Paradigm Warriors: Regress and Progress in the Study of Contentious Politics

Transcription

1 Sociological Forum, Vol. 14, No. 1, 1999 Paradigm Warriors: Regress and Progress in the Study of Contentious Politics Sidney Tarrow1 Paradigm warfare is a well-worn way of engaging in the polemics of research, but it frequently reduces paradigms to caricatures and turns complex reports of empirical research into cartoons. This is illustrated by two one-sided accounts of the Chiapas rebellion: one based on a simplistic "political opportunity" cartoon and the other on a foreshortened "culturalist" one. Reducing the many-sided (and in some ways ambiguous) approaches of the "political process" model to a supposedly hegemonic paradigm neglects many substantive contributions and cuts with too broad a stroke at "social movements" while ignoring the many-branched contributions of research and theory on contentious politics. KEY WORDS: social movements; contentious politics; political opportunities; repertoires of contention; cycles of protest. RASHOMAN IN CHIAPAS In 1994, the Mexican economy was overheating. The poor were getting poorer and the rich-although richer were dissatisfied with the palpable corruption of their government. The dominant political party, the PRI, in the saddle for a half-century, was divided between politicos and tecnicos. Internally divided, the PRI oligarchs no longer dared to repress their opponents as they had done in the past. Opposition parties of the left and right are gaining leverage in local and state politics. Sensing blood, they offered their support to insurgent challengers outside the polity. 1Department of Government, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY /99/ $16.00/ Plenum Publishing Corporation

2 72 Tarrow This was the opportunity insurgents had been waiting for. Taking advantage of the structural determinants outlined here and of the resources offered by indigenous anger, movement entrepreneurs launched a rebellion in the state of Chiapas. The government's repressive efforts were feeble and uncertain, and the opposition parties seized the opportunity offered by the rebels to attack it. Facing pressure from the U.S. government, amid a collapsing economy and increasingly bold challenges, the Mexican government had no choice but to negotiate. The Chiapas social movement succeeded because like social movements everywhere it was able to seize political opportunities. It is again The local people of Chiapas were suffering deprivation caused not only by their material poverty but by their cultural isolation. Made up largely of indigenous campesinos, they spoke languages unrelated to Spanish, had little sympathy for those who ruled them from the capital, and feared the loss of their native culture to North American market forces and the government's neoliberal policies. Over the years, they had constructed a worldview in which those who work the land possess virtue, whereas those who own it lack legitimacy. The local cacique, the grain merchant, the policeman: all were the linear descendants of the conquistadores who conquered their land and destroyed their ancient community. The rebellion of Chiapas was a rebellion in the name of these suppressed indigenous identities. However, insurgent identities were not inherited wholesale from the past; they were actively constructed through agency into mobilized ones by cultural leaders. In this process, the personal narratives of ordinary people were transformed into dynamic worldviews and arrayed as collective stories in a cognitive struggle with hegemonic elites. Symbols of the Mexican past, like Emiliano Zapata, inspired them, whereas leaders resembling the heros of successful Latin American revolutions, like subcomandante Marcos, assured them that the goals they sought were part of a wider historical struggle for justice in the hemisphere. CARTOONS AND CARICATURES The Rashomanic sketches presented here are, of course, cartoons. Although both are recognizable as foreshortened versions of the rebellion that was mounted in Chiapas in 1994, there are at least three things wrong with them. First, each is inaccurate and misleading in crucial details. Both ignore the considerable importance of the international media and of North American networks in publicizing the claims of the insurgents (Bob, 1997).

3 Regress and Progress in the Study of Contentious Politics 73 Both underspecify the cleavages within Chiapas and ignore the considerable suspicion in which Marcos and his comrades were held by other Mexican progressive groups (Van Cott, 1996). Both elide the complex strategic evolution of the EZLF from guevarist foco to neopopulist movement in response to the early diffidence of the peasantry. Second, both are theoretically impoverished. The first cartoon frames the Chiapas rebellion as a mechanism practically without agency, wholly dependent on structural opportunities, and producing mobilization through the clever calculation of movement entrepreneurs. The forms of contention used, the mobilizing structures built, the frames of resistance developed, and the actors' interaction with significant others are either derivative of structural constraints or are simply ignored. The second cartoon ignores opportunities, mobilizing structures, repertoires, and interactions, raising agency and identity to monocausal virtues and providing no clue as to why the rebellion occurred when it did. After all, cultural assault, market incursion, and indigenous collective identities are nothing new to rural Mexico! However, these are not the greatest disadvantages of these two cartoons. From the standpoint of building a cumulative social science of popular contention, each is based on a caricature of a paradigm. Although the second cartoon has the virtue of calling attention to the actors involved, it sees them but from the standpoint of the sympathetic observers' idea of how poor peasants ought to resist oppressive others. As a result, it underspecifies the political factors that produced the Chiapas rebellion when it occurred, such as the opportunities opened up to insurgents by the recent North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) agreement, and the factors in Mexican politics that led it along the path it took. In recognizing the importance of domestic opportunities, the first cartoon does propose an answer to the "Why now?" question. However, it specifies opportunity so broadly that any political change can be inferred as an opportunity post hoc. In focussing on a single social movement organization, it ignores other local conflicts for example, between people with small land holdings and landless peasants as well as the transnational dimensions of the rebellion. We do not get very far in understanding reallife contentious politics with cartoons or with caricatures of the paradigms that produce them. PARADIGM WARFARE IN SOCIAL MOVEMENT RESEARCH I have, of course, drawn these cartoons tongue-in-cheek to illustrate the dangers of one-sided and simplistic renderings of social movements

