And I Apologize for the Length

1

Hi Everyone,

This is the introduction to a joint book (the TOC follows), one chapter of which you will also read for the following week (November 17th). As often happens, it loses coherence as it goes along, partly because we have reworked the framing too recently. The idea that the packages of gains and losses have mostly to do with players and with arenas, which we address toward the end, now seems obvious, but this is not clear earlier in the intro. So please forgive some of the gaps in this early-stage draft.

If you have better ideas for how to present the fact that all the cases are set in cities, we would appreciate them.

And I apologize for the length

Thank you,

Jim

Gains and Losses:

How Protestors Win and Lose

James M. Jasper, Luke Elliott-Negri, Isaac Jabola-Carolus, Marc Kagan, Jessica Mahlbacher, Manès Weisskircher, and Anna Zhelnina

Preface: by James M. Jasper

Introduction: The Long Game

Chapter 1: Challenging Union Elections: The New York Transit Workers

Chapter 2: Institutionalizing Participatory Budgeting in New York City

Chapter 3: Winning $15 an Hour in Seattle

Chapter 4: How the Communists Survived in Graz

Chapter 5: Umbrellas in Hong Kong

Chapter 6: Opposing Putin in Moscow

Conclusion:

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Long Game

Every advantage is temporary. – Katerina Stoykova Klemer

In warfare there are no constant conditions. – Sun Tzu

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. – Max Weber

Let’s begin where so many theories of protest have, with the US civil rights movement. In 1961 SNCC was running a voter registration drive in one of the nation’s most racially backward places, the hill country of Southwest Mississippi. They began with Freedom Schools, to help local Blacks learn enough about the state constitution to pass a test interpreting it. Organizer Bob Moses, later to become a legend, then took six locals to the courthouse, where they passed the test. Several others were allowed to fill out the registration forms. Local Blacks were excited and impressed, and support for the young SNCC organizers grew.

Powerful local whites did not at first understand what a registration drive was, or where it might lead. But “as local authorities came to understand that something was going on more systematic than a few individuals trying to register, things got tougher” (Payne 1995:115-16). Moses was arrested, then beaten badly. The handful of completed registration forms mysteriously disappeared. Harassing crowds appeared in front of the registrar’s counter. Local Blacks persisted, but the costs facing them increased. All the initial gains disappeared.

Or did they? SNCC was blocked at the registrar’s office, but impressed potential supporters and participants. The bruising they took gained them credibility. Besides, setbacks can be learning experiences. “McComb is always remembered as a defeat for SNCC, which is true in a narrow sense, but it overlooks the fact that SNCC learned in McComb that merely the process of trying to organize a town would attract young people” (Payne 1995:119). The blocked registration efforts gained admiration, recruits, and a lesson that could be applied elsewhere. Some short-run gains led opponents to mobilize to eliminate those gains, but that setback was ultimately used to strengthen the movement in the longer run. Gains and losses come in complex bundles.

Social movements are a key source of change in the modern world, so it matters to all of us what helps them win and what makes them lose. Along with corporations and states, protest groups and their close cousins nongovernmental organizations struggle to shape history. They battle over cultural understandings, public policies and laws, and the rules that govern strategic arenas. These struggles rage for years and decades, even as the players and arenas change. We need to understand when and how protestors win or lose.

Theories of protest and social movements have turned toward strategy in recent years, as intellectual fashions shifted from structures to action and agency. Political opportunity structures have been replaced by political processes and mediation. We now appreciate that protestors interact dynamically with a variety of other strategic players and targets, in a number of structured arenas, rather than facing a static “environment.” Players on all sides encounter strategic tradeoffs, grapple with dilemmas, and make decisions. As a result of this paradigm shift, fine-grained micro-level histories have increasingly replaced broad structural hypotheses and correlations in empirical studies. Scholars trace processes through detailed mechanisms.[1]

The new dynamic and strategic models suggest that we rethink an old issue, the success and consequences of protest. The dominant structural approach saw success when challengers manage to conquer barriers to participation, in order to join a polity, and when they gain new laws and policies. But many structurally oriented scholars were uneasy talking about success at all, as this might depend on the subjective point of view of participants. Most of these scholars began instead to talk about the outcomes and consequences of movements, allowing for the possibility of negative outcomes as well as positive or neutral ones, unintended as well as intended ones. They try to avoid the goals of players, but they also lose any sense of the emotional dynamics that accompany a feeling of failure or success.

A strategic outlook suggests a combination of the two concerns: there are a variety of outcomes, some of them related to goals and others not, and a few of which are big successes or failures. But mostly there are small gains and losses that may or may not ever add up to ultimate success. In a (US) football match, we speak of a gain of five yards, or a loss of two, on each play. These may or may not add up to points on the board before the other team gains possession of the ball. It is also possible for a team to advance the ball all the way down the field in one overwhelming play, to score a touchdown. Politics is of course more complex, with many types of gains and losses. But the language offers an alternative to both success/failure and consequences.

