Suchergebnisse

Heidi J. Swarts explores activist groups cultural, organizational, and political strategies. Focusing on ACORN chapters and church federations, Swarts demonstrates how congregation-based organizing has developed an innovative cultural strategy, and how ACORNs national structure allows it to coordinate campaigns quickly. By making these often-invisible grassroots organizers evident, Swarts sheds light on factors that constrain or enable other social movements in the United States.

This article investigates predictors of living wage ordinance adoption in U.S. cities. The authors build on previous research by including all cities with more than 25,000 people (1,072 cities), adding new variables to measure favorable political context, use of event history analysis (Cox regression) to analyze temporal effects in diffusion, and distinguishing between predictors of early and late adoption. General political context, city size, and municipal expenditures were significant predictors, while grievances, presence of a local ACORN chapter, union density, and form of city government were not significant. Density of nonlabor progressive associations and history of progressive activism were major predictors of policy adoption.