Contentious Politics Essay

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Contentious politics, in the context of political science, means episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claims and their objects when: (1) at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the claims, and (2) the claims would, if realized, affect the interests of at least one of the claimants or objects of claims. Roughly translated, the definition refers to collective political struggle.

Of course, each term in the definition cries out for further stipulations. The term episodic, for example, excludes regularly scheduled events such as votes, parliamentary elections, and associational meetings. The term public excludes claim making that occurs entirely within well-bounded organizations, including churches and firms. Contention, of course, occurs both inside and outside of public politics, but political contention involves government, however peripherally, and thereby increases the likelihood of intervening coercive agents such as police and, on the average, increases the stakes of the outcome.

Not all forms of politics are necessarily contentious. Much of politics consists of ceremony, consultation, bureaucratic process, collection of information, registration of events, educational activities, and the like; these actions usually involve little if any collective contention. This does not imply that all forms of contention conform to a single general model. Drawing upon definitions from Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow’s Contentious Politics (2006), Tilly’s European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (1993), and Nicholas Sambanis’s “What Is a Civil War?” (2004) the differences among three major forms of contention clarify this lack of a general model:

• Social movements: sustained challenges to power holders in the name of a population living under the jurisdiction of those power holders by means of public displays of that population’s worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment;
• Civil wars: sustained large-scale reciprocal armed conflict between two or more social actors in a population—however defined—over control of a state or over the demand of one of the actors to establish its own state;
• Revolutions: attempted transfers of power over a state in the course of which at least two distinct blocs of contenders make incompatible claims to control the state, and some significant portion of the population mobilizes on behalf of the claims of each bloc.

These forms of contention have different dynamics, involve different combinations of performances, and produce different levels of violence. Although they can overlap empirically and easily shift from one to another, they are best understood by examining what they have in common; they share contentious interaction between makers of claims and others who recognize that these claims bear on their interests and bring in government as mediator, target, or claimant. Considering the forms of contention in the same framework helps to understand three important properties of contentious politics: (1) the rapid formation and transformation of different forms of contention; (2) the interactions between actors that form across institutional boundaries; and most important, (3) the common mechanisms and processes that underlie and drive contentious politics.

Approaches To Contentious Politics

 Since the 1960s, the study of contentious politics has spawned a host of distinct topical literatures—on revolutions, social movements, industrial conflict, international war, civil war, interest group politics, nationalism, and democratization. Scholars in each group used different methodologies and mainly proceeded in cordial indifference to each other’s findings. Yet different forms of contentious politics involve similar causal processes, such as mobilization, a central process in civil wars, revolutions, and social movements as well as in electoral campaigns, strikes, and warfare. As long as the same mechanisms and processes can be identified in different forms of contention, they should be studied together irrespective of the boundaries that scholars have established between these forms. Several general approaches to contentious politics have attempted to bring integration out of segmentation.

Until the late 1960s, the so-called collective behavior approach had dominated American studies of social movements. Best synthesized in the work of Neil Smelser in 1962, the approach emphasized the cognitive and emotional elements in collective action and focused heavily on grievances. In its extreme manifestations, it invited caricature by regarding collective action as the result of anomie, alienation, and even psychological disorder. But even more balanced proponents of the approach never solved the puzzle that there is no one-to-one relationship between the extent of people’s grievances and their capacity and willingness to advance their claims. In the 1960s and after, the dominant approaches to contentious politics shifted from collective behavior to the structures that empower and constrain it.

Structural Approaches

Structuralism took two forms: classical microstructural models descended from Marx, in which major societal changes directly produce shifts in contention; and models of political structure focusing on the opportunities and threats, along with the facilitation and repression induced by political institutions and regimes. Macrostructural models were more popular in Europe, while political structural models developed in the United States, especially after the civil rights movement. But the political process model that resulted soon became the common property of Americans such as Doug McAdam and Europeans including Donatella della Porta, Dieter Rucht, and Hanspeter Kriesi.

