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"Political opportunity"
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There is nothing for you here : finding opportunity in the twenty-first century
\"A celebrated foreign-policy expert and key impeachment witness reveals how declining opportunity has set America on the grim path of modern Russia - and draws on her personal journey out of poverty, and her unique perspectives as a historian and policy maker, to show how we can return hope to our forgotten places
Book
Hot Lights and Cold Steel: Cultural and Political Toolkits for Practice Change in Surgery
One of the great paradoxes of organizational culture is that even when less powerful members in organizations have access to cultural tools (such as frames, identities, and tactics) that support change, they often do not use these tools to challenge traditional practices that disadvantage them. In this study, I compare data about work practice change from my own field study of an elite teaching hospital (conducted in the early 2000s) to previously reported data from field studies of two similar hospitals (one conducted in the 1970s and one in the 1990s). I demonstrate that although cultural toolkits supporting change may allow less powerful organization members to see traditional practices as running counter to their interests, they may not be able to significantly change traditional practices unless they also have access to what I call
political toolkits
(including tools such as staffing systems, accountability systems, and evaluation systems) that support change. Although cultural tools allow them to reinterpret practices that disadvantage them as unfair, political tools allow them to feel optimistic that others will help them effect change. Whereas cultural tools enable them to develop a \"we\" feeling with other reformers, political tools allow them to coordinate their change efforts. And although cultural tools provide them with a repertoire of contentious tactics, political tools afford them a sense of security that they can battle defenders of the status quo without ruining their careers. These findings contribute to our understanding of both the cultural construction of organizational life and social movement processes.
Journal Article
Neighborhood Immigration, Violence, and City-Level Immigrant Political Opportunities
Using a multilevel comparative framework, we propose that politically receptive city contexts facilitate the viability of marginalized neighborhoods. To illustrate this proposition, we examine the relationship between immigrant concentration and neighborhood violence. Drawing on political process and minority incorporation theories, we argue that favorable immigrant political opportunities will strengthen the often-found inverse relationship between immigration and crime at the neighborhood level. Unique data from the National Neighborhood Crime Study (Peterson and Krivo 2010a) provide demographic and violence information for Census tracts in a representative sample of 87 large cities. We append this dataset with city-level measures of immigrant political opportunities, such as the extent of minority political incorporation into elected offices and pro-immigrant legislation. Multilevel instrumental variable analyses reveal that the inverse relationship between immigrant concentration and neighborhood violent crime is generally enhanced in cities with favorable immigrant political opportunities. We speculate that this occurs because favorable political contexts bolster social organization by enhancing trust and public social control within immigrant neighborhoods. Our findings demonstrate that the fate of neighborhoods marginalized across ethnicity and nativity are shaped by the responsiveness of political actors and structures to their concerns.
Journal Article
Conceptualizing Political Opportunity
This article reviews central problems in political opportunity theory and explores the implications of adopting certain conceptualizations of political opportunities for explaining the emergence, development, and influence of protest movements. Results from multivariate analyses of civil rights protest, organizational formation, and policy outcomes indicate significant variation depending on (1) whether the political opportunity structure is conceptualized broadly or narrowly, (2) the dependent variable concerned, and (3) the underlying assumptions about the mechanisms through which opportunities translate into action. We argue that the variation in results can best be understood by adopting a broader understanding of protest and the political process and that theory development requires more careful and more explicit — although not necessarily more uniform — conceptualization and specification of political opportunity variables and models.
Journal Article
From Exclusion to Co-Optation: Political Opportunity Structures and Civil Society Responses in De-Democratising Hungary
While it is well-known that democratic backsliding imposes a variety of challenges on civil society organisations, it is often assumed that it represses civil society. However, a closer look at the impact of democratic backsliding on civil society organisations reveals that even in countries where democratic backsliding is fairly advanced, the relationship between civil society and the state is more complex. Close cooperation and partnership between civil society organisations and the state are scarce in backsliding countries; the relationship between civil society organisations and the state might, however, range from hostility to varying forms and degrees of co-optation. Based on interviews with representatives of civil society organisations and the examination of the sector-specific social and political environment, we aim to explore the forms and factors that shape the relationship between civil society organisations and the state in Hungary. More specifically, we analyse the impact of the changing political opportunity structures on three important sectors of civil society organisations: human rights organisations, environmental organisations, and women’s organisations. We argue that, to seize control over civil society the government applies sector-specific strategies, ranging from exclusion to co-optation. State strategies, in turn, spark different responses from civil society organisations.
