Just because there’s a protest-worthy cause doesn’t mean that a protest movement will, in fact, emerge. Researchers who study social movements have theorized that such mobilization tends to occur when members of a community have the right kind of political opportunity or when they have access to critical resources.
Sociologists Rachel Wright of Stanford University and Hilary Schaffer Boudet of Oregon State University have found a novel way to put those theories to the test. First of all, they decided to look not only at cases when a social movement emerged, but also at cases when that didn’t happen. “Communities have a choice as to whether or not to mobilize. Some do, and some don’t,” Wright says.
Wright and Boudet focused on communities where a large and potentially controversial energy infrastructure project—a liquefied natural gas terminal, for instance, or a nuclear power plant—was slated for installation. The researchers combed through a federal database containing environmental impact statements for such proposed projects and chose a set of cases to research in depth. They read newspaper stories, gathered census data, and conducted interviews with people on all sides of each proposal. Drawing on that research, they identified 10 cases in which a protest movement emerged and 10 cases in which little or no mobilization took place.
Next, by applying a technique known as fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, the researchers used their rich pool of data to derive conclusions about which combinations of factors led to mobilization—and which did not.
For example, communities that did not already feature industrial development of the same type as the proposed project were more likely to mobilize against that project. The same was true of communities that had experience with opposing projects similar to the one that was under consideration. Such communities, the researchers say, were more likely than others to view a proposed project as threatening. In these cases, political opportunity and resource availability were also evident, but they weren’t sufficient to explain the emergence of a movement to protest a given project. “It’s the combination of factors that’s important,” Boudet says.
“Fuzzy” methodology enabled the researchers to bring clarity to the study of social movements. “You’re not going to come up with a simple explanation of things, necessarily, but it more closely matches what happens in the real world,” Boudet says.
Charles Ragin, Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, developed the fuzzy-set analysis method by adapting a technique that electrical engineers use. “What’s cool about this method,” Wright says, “is that it tells you which packages [of factors] more frequently align with your outcomes of interest.”
Ragin says he was “pleasantly surprised” to see Wright and Boudet’s application of this method to social movements “They have a very clear argument about why it takes a combination of factors,” he says. “That’s really important.”
Read more stories by Corinna Wu.