4 74 Tarrow embedded in complex and shifting contentious realities. Yet my cartoons are not all that different from how the history of social movements has been written since the late 1960s. Rather than a search for more synthetic models that can account for these histories, or focussing different models on different parts of the mobilization process (Klandermans 1997), such canned histories are often written by paradigm warriors seeking to vanquish another group of researchers, as Goodwin and Jasper here attempt to do. Since the 1960s, each time a general model has been proposed, a new wave of paradigm warriors steps forward, sword in hand, ready to slay the dragon of hegemonic discourse. As Howard Aldrich writes in another context: Some observers write about... paradigms as if the competition between theories takes place at the levels of ideas, with "good ideas" battling with "bad ideas" in some sort of ideational arena. (1988:19) In the social movement field in the 1960s and 1970s, a resource mobilization model was developed that was antagonistic to the inherited collective behavior approach. Its proponents made a major advance on its predecessor, but they did it an injustice in zeroing in on its most simplistic exponents and ignoring the complexities in its more careful exemplars. Resource mobilization got its comeuppance: in the 1980s, two new paradigms appeared. One hearkened back to political scientists' work of the late 1960s and 1970s (Eisinger, 1973; Lipsky, 1968; Piven and Cloward, 1971; and especially Tilly, 1978) and came to be called "political process theory" (McAdam, 1982; Tarrow, 1983). The second, "new" social movement theory, drew on European structuralism but went considerably beyond it in the direction of social construction and identity politics (Melucci, 1985, 1988, 1996; Offe, 1985). Both groups smote resource mobilization for its excesses of economism and its apparent indifference to the beliefs of the aggrieved, but in their urge to reify the "new" (see the critique in Calhoun, 1995) they foreshortened its contributions. However, both drew on and learned from this tradition and, in turn, helped to influence its proponents' later research (for example, see McCarthy and his collaborators, 1991, 1995, Zald, 1996). Now in the late 1990s, drawing unconsciously on the second tradition, two new paradigm warriors, Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper, launch a phenomenological critique of the first. Like their predecessors in the sequence of paradigm warfare, they regard their target as "hegemonic." They are assisted in doing so by a considerable effort of reductionism (including within it some authors who might be surprised to find themselves in such company) and selectivity (they focus on the recent generation of work in this perspective, exempting from attack its most prominent inventor, Charles Tilly, and most of the work in this tradition by political scientists and social historians). Although they do not miss the lack of unanimity in

5 Regress and Progress in the Study of Contentious Politics 75 the tradition in specifying political variables, their narrowing of focus actually leads them to overlook one of its dangers excessive syncretism (see the critique in Lichbach, 1997). Indeed, in the best tradition of paradigm warfare, Goodwin and Jasper reduce their focus to one aspect of the approach they criticize, in this case, to the concept of political opportunity structure. They deal with the extensive work on mobilizing structures and framing in the tradition as if they were afterthoughts of a structuralist fixation, largely ignoring the concepts of repertoires and cycles in the political process approach (Tilly, 1978; McAdam, 1983; Traugott, 1995). Most important, they elide the interest in the mutual interaction among challengers, opponents, and third parties that has been central to this tradition since Tilly's construction of a polity model in the late 1970s. Although practitioners can certainly be found who mechanically regard political opportunity structure as the be-all and end-all of mobilization, in centering around that concept as a kind of Rosetta stone of political process theory, Goodwin and Jasper ignore the fact that most political process theorists since Tilly (1978) try to explain movements as the outcome of a combination of structural and cultural as well as long-term and contingent factors and of the interactive logics of the political struggle. Goodwin and Jasper quote my Power in Movement to the effect that "people join in social movements in response to political opportunities and then, through collective action, create new ones" (this issue, p. 30; Power in Movement, 1994:17-18). It is de bonne guerre in paradigm warfare to extract a snippet of an author's work to reduce it to inconsequence. Yet turning only eight pages back in the same book, they would have found the following: Movements do have a collective action problem but it is social: coordinating unorganized, autonomous and dispersed populations into common and sustained action. They solve this problem by (1) responding to political opportunities through the use of (2) known, modular forms of collective action, by (3) mobilizing people within social networks and (4) through shared cultural understandings. (1994:9) This fixation on POS is unfortunate, for it allows Goodwin and Jasper to paint their opponents as advocates of invariant models and to virtually ignore their emphasis on identity formation within collective action (Tarrow, 1998, ch. 7; Tilly, 1997), the historical rootedness of their work (Costain, 1992; Meyer, 1990; Piven and Cloward, 1971, 1977; McAdam, 1988; Tarrow, 1989; Schneider, 1995; Tilly, 1978, 1986, 1995); the nesting of social movements in broader historical cycles (Brockett, 1995; Goldstone, 1980; Mc- Adam, 1995; Tarrow, 1989; Tilly, 1995); and especially their bringing interaction with states, opponents, and significant others into the study of contention (Brockett, 1995; Costain, 1992; della Porta, 1995; Kriesi et al., 1995; Schneider, 1995).

