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Robert Dahl, a political scientist whose work is widely respected by sociologists, responded directly to C. Wright Mills in the 1950s and 60s. In Dahl’s most famous book, Who Governs?, he presented New Haven, Connecticut as a case study in pluralism. Dahl scoffed at the idea that any kind of secret

cabal was running New Haven — instead, he argued, the city government did its best to balance the competing interests of all the different people it governed. Sometimes people felt slighted and got angry, sometimes people took advantage of others, but by and large, Dahl said, New Haven was a democratic city — “warts and all.”

Dahl and other pluralists believe that’s the way government works, at least in democratic societies: by helping large, diverse groups of people work in their own best interest.

Social Movements: Working for Change

In the perfect pluralist society, democratic voting and fair representation would be enough to bring about a system of laws and policies that appropriately balance the interests of everyone in a society. It never quite seems to work out that way, though — in part because there is no such thing as a perfectly democratic society, and in part because many of the most important institutions in society are not governmental at all. For that reason, people often find it necessary to organize social movements to work as a group for the kind of changes they want to see.

In this section, I explain how social movements get off the ground and mobilize supporters — and how and why they succeed.

Getting off the ground

A social movement, in the sociological sense, is more than just a bunch of people who say they want something: it’s an organized effort to achieve social change. Social movements can be very small, or they can be very large; they can be very successful, and they can be complete failures. Nonetheless, what all social movements have in common is that they represent concerted efforts to bring about social change. They typically represent people who feel that their voices are not being heard through other channels; that they don’t have the means to get through to the powers that be without an organized effort to make their demands known.

There are many different kinds of social movements, with many different kinds of goals. From community-organizing groups like ACORN to religious groups like the Christian Coalition to lawless groups like the Ku Klux Klan, a social movement is any group of people organizing to bring about social change.

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Social movements often target governmental officials and agencies, but they sometimes also target corporations or influential individuals. Most social movements seek to raise public awareness of the issues with which they’re concerned; in fact, some social movements seek to do nothing but raise public awareness.

Social movements’ efforts may take many forms. Most social movements involve one or more of these efforts:

Rallys, marches, and parades: Public gatherings to show the world how many people feel a certain way, and how strongly they feel it.

Coordinated demands: Letters, e-mails, or other messages to the movement’s target(s).

Publicity: Advertisements, posters, graffiti, or other means of spreading a group’s message.

Civil disobedience: Members of a group defying the law to show how strongly they feel about their cause, especially when their cause involves a law they find unjust.

Social movements do not necessarily have to be coordinated from the top down; in fact, most large social movements are diverse, with different organized groups working towards some shared goals and some different goals. Groups within a social movement may also disagree on the means of achieving a goal: For example, some groups may believe that violent vigilante efforts are justified and necessary whereas other groups believe that efforts should be exclusively peaceful.

So why do social movements arise? It’s a question sociologists have been studying for a long time, and the answer isn’t obvious. After all, everybody wants something in society, but not everybody is going to go down to City Hall and picket over it, write letters about it, or even tell anyone else how they feel about it. There are any number of grievances that exist in any given society; which ones turn into full-fledged social movements? There are at least two good answers to this question; they come from relative deprivation theory and resource mobilization theory.

Relative deprivation theory

One answer that seems to make sense goes by the name of relative deprivation theory. According to relative deprivation theory, people are spurred into organized action when a gap opens up between what they think they deserve and what they are actually getting. In other words, if society is setting a group of people up to think that they ought to have something, but then doesn’t give it to them, they feel “relatively deprived” and are inclined to take their grievances to the streets.

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As an example, think about the women’s suffrage movement of the late 19th century and early 20th century. In the United States (and in many other countries) at that time, there was a concerted movement by women — with the support of sympathetic men — to gain the right to vote. This effort definitively succeeded with the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing all women the right to vote.

That amendment, though, was not ratified until 1920 — and women had been without the guaranteed right to vote for all of American history up until that time. Why was there no major suffrage movement in the 18th century, or

in the early 19th century? Certainly there were plenty of women who were unhappy about their lot during those times, but they didn’t form a major suffrage movement until later.

Relative deprivation theory would say that women didn’t organize a mass suffrage movement until they felt relatively deprived of the right to vote. As the 19th century neared its end, the idea that any group could be legitimately deprived of the right to vote was under increasing attack from all sides. Slavery had ended, and in many places people of all races could vote. (Jim Crow laws, sadly, kept African-Americans in many places from actually voting until decades later.) Women in certain other countries were gaining the right to vote in the late 19th century, and some U.S. states and territories were granting suffrage (that is, the right for women to vote) for elections within their jurisdiction.

