Apres un regard rapide sur l'état actuel de la recherche sur les conséquences des mouvements écologistes, antinucléaires et pacifistes en nous centrant sur les travaux qui s'intéressent aux effets de la mobilisation sur les politiques publiques et mettant en évidence certaines variables explicatives majeures, nous donnons un aperçu des mobilisations sur ces thèmes aux Etats-Unis, en Italie et en Suisse. Pour conclure, nous proposons une approche comparative et longitudinale de l'impact des mouvements sociaux sur les politiques publiques. Selon cette approche, cet impact peut difficilement être autonome, mais découle de l'articulation de la contestation et de trois autres facteurs : la structure des opportunités poli- tiques (notamment les alliances politiques), la position de l'opinion publique par rapport aux enjeux soulevés par ces mouvements et la proéminence de ces enjeux. Nous confrontons arguments théoriques et données empiriques concernant ces mobilisations dans les trois pays de 1975 " 1995. Notre analyse montre comment ces trois facteurs interviennent de manière décisive, mais différenciée selon les mouvements, pour modifier la relation entre contestation et politiques publiques.
This article investigates multiculturalism by examining the relation ship between migrants' group demands and liberal states' policies for politically accommodating cultural and religious difference. It focuses especially on Islam. The empirical research compares migrants' claims-making for group demands in countries with different traditions for granting recognition to migrants' cultural difference - Britain, France and the Netherlands. Overall, we find very modest levels of group demands indicating that the challenge of group demands to liberal democracies is quantitatively less than the impression given by much multicultural literature. Group demands turn out to be significant only for Muslims, which holds across different countries. Qualitative analysis reveals problematic relationships between Islam and the state, in the overtly multicultural Dutch approach, within British race relations, and French civic universalism. This implies that there is no easy blueprint for politically accommodating Islam, whose public and religious nature makes it especially resilient to political adaptation.
This exploratory essay provides a general framework for the study of crossnational similarities among social movements by looking at three broad social processes: globalization, structural affinity, and diffusion. Each of these concepts is at the core of three apparently rival explanations of movement similarities. The globalization model explains similarities among social movements as a product of similar movement reactions to transnational political opportunities; the structural affinity model states that similar national political opportunity structures account for similarities among social movements across countries; and the diffusion model argues that the adoption of information from abroad causes similarities among social movements in different countries. This essay integrates three concepts in a general model of crossnational similarities among social movements. The model is illustrated with data on new social movements in four West European countries.
Explanations of protest policing have neglected the "spotlight of the media." Based on data on repression and its media coverage in four Swiss cities from 1965 to 1994, our findings suggest that the mass media do have an impact on levels and forms of repression, along with political opportunity dimensions and levels of disruption. We identify two mechanisms. First, we show that the symbolic battles waged by protest groups and their outcomes affect the level of repression these groups face. More specifically, depending on whether the civil-rights or the law-and-order scenario wins in the public sphere, the police adopt different postures when facing disorders. Second, the police are also shown to be vulnerable to an increase of media attention during a protest campaign. When protest becomes a blind spot in the public sphere, repression increases.
Inspired by spatial theories of political behavior and by work on the impact of immigration on national identity, in this article we propose an explanation of the extreme right’s claim making based on the interplay of three factors: national models of citizenship, the dynamics of political alignments and party competition, and the strategic/organizational repertoires of the extreme right, in particular the electoral strength of extreme-right parties. Confronting a number of hypotheses derived from this theoretical framework with original data on the extreme right’s claim making in five European countries (the Netherlands, Britain, France, Germany, and Switzerland), we show how political-institutional and cultural-discursive opportunities account for differences in the extent, forms, and content of xenophobic and extreme-right claim making. Our study shows that national configurations of citizenship affect in significant ways the mobilization of the extreme right, both directly and indirectly. More precisely, our two-country comparison confirms the hypothesis that the claim making of the extreme right depends on a specific political opportunity structure formed by the combination of discursive opportunities deriving from the prevailing model of citizenship and by the political space made available by mainstream parties for far-right mobilization.
Different European nation-states use the most diverse statistical con- structions of foreign origin or ethnic minority populations. Several countries traditionally even shun from producing such data. This makes international comparison a very difficult endeavour. Anyone wanting to perform comparative research on immigrants or (immigrant origin) ethnic minorities in Europe is unavoidably confronted with the most diverse types of national statistical data and has to opt for ad hoc solutions. Attempts at international comparison can thus be very tricky due to data characteristics. It is important that researchers are aware of these problems and do not simply accept data (especially in comparisons) at face value. In this article we embark on a comparative explorative study of the way in which immigrant background and immigration related ethnicity is taken stock of by national statistical institutes in a set of European nation-states.
