Suchergebnisse

Political opportunity structures are often used to explain differences in the characteristics of movements in different countries on the basis of the national polity in which they exist. However, the approach has a number of weaknesses that are outlined in this article. The article especially stresses the fact that such broad-brush approaches to political opportunity structures fail to account for the different characteristics of movement organisations within the same polity. The article therefore recommends using a more fine-tuned approach to political opportunities, taking into account that the strategies and status of organisations affect the real political opportunities they face. This fine-tuned approach is used to predict how the status and strategy of environmental organisations might influence the extent to which different types of environmental organisations in the UK network with one-another. We find that organisations that face an open polity - those with a moderate action repertoire and a constructive relationship with government institutions - tend not to cooperate with those with a radical action repertoire and negative relations with government institutions. On the other hand, those that vary their action repertoires, and which have variable status according to the issues involved or campaign targets, have a much broader range of network links with other types of organisations. Thus, there is much more diversity in types of environmental organisation in the UK than the broad-brush to political opportunity structures would account for. Nonetheless, it does seem that environmental organisations are aware of how their own behaviours might influence (non-structural) political opportunities, and that they mould their strategies and networking patterns around this awareness.

This article argues that the agenda-setting power of protest must be understood in dynamic terms. Specifically, it develops and tests a dynamic theory of media reaction to protest which posits that features of street demonstrations—such as their size, violence, societal conflict, and the presence of a "trigger"—lead protest issues to be reported and sustained in the media agenda over time. We conduct a unique empirical analysis of media coverage of protest issues, based upon a data set of 48 large-scale street demonstrations in nine countries. Time-series cross-sectional analysis is used to estimate the dynamic effects of demonstration features on media coverage of the protest issue. The findings show that violence can increase media attention in the short term and larger protest size sustains it over the longer term. The agenda-setting power of protest is structured in time.