6 76 Tarrow Paradigm warfare need not be reductionist. Consider the creative encounter between the advocates of European "new" social movement theory and their American positivist opponents in the 1980s, documented in a series of conference volumes (Klandermans et al., 1988; Morris and Mueller, 1992). It led, among other things, to new social movement theorist Hanspeter Kriesi and his collaborators' Politics of New Social Movements in Western Europe (1995). Or think of the sharpening of perspectives about the concept of "globalization" and its implications for transnational contention in Margaret Keck and Katherine Sikkink's Activists Beyond Borders (1998) or the recent debate on global flows of labor and capital in International Labor and Working-Class History (1995). In contrast with these careful and subtle debates, Goodwin and Jasper employ an ax to chop down a shrub of their own invention, in place of the scalpel that would be needed to dissect the many-branched plant that their subjects have been cultivating over three decades of work. FROM SOCIAL MOVEMENT REDUCTIONISM TO CONTENTIOUS POLITICS Let me illustrate the dangers of paradigm warfare with one example. Goodwin and Jasper argue that advocates of political process models promise "a causally adequate, universal theory or 'model' of social movements" (this issue, p. 28). Now social movements make a nice target; but in narrowing their scope to movements, Goodwin and Jasper ignore a major innovation of the political process approach over its predecessors: to embed the study of movements within a larger universe of contentious politics and thence to politics in general (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, 1997; Oliver, 1989; Tarrow, 1998; Tilly, 1995). Political process theorists argue that the social movement is a historically specific subtype of contentious politics, and not its sole and universal expression (Tarrow, 1998; Tilly, 1995). That argument cannot even be examined by critics who assume that "social movements" are the alpha and omega of the writers they criticize. Ignoring it leads Goodwin and Jasper to elide some of the major contributions of the political process tradition: its discoveries about the modularity and institutionalization of repertoires of contention (Tilly, 1978, 1986, 1995, and the contributions to Traugott, 1995); its work on the complex and recursive reciprocity between movement challengers and members of the polity (Costain, 1992; Tarrow, 1989, 1998; Tilly, 1978, 1995); how the structure of opportunities intersects with historical cleavage structures to produce substantially different patterns of contention from country to country (Kriesi et al., 1995) or from

7 Regress and Progress in the Study of Contentious Politics 77 region to region (Amenta et al., 1992); the impact of participation in contentious experiences on participants' lives long after the movements in which they took part have disappeared (McAdam, 1988); and how, in cycles of protest, movements both gain resources and contribute opportunities to other forms of contention and to more institutional actors (Tarrow, 1989, 1998; Giugni, McAdam, and Tilly, 1998). This author is not alone in his plea that polemical attacks on paradigms give way to more serious confrontations between data, variables, and models. From one theoretical perspective, John Lofland regrets that theory bashing has become such common practice in movement literature (1993). From another, Bert Klandermans regrets excessive disciplinary fragmentation and surveys different attempts for synthesizing theoretical frameworks (1997). From a third, Freidhelm Neidhart and Dieter Rucht elaborate a subtle and complex grid of variables for the study of contention (1993). With my collaborators, Ron Aminzade, Jack Goldstone, Elizabeth Perry, Doug McAdam, William Sewell, Jr., and Charles Tilly, and our associates from a number of universities, and with the support of the Mellon Foundation and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, we have been attempting, from different theoretical perspectives, to broaden the compass of social movement theory to other areas of contention, and to move away from the Western democracies from which most of our current models are derived to other parts of the world and to other types of systems. Our hope is to challenge our own political process models by confronting them with new and more demanding contexts and different theoretical traditions. Paradigm warfare has a place in the annals of research. However, to the degree that it is reductive, selective, and polemical, it produces caricatures instead of research and cartoons instead of critiques. Toward the end of their article, Goodwin and Jasper sketch the first outlines of a different research agenda. Rather than political process models, they call for a phenomenological individualism that will overcome the defects of what they see as an overwhelming emphasis on the political process. In future contributions, it is hoped that they will specify what this means in practice and how it will take us beyond a critique of the last paradigm and a call for better description. Their readers await with interest to see how they plan to accomplish this task. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to Ron Aminzade, Clifford Bob, Judy Hellman, Doug McAdam and Charles Tilly for help in preparing this article.