In this paper we focus on the handling by the police of mass demonstrations in Switzerland during the past three decades. Our aim is to single out the determinants of police intervention during these protest events. We look at three sets of potential causes: (1) the configuration of power (i.e. political alliances and coalitions), (2) face-to-face interactions between protesters and the police during demonstrations, and (3) the broader public attention towards the protests. We test hypotheses regarding these three sets of causes using protest event data and applying both time-invariant methods and time-series analysis. The results show that (1) political alliances and coalitions do not have the impact that previous studies have predicted, (2) it is repression that causes violence rather than the other way around, and (3) the likelihood and modes of police intervention are influenced by the broader public attention given to ongoing protests.
This article seeks to explain differential participation in social movements. People are not brought to collective action at the same level of intensity. Some become core activists, while others invest only little time and effort. We test a number of hypotheses drawn from the social networks and the rationalist perspectives on individual engagement by means of survey data on participants in a major organization of the Swiss solidarity movement. Not surprisingly, both perspectives find empirical support: the intensity of participation depends both on the embeddedness in social networks and on the individual preferences towards engagement, that is, the perception of a number of aspects implied by engagement. In particular, to be recruited by an activist and the perceived effectiveness of one’s own prospected contribution are the best predictors of differential participation. We specify the role of networks for social movements by looking at the nature and content of networks and by distinguishing between three basic functions of networks: recruitment, socialization, and the bridging of structural and individual components of participation. The latter function suggests that individual preferences are not given a priori but are strongly affected by the m edd dness in social networks. This allows us to criticize both social networks and rational choice accounts of individual participation. Explanations that stress the role of networks are often mechanistic insofar as they fail to show how the mbeddedeness of individuals in pre-existing networks affect their interests, preferences, and utilities. Rationalist accounts, on the other hand, neglect the origin of those interests, preferences, and utilities, which are strongly affected by social relations.
In this paper, we discuss the relation between social movements, public opinion, and political alliances with respect to the impact of movements on public policy. We first discuss the existing literature and sketch three broad models of the role of public opinion and political alliances (or the absence of such role) in facilitating the task of social movements in producing policy change: the direct-effect model, the mediated-effect model, and the joint-effect model. We test empirically each of this three explanations by means of time-series analyses of the mobilization of ecology, antinuclear, and peace movements in the United States between 1975 and 1995. The results show, first, that the three movements did not have a substantial impact on public policy, confirming that the direct-effect model has little explanatory power. Second, the mediated-effect model, too, is not supported by the empirical evidence, both in its public opinion and political alliances variants. Third, the joint-effect model is that which fits our data the best.
In this paper we discuss the institutional setting, both cultural and political, for the claim-making of immigrants and ethnic minorities and derive a number of hypotheses regarding variations in the extent, forms, and content of claim-making. The general underlying idea is that the political-institutional setting shapes the modalities of claim-making, while the cultural-institutional setting provided by the dominant definitions of citizenship and by the regimes for the incorporation of migrants affects its content. In addition, models of citizenship determine the space for the presence and intervention of minorities in the national public space. The degree of legitimacy of these groups for participating in the public debates is an important intervening variable in this respect. We confront our hypotheses with data on the collective claim-making by immigrants and ethnic minorities in France and Switzerland for the period 1990-1994. The data are part of an ongoing comparative project on immigration politics, citizenship, and the mobilization of ethnic difference in several West European countries. The method used in this project and in the present paper attempts to integrate protest event analysis and public discourse analysis in a broader framework for the study of the strategic claim-making occurring in the public space.
This very exploratory paper looks at the impact of dominant conceptions of citizenship on the mobilization by the extreme right. Previous work has focused on the role of structural cleavages and institutional opportunities such as party alignments and competition. While we acknowledge the importance of such factors, here we focus on citizenship rights as the relevant political opportunity structure for the mobilization of the contemporary the extreme right in Western Europe. We start from the idea that one of the main characteristics of the contemporary extreme right is its framing of the notion of national identity in ethnocultural terms (as opposed to a framing in civic-territorial terms) and examine a number of hypotheses regarding four aspects of the mobilization by the extreme right: (1) its presence in the public space, (2) its organizational forms, (3) its forms of actions, and (4) the content of its claims. We illustrate our hypotheses through a comparison of public claim-making by extreme right actors in France and Switzerland, two countries that differ substantially in the models of citizenship.
The Institutional Resource Regime framework appears successful in comparing natural resource governance systems but unable to provide a common and persuasive explanation of the evolution of these systems. To fill this gap, the concepts of institutional complexity trap and transversal transaction costs (TTC) have been recently put forward. IRRs tend to fall into an institutional complexity trap which progressively reduces efficiency in regulating natural resource uses. These dynamics are the macro consequences of micro frictions in IRR extension, i.e. the transversal transaction costs. To date, the TTC concept has been mainly theoretical; the present paper examines its empirical relevance. We investigate dynamic causes of malfunctioning in poly centric systems focusing on interlinkages between extent and coherence. Materials come from case studies of urban water systems in Europe and Australasia. It allows us to propose a typology of TTCs and to highlight their impacts on the governance system. Finally, we are able to trace the pattern of evolution of an IRR in relation to the most likely institutional frictions occurrences. This has substantial policy implications, as we shed light on indirect but significant limitations to natural resource policy developments and adaptations.
