensible aux questions environnementales. À partir du cas des munitions immergées dans les lacs, le présent article s’interroge sur les manières dont les stratégies du secret conjuguées avec d’autres facteurs, tels que l’oubli ou d’autres priorités politiques, ont retardé toute réflexion sur ce dossier et ont participé au contingentement de tout débat public. À quelles conditions préalables le dépôt des munitions dans les lacs suisses pourrait-il entrer dans le débat public et engager les pouvoirs publics à agir au-delà même d’un risque potentiel non avéré ? Pour y parvenir, il s’agira de s’interroger sur le rôle et la fonction même de la controverse écologique comme moyen de mobilisation de la société civile et des acteurs institutionnels.