All this meant that a woman in 1900 who was living in a state where she was unable to vote could read about plenty of other examples of women who did have the right to vote. A hundred years previous, in 1800, a woman unable to vote would not have been able to point to many examples of women who could legally vote — so though both the woman in 1800 and the woman in 1900 were equally deprived of the right to vote, the woman in 1900 would feel more deprived.

A useful aspect of this theory is that it’s helpful for explaining why there are just as many social movements in wealthy societies as there are in poor societies. Objectively, people in some societies are more deprived than people in others — but what inspires social movements, according to this theory, is a sense of relative deprivation.

If relative deprivation theory still seems confusing, think about a child whose father spontaneously decides to buy him a one-scoop ice cream cone; now, think about a child who is given the same one-scoop cone while his sibling is given a two-scoop cone. Which child is more likely to get upset?

Resource mobilization theory

Many sociologists, though, feel that relative deprivation theory is not enough to explain how and why social movements arise. Not only are there just as many social movements in wealthy societies, note those sociologists, when

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Rounding up the posse

If one question is how social movements get started, another question is how people become involved in them. Even in the case of large, widespread social movements, most people in a society — even most people who care greatly about a given issue — do not become involved. Why?

One answer comes from microsociology, and points to the importance of frames. As I note in Chapter 6, a “frame” is a definition of a social situation. What I think my role is in a given social situation — including how,

and whether, I need to act — depends on the frame around that situation. Whether or not a person chooses to join an active social movement depends, at least in part, on whether or not the situation is framed as one that person has an interest in.

This becomes especially important when you consider the fact that sometimes the grievances social movements fight for are quite removed from the lives of the people whose support the movement needs. In the women’s suffrage example above, the aggrieved, deprived group is quite clear: it’s

women. In other cases, it’s not so clear; to mobilize supporters, social movements need to convince as many groups of people as possible that the movement’s cause is something the groups have a stake in.

As an example, think about the animal rights movement. There are many different organizations involved in that movement, with different goals and methods, but the general goal is to end practices that harm or cause suffering to animals. To mobilize as many supporters as possible, the various groups involved in the animal rights movement place a number of different frames around the issue.

To attract supporters who are concerned about the environment, advocates portray animal rights as an environmental issue: raising animals for food, they point out, requires more resources and creates more pollution than raising grains and vegetables does.

To attract supporters who are concerned about their health, advocates portray animal rights as a health issue: eating vegetarian, they say, means you’ll be healthier.

To attract supporters who are pet owners, advocates portray animal rights as a moral issue: they spread photos and videos of animals being mistreated to win the sympathy of people who would never want their pets to be treated that way.

To attract people who are conscious of their social status, advocates portray animal rights as something it’s cool to be worried about: they have attractive people pose for ads — sometimes unclothed (“I’d rather go naked than wear fur”) — to suggest that caring about animal rights is something that hot, high-status people do.

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themselves “pro-choice” (that is, in favor of keeping abortion legal), and had switched their views after becoming active in the pro-life movement. What happened in these cases was that people typically became involved in the movement through friends and family: licking envelopes or making signs to support someone they cared about. After they started participating in the movement, they found that their beliefs about the issue became much stronger — that they turned into dyed-in-the-wool advocates for the pro-life cause.

Even, it seems, when it comes to an issue as personal and where views are held, by many people, so strongly, people can more easily be induced to act than to believe; after they start acting, their beliefs may follow. For this reason, social movements may have as much luck going through personal networks and offering other incentives (even material rewards) for people to act as they’d have appealing to people’s fundamental beliefs.

What it means for a social movement to be successful

Some social movements quickly meet with success, some find success only after many years, and some social movements meet with no success at all. Is there any way to understand why some movements succeed and others fail?

With an eye to exactly this question, sociologist William Gamson studied several dozen organizations involved in social movements. After careful study, he concluded that (you’ve heard this before!) it wasn’t quite that simple. To “succeed” or to “fail” can mean different things in different contexts.

Gamson offered at least four different outcomes that social movements can meet, depending on whether or not they’re accepted as legitimate organizations and whether or not their material goals are met. Here are the four outcomes Gamson saw:

Full response. When a movement is recognized as legitimate and achieves its goals, it’s unquestionably been a success. This is the kind of success that the Civil Rights movement has had after many years of struggle: Not only do African-Americans have the universal right to vote and to gain employment without discrimination, the movement’s leaders have been given much recognition. In the United States, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is a national holiday.

Preemption. Social movements may experience bittersweet victories when they realize their goals but are not accepted as legitimate organizations or as welcome movements. Music fans who have organized digital file-sharing networks to pressure record companies to loosen