Most scholars who focus on the political intermediation of contentious politics center on a cluster of variables called political opportunity structure. Opportunity structures are features of regimes that affect the likely outcomes of actors’ possible claims. A reasonably consensual list of those features, noted by Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, include:

1. Multiplicity of independent centers of power within the regime.
2. The regime’s openness to new actors.
3. Instability of current political alignments.
4. Availability of influential allies or supporters for challengers.
5. Extent to which the regime represses or facilitates collective claim making.
6. Decisive changes in all of these features.

Threats are the converse of opportunities. But threats and opportunities occur simultaneously and most people engaging in contentious politics combine response to threat with seizing opportunities. Both threats and opportunities shift with fragmentation or concentration of power, changes in a regime’s openness or closure, instability of alignments, and the availability of allies.

Repertoires Of Contention

The development of the political process approach was accompanied by systematic attention to the repertoire of contention—the sets of performances that people habitually use in mounting contention. Repertoires represent not only how people make claims, but also what they know about making claims and their reception by targets of their claims. Repertoires and performances evolved with the histories of industrialization and state-building. For example, the protest demonstration grew out of, and at first resembled, the religious procession to a place of worship. It turned contentious as demonstrators moved from a place of assembly to a site from which they could directly confront the targets of their claims. Later, the protest demonstration became the central form of action, mounted routinely to demonstrate a claim before the public. With the development of mass media, it could be staged to gain media attention. Change in social movement repertoires accelerated in the 1960s—as they do in any major wave of contention.

Protest Event Analysis

After the 1960s, complementing the emphasis on repertoires, scholars developed a wide array of systematic methods and approaches to track the changes in the forms of contention in the public sphere. The systematic analysis of contentious events has become the closest thing to a core method for the study of contentious politics. Scholars enumerate and analyze the number of events, numbers and composition of participants, their targets and degree of violence, and the kinds of performances they involve. But in focusing on the public politics of contention, the new method ignored private forms of contention, such as the emotions in contentious politics, the construction of new collective actors (e.g., the new women’s movement), and the study of motivations for collective action. These were the major starting points for new approaches in the 1980s and 1990s.

Alternatives To Structuralism

In the 1980s, two alternative models began to challenge the hegemony of structuralism: a culturist model, which focused on emotions, cognition, discourse, and the construction of collective action; and a rationalist model focusing on the dispositional microfoundations of collective action.

The culturalist model is part of the broader, cultural turn in the social sciences, but it also had social-psychological roots and led to a revived interest in Erving Goffmann’s important 1974 book, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cultural factors were also important to scholars of contention in the global South, where the cultural grounding of Western social movements could not be assumed. By the turn of the century, the culturalist approach had developed into a wholesale critique of structuralism.

The rationalist model has in common with culturalism a focus on individual motivations for collective action, but it had in common with structuralism a focus on external inducements to collective action. Building on the earlier insights of Mancur Olson in 1965, rationalists observed that rational people might very well avoid taking action when they see that others are willing to act on their behalf. To solve this free-rider problem, rationalist-oriented scholars focused on the micro foundations of collective action, on movement organizations, and on the social networks that underlie collective action. What remained obscure in both culturalism and rationalism were the specific links between individuals and their opposite numbers, significant third parties, and institutions. This led to an increased emphasis on relational models.

Mechanism-And-Process Approaches

Mechanism-and-process-based accounts of contentious politics attempt to specify links among actors, their opponents, third parties, and institutions in studies of entire episodes of contention. Relevant mechanisms can be found in the general environment of the actors, in actors’ dispositions toward significant others, or in their relations to significant others. Familiar environmental mechanisms include population shift or resource increase or depletion. Important dispositional mechanisms include the attribution of similarity (e.g., identification of another political actor as belonging to the same category as one’s own, a key mechanism in coalition formation). Significant relational mechanisms include brokerage (e.g., the production of a new connection between previously unconnected or weakly connected sites). Processes can be either combinations of simultaneously developing mechanisms or regularly linked sequences of mechanisms.

Some combinations of mechanisms are fortuitous or idiosyncratic, but others combine regularly in robust processes that can be observed in a wide variety of contentious episodes. The most fundamental one is mobilization, or the shift of resources from individuals to collectivities through a combination of mechanisms.

