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Social movements are examined as precursors of political change & social transformation in Latin America. Here, movements of the 1960s & 1970s are summarized. Such movements cut across social class structure, with leadership not fixed in a certain personality, & the ruling classes responded with state terror. This response only temporarily quelled the movements: structural factors, eg, a decline in the standard of living & continued elite class-state ties, led to a resurgence of social movements in Latin America in the 1980s. These movements challenge the ruling military-civilian class, & seek to quicken the democratization process in Latin America. The origins of such movements & major actions are described. A. Cole

When the United States activists called for people to Occupy#everywhere, it is unlikely they were thinking of the headquarters of the Italian centre-left party. Parties and movements are often considered to be worlds apart. In reality, parties have been relevant players in movement politics, and movements have influenced parties, often through the double militancy of many of their members. OccupyPD testifies to a continuous fluidity at the movement-party border, but also to a blockage in the party's interactions with society that started long before the economic crisis but drastically accelerated with it. In this paper we present the OccupyPD Movement as a case of interaction between party politics and social movement politics, and in particular between the base membership of a centre-left party and the broader anti-austerity movement that diffused from the US to Europe adopting similar forms of actions and claims. Second, by locating it within the context of the economic and democratic crisis that erupted in 2007, we understand its emergence as a reaction towards politics in times of crisis of responsibility, by which we mean a drastic drop in the capacity of the government to respond to citizens' requests. To fulfil this double aim, we bridge social movement studies with research on party change, institutional trust and democratic theory, looking at some political effects of the economic crisis in terms of a specific form of legitimacy crisis, as well as citizens' responses to it, with a particular focus on the political meaning of recent anti-austerity protests. In this analysis, we refer to both quantitative and qualitative data from secondary liter-ature and original in-depth interviews carried out with a sample of OccupyPD activists.

This article discusses and critiques the four articles that comprise this volume on Taiwan's social movement and democratization. I argue that the four articles suggest that while Taiwan's social movements have made a clear impact on Taiwan's democratization, they remain challenged by the neo-liberal orientation of elected governments, in both KMT and DPP forms. The article provides brief comparison to East Asian NICs and Western experiences with social movements. A strength of the articles is their attention to the complex ways social movements and democratization have impacted each other for the past two decades, with attention to unintended consequences. It concludes with some thoughts on the implications of how nationalism and globalization will continue to shape the potential of social movements in Taiwan. Adapted from the source document.

This book explores the changing nature of social movements and economic elites in post-Second World War Europe. In the years following 1945, Europe faced diverse challenges connected by the overriding question of how the reconstruction of the continent should proceed. For the Central Powers, the implementation lay in the hands of the Allied occupying forces who organised the process of denazification and the establishment of a new economic order. In countries without military occupation, there was a deep gap between the new governmental forces and the former collaborators. In both cases, social movements which were formed by anti-fascists on the left of the political spectrum assumed the task of social reorganisation. The chapters in this book explore the discourses about economic systems and their elites which moved to the fore across a range of European countries, uncovering who was involved, what resistance these social movements faced and how these ultimately failed in the West to bring about change, while in Eastern Europe Stalinism forcibly imposed change.

The rise of social movements in postwar American cities has been associated with economic reorganization and urban redevelopment. But we argue that although economic change in the cities and social migration motivated by national economic forces provided the objective conditions within which movements arose, specifically political factors were determinative. The first part of this article explores in theory the linkages between economic change and social mobilization. It concludes that urban movements must be under-stood within the context of both routine urban politics and national political events. Using New York City as a case, we go on to show that before and after the national black movement of the 1960s, popular urban protest was commonplace, yet was channeled and contained by the political system. Thus, in recent years, despite enormous economic reorganization and decline in the situation of the lower classes in New York, urban movements have not arisen. Rather, communal protest is isolated, institutionalized in various mechanisms for citizen participation, and results, at best, in a few concessions. The final section of the article assesses the possibilities of social action rooted in urban movements. It argues that only a national movement and political party can establish the context for powerful mobilizations at the urban level.