Most strategic engagements are long wars of position (fought in the trenches, if you prefer that metaphor). There is no single battle that decides everything, no final court decision or vote, after which all the strategic players pack up and go home. Yes, some decisions are more important than others, and some lead to the demobilization of players. But these decisive moments are the exception, not the rule. Usually the players regroup or reform, or turn their attention to other goals and arenas. Politics is a game of gains and losses, of various sizes, in a number of different arenas, over long periods of time. Players have more short-run tactical goals than long-run strategic goals, and the unintended outcomes often outnumber the intended.[2]

A strategic perspective encourages attention to different players in different arenas. This contrasts with the structural view, which tends to simplify the world into insiders and outsiders, usually movement versus state. That dichotomized view of conflict, with two primary sides pitted against one another, lends itself to a zero-sum view of decisive outcomes, in which one player wins when the other loses. The challenger gains entry to the polity; a social movement wins a law that benefits it members. If instead we acknowledge a number of different players, in shifting alliances and with different things at stake, we can more easily recognize the gains and losses in wars of position.

By taking seriously the points of view of players, a strategic approach confronts the numerous tradeoffs and dilemmas that players face. (Tradeoffs are always there, and they become dilemmas when players recognize them.) They are the reason that decisionmaking is difficult. Every option comes with a list of benefits, costs, and risks, some of them certain (the cost of supplies, for instance) and some of them very uncertain (the likelihood of police violence or a dictator’s overthrow). Many moves result in gains at the same time as losses. Jasper (2006) has highlighted dozens of these tradeoffs, and in this book we will encounter many of them in the course of accounting for gains and losses.

Military theory contrasts wars of attrition and wars of maneuver: in the former, troops bang away at each other unimaginatively as their resources dwindle; in the latter commanders take risks when they see weaknesses in opponents. Protest movements usually lose wars of attrition, as their opponents – corporations, states, and other powerful institutions – have greater resources, especially money and media attention. So protestors innovate, take advantage of opponents’ weaknesses, and grab media attention by doing things others have overlooked. If they are lucky, they can obstruct business-as-usual enough to gain some concessions from those who are hurt. In wars of maneuver, smart strategic choices can compensate for a lack of resources (Ganz 2000).[3]

In either case, wars consist of many battles on many fronts, just as social movements pursue many objectives across a variety of arenas. But let’s review the trajectory by which specialists went from strategy to structure and then back to strategy.

Success and Failure

As soon as scholars, in the late 1960s, began to study social movements as a rational political process distinct from crowds and fads, the question of their success and failure naturally followed. Crowds had been dismissed (wrongly) as only expressing emotions, whereas movements articulate goals and promote policies. They are strategic players with ends and means. Most crowd theorists had disliked protest, but the 60s generation of scholars cared about the success of protestors for political as well as intellectual reasons. They wanted to help (most of) them win.

So when do protestors win and when do they lose? Two of the most influential books on movements published in the 1970s asked this. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward (1977) famously argued that disruptive protest is more likely to succeed, and that formal organizations such as unions tend to discourage this kind of disruption. Some groups have more “disruptive power” than other groups, positioned so that they can shut down processes that their opponents value, such as sit-down strikes in factories, or boycotts and lunch-counter sit-ins for civil rights (Piven 2006).

In a gains-and-losses framework, we can recast Piven and Cloward’s work as highlighting two strategic dilemmas. Disruption, whether peaceful or violent, poses the naughty or nice dilemma: it is sometimes possible to intimidate your opponents into quick concessions, but there is frequently a cost to your reputation as a morally admirable player (Jasper 2006:106). In the long run you may lose allies and public support. The aggressive option usually makes more sense if the public is already hostile, and if the potential gains are substantial and not easily reversed (Schumaker 1978).[4]

Piven and Cloward view formal organizations as undermining a group’s chances for success. The founding of new organizations creates new goals for protestors, namely the maintenance and growth of those organizations. But if an organization is capable of any advances for its members, then it poses the organization dilemma (Jasper 2004): there are some tactics that bureaucracies do well, and some they do poorly. They are better at regular activities, such as aggregating resources, than at short-term massive resistance like general strikes. They may give up short-run disruptive potential in exchange for longevity as a player.[5]

The naughty or nice and organization dilemmas are linked in Piven and Cloward’s view: planning for the long run prevents protestors from taking advantage of short-run anger and outrage that offer their only real chance for gains. This is especially true of the poor people’s movements that Piven and Cloward studied. (They will lose long-run wars of attrition.) As often happens, the decision about one dilemma affects what happens with another. We’ll see that short- and long-run tradeoffs are ubiquitous in the world of gains and losses.

Identifying strategic tradeoffs and dilemmas helps us make sense of the mixed empirical results for disruption: the combinations of gains and losses sometimes tip toward the former and sometimes toward the latter. We need to understand what determines the balance, and what this means for future engagements. We can only do this by disaggregating success and failure into manifold gains and losses, and examining how they are related. Virtually all research so far has looked at one outcome at a time. Whether violence or disruption works may depend on which impact a scholar chooses to measure.

Some authors find that violent strikes are more successful than peaceful ones (Shorter and Tilly 1971), while others find the opposite (Snyder and Kelly 1976). Of course, strikes are already disruptive; violence is much more disruptive but also more frightening to bystanders and other players. Emotional reactions differ according to the threats. We need to dig beneath these broad correlations to get at the packages of gains and losses at work; disruption and violent disruption may differ enormously in how they unfold. Chenoweth and Stephan (2011) find that nonviolence is better than violence at bringing about regime change, although their evidence also suggests that this might have become more true in recent decades. Chenoweth and Schock (2015) find what the naughty/nice dilemma would predict: violent flanks have more benefits in the short run than in the long run.