Tactical Innovation in Social Movements: The Role of Peripheral Claims and Multi-Issue Protest

• In Event: 535 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Paper Session. Strategy and Social Movements

Abstract

Social movement research has argued that tactical innovation occurs in response to changes external to movements, such as historical shifts in political authority, or as part of internal movement processes, such as the emergence of protest organizations. In this study, we locate the roots of tactical innovation in the relational features of the claims articulated at protest events. With data on over 23,000 protest events that took place in the United States between 1960 and 1995, we develop two new operationalizations of tactical innovation and novel measures of the relationships between protest event claims. Our results show that multi-issue protest events are more likely to utilize novel recombinations of tactics while protest events with more peripheral movement claims deploy new protest tactics. We bring together sociological work on social movement dynamics, innovation, and field theoretic approaches to theorize about the relationship between the tools and content of activism.

Author

• Dan Wang, Columbia University