Journal Article
Political trust, extra-representational participation and the openness of political systems
The relationship between trust in representative political institutions and extra-representational participation (ERP) is contested. Generally, scholars have assumed that distrust is a major source of ERP. However, empirical studies have yielded inconclusive results. This article contributes to the debate by linking it to recent studies on how contextual factors affect the amount of ERP and interact with micro-level predictors. We take an innovative stance by conceptualizing the openness of political systems in both institutional and cultural terms, and by arguing that the negative micro-level relationship between political trust and ERP should be stronger in more open political systems. With a multi-level analysis of 22 European democracies, we show that citizens who distrust representative institutions are indeed more likely to engage in ERP. Most importantly, our findings indicate that the more open a political system in cultural terms, the stronger the negative micro-level relationship between political trust and ERP.
Journal Article
How Scandals Act as Catalysts of Fringe Stakeholders' Contentious Actions against Multinational Corporations
In this article, we build on the stakeholder-politics literature to investigate how corporate scandals transform political contexts and give impetus to the contentious movements of fringe stakeholders against multinational corporations (MNCs). Based on Adut's scandal theory (2005), we flesh out three scandal-related processes that directly affect political-opportunity structures (POSs) and the generation of social movements against MNCs: convergence of contention towards a single target, publicisation of deviant practices, and contagion to other organisations. These processes reduce the obstacles to collective actions by fringe stakeholders by pushing corporate elites to be more sensitive to their claims, by decreasing MNCs' capability to repress contentious movements, by forcing the targeted MNCs to formalise a policy to monitor and eradicate the controversial practices and by helping fringe stakeholders find internal and external allies to support their claims. This conceptual model of scandals as catalysts of contentious actions contributes to a better understanding of stakeholder politics by unveiling the role of the political context in the coordination of fringe stakeholders.
Paper
The politics of nonviolent mobilization
Nonviolent resistance is considered one of the most effective methods of bringing about political change. Yet empirical research on how nonviolent campaigns emerge is limited. This article considers two sets of considerations which influence the strategic decision of a campaign to use nonviolent or violent methods: interactions with the state and campaign resources. Campaigns are concerned about the risk of repression from the state and are more likely to choose nonviolence when they believe the state will accommodate their demands. Open political competition signals likely accommodation. Campaigns’nonviolent tactics are more effective when they possess social movement resources, though high levels of movement resources threaten the state. The argument implies political competition and social movement resources are associated with a higher likelihood of a campaign using nonviolence, though the relationship with social movement resources diminishes at high levels. Implications of the argument are tested on a sample of contentious campaigns from 1945 to 2006. Political competition and social movement resources are related as expected to the use of nonviolence. However, an extension shows these factors do not account for the advantage of nonviolent methods, particularly in triggering backlash protests, once a campaign is under way. An original ordinal measurement strategy for campaign methods suggests the intensity of violence and nonviolence are likewise unrelated to competition and resources.
Journal Article
Narrating political opportunities: explaining strategic adaptation in the climate movement
This article advances theory on social movements' strategic adaptation to political opportunity structures by incorporating a narrative perspective. Our theory explains how people acquire and use knowledge about political opportunity structures through storytelling about the movement's past, present, and imagined future. The discussion applies the theory in an ethnographic case study of the climate movement's mobilization around the UN Climate Summit in Paris, 2015. This analysis demonstrates how a dominant narrative of defeat about the prior protest campaign in Copenhagen, 2009 shaped the strategizing process. While those who experienced Copenhagen as a success preferred strategic continuity, those who experienced defeat developed a \"Copenhagen narrative\" to advance strategic adaptation by projecting previously experienced threats and opportunities onto the Paris campaign. Yet by relying on a retrospective narrative, movement actors tended to overlook emerging political opportunities. We demonstrate that narrative analysis is a useful tool for understanding the link between structure and agency in social movements and other actors affected by (political) opportunity structures.
Journal Article
The Domestic Political Costs of Economic Sanctions
While a great deal of attention has been to paid to whether or not economic sanctions work, less energy has been devoted to exploring the causal mechanisms that lead to the success or failure of sanctions policies. Often, it is assumed that the population is one important source of political costs for targeted leaders, but this assumption has not been tested. Are sanctions related to an increase in antigovernment activity? How does the domestic political system of the targeted state affect the likelihood of this antigovernment behavior? The findings presented here suggest that sanctions may increase antigovernment activity, but that increase is mitigated by the domestic political structures of the target state. In autocratic targets, political violence is less likely to occur when sanctions are in place. For sanctions against autocratic states to be costly, it appears that the political costs needed to alter behavior must be generated internationally rather than domestically.
Journal Article