Unlocking the Tactics, Network and Membership of Clandestine Social Movements

• In Event: 2483 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 11. Radical Movements and Covert Tactics

Abstract

It remains difficult to study many social movements due to the efforts of movement members (or groups) to remain clandestine, or to otherwise obscure their tactics, networks, membership, and agenda. As a consequence, data limitations and/or theoretical disagreements abound within social movement research on many radical groups. We contend that the texts produced by radical groups and their supporters provide a window into group features, and that recent advances in automated content analysis methods afford a means for unlocking these texts in a systematic fashion. To this end, we apply a recently developed automated content analysis technique—the structural topic model (STM)—to one of the radical animal liberation movement’s primary North American publications so as to uncover the underlying issues discussed within this social movement. The STM provides revealing insights into the topical agenda of animal liberationists, and the relative attention paid towards networking, violence, radicalization, and direct actions. Examination of these topics over time further suggests that that the movement’s identity exhibited a number of ideological shifts during the 1990s and 2000s, which corresponded in some cases to internal changes in movement membership and in other cases to external pressures or events.

Authors

• Zack W. Almquist, University of Minnesota

• Benjamin Bagozzi, University of Delaware