Herbert P. Kitschelt: Political Opportunity Structures and Political
Protest: Anti-Nuclear Movements in Four Democracies
Since the 1960s, successive protest movements have challenged public policies,
established modes of political participation and socio-economic institutions in advanced
industrial democracies.
Social scientists have responded by conducting case studies of such movements.
- Comparative analyses, particularly cross-national comparisons of social movements,
however, remain rare, although opportunities abound to observe movements with
similar objectives or forms of mobilization in diverse settings.
A social movement that lends itself to cross-national study is the anti-nuclear power
movement, which swept across the political landscapes of America and Europe in the
1970s. In some countries, the nuclear power conflict reached an intensity
unprecedented in the history of technology controversies.
This article is an attempt to use some of the rich detail of the existing case studies to
construct a systematic comparison of the anti-nuclear power movements in
France, Sweden, the United States and West Germany.
- All four countries have experienced intense conflicts over nuclear technology, but
anti-nuclear movements in each have pursued a different strategy and have had a
different impact on overall energy policy.
Political Opportunity Structure
They are comprised of specific configurations of resources, institutional arrangements
and historical precedents for social mobilization, which facilitate the development of
protest movements in some instances and constrain them in others.
- While they do not determine the course of social movements completely, careful
comparisons among them can explain a good deal about the variations among social
movements with similar demands in different settings, if other determinants are held
constant.
- Comparison can show that political opportunity structures influence the choice of
protest strategies and the impact of social movements on their environments. The
latter is a topic that has received little attention until recently.
Three theoretical approaches:
- Marxian-macrosociological
- Microsociological
- Resource mobilization
,Essentially, what distinguishes the approach taken here is the importance assigned to
explaining movement variations, both in terms of mobilization and impact.
- Marxian-macrosociological analysis, for example, links the emergence of social
movements to various stages in the development of socio-economic modes of
production;
o those following this approach have viewed the anti-nuclear movement as a
member of a larger class of 'new social movements' that has been spawned
by the systems of bureaucratic and technological control that regulate social
life in late capitalism.
§ What proponents of this approach do not explain is why the various
national anti-nuclear protests have had such dissimilar careers, in
terms of both differential articulation and impact, in otherwise similarly
consulted capitalist.
- Microsociological approaches, which seek to explain the mobilization of protest and
its impact on policy and institutions as direct consequences of the number and
intensity of social 'strains' and grievances' or of the relative deprivation experienced
by particular social groups.
- The explanatory approach suggested here is loosely linked to the relatively recently
elaborated resource-mobilization perspective in social protest research, which
conceives of social movements as collective and rational decision-makers that
mobilize their followers and promote their causes with the best available strategies
given limited cognitive and material resources.
o Most of the empirical studies that adopt this perspective, however, concentrate
on those internal variables of movement mobilization that are deemed to be
within an incipient movement's discretion, e.g., incentive structure in
membership recruitment, internal organization, specification of goals and
skills in forming coalitions with allies.
Similarities between France, Sweden, the US and West Germany
- First of all, these four anti-nuclear movements share similar operational objectives,
namely, to prevent the completion of nuclear power plants under construction, to
prevent work from beginning on planned projects and, ultimately, to shut down
existing nuclear facilities.
- Secondly, in all of the cases, nuclear power conflicts grew from localized, segmented
conflicts about specific power plants into national movements and controversies in
the same time period, soon after the first energy crisis of 1973-74.
o (Anti-nuclear movements are treated here as complex aggregations of protest
events at the level of entire countries, not as sequences of separable protest
episodes at a more disaggregated level.)
- Thirdly, the objective 'threat' of nuclear power was about the same in each country in
that all governments were firmly committed to nuclear programs of approximately the
, same size and growth rates at the time that anti-nuclear protest became a national
phenomenon.
o Each country, for example, expected to install one to two gigawatts of nuclear
electricity generation capacity per million inhabitants by the late 1980s.
- Finally, as we shall see, the subjective sense of deprivation and grievance also was
quite similar.
Explaining Strategies and impacts of social movements
Political opportunity structures can further or restrain the capacity of social movements
to engage in protest activity in at least three different ways.
- Firstly, mobilization depends upon the coercive, normative, remunerative and
informational resources that an incipient movement can extract from its setting and
can employ in its protest.
o In Western democracies, non-violent resources are crucial for the emergence
of protest.
o Thus, if movements can appeal to widely shared norms, collect adequate
information about the nature of the grievance against which they protest and
raise the money to disseminate their ideas and information, the chances of a
broad mobilization increase.
- Secondly, the access of social movements to the public sphere and political
decision-making is also governed by institutional rules, such as those reinforcing
patterns of interaction between government and interest groups, and electoral laws.
o These rules allow for, register, respond to and even shape the demands of
social movements that are not yet accepted political actors.
- Thirdly, a social movement faces opportunities to mobilize protest that change over
time with the appearance and disappearance of other social movements.
o The mobilization of one movement, for example, may have a 'demonstration
effect' on other incipient movements, encouraging them to follow suit.
Factors which determine the openness of political regimes to new demands
on the input side
1. The number of political parties, factions, and groups that effectively articulate
different demands in electoral politics influences openness.
a. The larger this number, the more 'centrifugal' a political system tends to be
and the more difficult it is to confine electoral interest articulation to the 'cartel'
of entrenched interests that is represented by the established, bureaucratized
parties.
2. Openness increases with the capacity of legislatures to develop and control policies
independently of the executive.
a. This is the case because a legislature is by definition an electorally
accountable agent and is therefore much more sensitive to public demands,
whereas only the uppermost positions in the executive are subject to such
direct public pressure.
, 3. Patterns of intermediation between interest groups and the executive branch are
another element shaping political openness.
a. Where 'pluralist' and fluid links are dominant, access for new interests to the
centres of political decision-making is facilitated.
4. Finally, political openness not only requires opportunities for the articulation of new
demands, but new demands must actually find their way into the processes of
forming policy compromises and consensus.
a. For this to occur, there must be mechanisms that aggregate demands.
Openness is constrained when there are no viable procedures to build
effective policy coalitions.
Dimensions on the capacity of political systems to implement policies
1. National policies are implemented more effectively when the state apparatus is
centralized.
a. A complicated division of jurisdiction between a multitude of
semi-independent government agencies and a federal stratification of state
authority tends to make policy implementation more cumbersome.
2. Simultaneously, government control over market participants is a key variable for
government effectiveness in many policy areas.
a. The degree of state control over the finance sector, the relative size of the
public sector's share of GNP and its share of total employment, and the
state's co-ordination, control or exclusion of economic interest groups in
policy-making, are some of the factors that influence policy effectiveness.
b. The greater is the control of economic resources and decision centres
through political institutions, the more limited are the resources available with
which to challenge policies.
3. Policy effectiveness is also determined by the relative independence and authority
the judiciary enjoys in the resolution of political conflict.
a. Policy implementation becomes more hazardous and cumbersome if courts
are forums of political arbitration removed from executive branch control.
Political Opportunity Structures in France, Sweden, West Germany and the United
States
How do these different national political opportunity structures affect the
strategies and impacts of social movements?
Two major hypotheses guide the present comparison of anti-nuclear movements.
- Firstly, with respect to strategies, political opportunity structures set the range of likely
protest activities.
o For instance, when political systems are open and weak, they invite
assimilative strategies; movements attempt to work through established
institutions because political opportunity structures offer multiple points of
access.