Movements And Institutions

In relating contentious politics to institutions, an earlier research tradition saw all political contention aimed against institutions. But properly seen, contention can occur outside of, within, and on the boundaries of institutions. Boundaries between institutionalized and noninstitutionalized politics are difficult to draw with precision. More important, the two sorts of politics involve similar causal processes. For example, the study of coalitions has almost always been operationalized within legislative institutions, but coalitions occur widely in the disruptions of rebellions, strikes, and social movements. As long as the same mechanisms and processes can be identified in institutional and noninstitutional politics, they can be studied together irrespective of institutional boundaries.

Of course, institutions both constrain and enable contentious politics, and, subsequently, different kinds of regimes produce different configurations of contention. These connections among contention, political power, and institutions appear in both turbulent periods and in the more routine politics of both authoritarian regimes and settled democracies. However, the more violent forms of contention are most likely to develop in weak authoritarian regimes, or anocracies, as termed by James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin in 2003.

Lethal Conflicts

Civil wars and most revolutions involve large-scale lethal conflicts with special features that set them off from other forms of contentious politics. Two features in particular make a difference. First, killing, wounding, and damaging affect the survival of participants well after the immediate struggle has ended. Second, creating and maintaining armed force requires extensive resources. Large-scale lethal conflicts include interstate wars, civil wars, revolutions, and genocides as well as a significant subset of struggles across religious, ethnic, linguistic, and regional boundaries. All of these involve high stakes and disciplined military organizations.

Yet there are significant commonalities between lethal conflicts and social movements. As in these more pacific conflicts, existing political opportunity structure interacts with established repertoires of contention to shape what sorts and degrees of large-scale violence occur within a given regime. When large-scale lethal contention is compared with social movements, similar mechanisms and processes emerge: environmental mechanisms, such as resource extraction or depletion; dispositional mechanisms, such as the hardening of boundaries between ethnic groups that formally lived together; and relational mechanisms, such as the brokerage of new connections between previously unconnected or weakly connected sites.

In contrast with social movements, which concentrate in high-capacity democratic or democratizing states, lethal conflicts concentrate in low-capacity authoritarian states. Highcapacity states reduce the threat from challengers both by offering routine opportunities for making low-level claims and by making it difficult for anyone to create rival concentrations of coercive means within their territories. Low-capacity states fear that making concessions to low-level claims will trigger broader ones. They also more often face the threat that some rival actor will build up a major concentration of coercive means and use it to topple existing rulers.

Open Questions

As in any evolving field, a number of contested issues score the surface of the study of contentious politics. A brief sketch of the most important questions include:

• Do social movements that do not target the state fall outside the range of contentious politics?
• Are the major outcomes of contentious politics limited to the policy terrain, or do they also involve cultural change and biographical impacts?
• Do new forms of collective action—particularly Internet-based campaigns—challenge existing approaches to contentious politics, or will they eventually be absorbed into the repertoire of contention, much as the newspaper and television were?
• Does globalization shift the targets of contention from national states to something beyond the state, or does it simply add the possibility of “forum shopping” to claim-making strategies?

Bibliography:

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3. Chong, Dennis. Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
4. della Porta, Donatella. Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State: A Comparative Analysis of Italy and Germany. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
5. Diani, Mario. Green Networks: A Structural Analysis of the Italian Environmental Movement. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995.
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21. Rucht, Dieter, Ruud Koopmans, and Friedhelm Neidhardt, eds. Acts of Dissent: New Developments in the Study of Protest. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.
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25. Snow, David A., E. Burke Rochford Jr., Steven K.Worden, and Robert D. Benford. “Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation.” American Sociological Review 51 (1986): 464–481.
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27. From Mobilization to Revolution. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1978.
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29. Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.
30. Tilly, Charles, and Sidney Tarrow. Contentious Politics. Boulder: Paradigm Press, 2006.

See also:

• How to Write a Political Science Essay
• Political Science Essay Topics
• Political Science Essay Examples

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