"aiming at a moving target": social science and the recent rebellions in eastern europe

"Aiming at a Moving Target": Social Science and the Recent Rebellions in Eastern EuropeAuthor(s): Sidney TarrowSource: PS: Political Science and Politics, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Mar., 1991), pp. 12-20Published by: American Political Science AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/419368 .Accessed: 15/06/2014 16:06

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Understanding Political Change in Eastern Europe

"Aiming at a Moving Target": Social Science and the Recent Rebellions in Eastern Europe Sidney Tarrow, Cornell University

Author's Note: This article is a revi- sion of a talk given to the Society and History Program at the Univer- sity of Minnesota in November 1990. I am grateful in particular to Ron Aminzade and Bud Duvall there, and to Peter Gedeon, David Stark, and Charles Tilly for their comments on an earlier version of this text.

A Week in Prague One week before the mass demon-

strations that led to the collapse of the Czechoslovak Communist regime in November, 1989, a Charter 77 activist, Jan Urban, proposed that the group contest the national elections to be held in June of 1991. Urban's friends laughed at his pro- posals for being hopelessly utopian. But a week later, thousands of students filled Wenceslas Square, a general strike was called, and the regime collapsed. The leaders of the future Civic Forum, who had been carefully watching events in Hungary, Poland and the GDR, had little idea that their own country was ripe for revolution.'

While prediction in social science is always hazardous, our lack of preparation for the recent wave of mobilization in Eastern Europe is particularly glaring. ...

Charter 77 would not have fared much better had it consulted West- ern social scientists, because our

models for understanding the emergence of new social movements and their spread and outcomes are woe- fully inadequate. While prediction in social science is always hazardous, our lack of preparation for the recent wave of mobilization in Eastern Europe is particularly glaring, given the vast body of research and theo- rizing that has developed since the 1960s both in Western Europe and the United States.

Some might argue that the two situations are too far apart to allow reasonable comparisons. I will argue instead that it is the models and methods we developed after the sixties that make it difficult for Western students to understand the wave of recent movements in the East. These, I shall argue, address both individual and global factors, instead of focusing on the phenomenon of collective action within waves of mobilization. This article will be a preliminary attempt to put forward some sugges- tions for how best to aim at the "moving target" of collective action in Eastern Europe before it passes from the scene.

From the Sixties to the Eighties

More than in most areas of social science, the field of collective behavior and social movements has been influenced by the ebb and tide of political events. As Charles Tilly points out, it was the nineteenth cen- tury's abrupt exposure to industriali- zation that led to the negative view of social movements that we find in the work of the early theorists (Tilly 1985: ch. 1). Similarly, it was the

horrors of Fascism and Stalinism that led intellectuals who had experi- enced the inter-war and the wartime periods to see movement participants as "true believers" (Hoffer 1951).

. . . it is the models and methods we developed after the sixties that make it difficult for western students to address the wave of recent movements in the East.

In much the same way, the revival and transformation of social movement studies in the 1970s and 1980s was a product of the contentious politics of the 1960s. But in contrast to the dark view of movements produced by earlier periods, the research that followed the sixties had more positive effects. We learned, among other things, that the "end of ideology" was no more than a historical product of the early postwar years; that protesters were seldom fanatics or extremists, but were often par- ticipatory, well-educated members of their societies (Barnes and Kaase 1979); and that the movements of the sixties shared many of the charac- teristics of other political organizations-among them, affluence, new forms of organization and media access (McCarthy and Zald 1973).

But both the politics and the social science which emerged from the 1960s left us poorly prepared for other waves of mobilization and, in particular, for the most recent one in Eastern Europe. Why is this the

12 PS: Political Science & Politics


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Aiming at a Moving Target

case? I can put forward three possi- ble reasons:

The Anti-Institutional Persuasion: Most of the new students of movements after the 1960s came out of the New Left and were opposed to the institutional politics of their countries. Whether in the name of Marcusian (1966) or Frankfurtian (Offe 1985) models, speaking in Gallic (Touraine 1971), Latin (Alberoni 1984) or American (Lowi 1971) accents, these scholars saw a basic opposition between movements and institutions. The new movements were related to a new political para- digm based, in one popular formula- tion, on the desire for expanded "life-spaces" (Offe 1985), and, in another, on post-materialist attitudes (Inglehart 1977, 1990). In both cases, this led to an underspecification of the institutional structures within which movements emerged and of the intermediate processes that turned structural potentials into collective action. 2

Surveys and Actions: The new wave of protests also coincided with the extension of survey methods to the study of political action. If the survey could prove a sensitive indicator of electoral trends and party identification, why couldn't the same instrument be used to study unconventional participation as well? After the end of the "riot" studies-which had led to a wave of ecological analysis-surveys became the primary American approach to collective action.

From this reasoning, a number of fine studies of individual motivation and involvement resulted. 3 But despite their systematic nature, surveys are not the best way to gather information on a wave of mobilization. For protest is, first and fore- most, a form of action-not a set of dispositions towards, or reports of participation in collective action.4 Without carrying out systematic studies of collective action itself, it is difficult to know when, against whom, and in what collective contexts people decide to engage in protest activities.

Psychology and Microeconomics: The turbulence of the 1960s also coincided with the growing influence of new paradigms in political science and sociology. Two were particularly

influential in social movement studies: the relative deprivation model that Gurr (1970) gleaned from psychology; and the rational actor model that was adapted from Olson's (1965) microeconomic model of collective choice.5 Both approaches inferred decisions to participate directly from individual states but failed to place individuals in the social and institutional settings in which their decisions are made.6 But unless individual motivation can be placed in its collective context, then the costs, risks and potential gains of collective action cannot even begin to be assessed. Post-Olsonian collective choice studies, like those of Klander- mans (1984) and Fireman, Gamson, Rytina and Taylor (1978) show that these contextual factors are crucial for the triggering of collective action.

But unless individual motivation can be placed in its collective context, then the costs, risks and potential gains of collective action cannot even begin to be assessed.

Eastern Europeans are in a good position to avoid these pitfalls. Because of the last fifty years of history, they understand the constraints of institutions too well to ignore their importance in the emergence and structuring of new movements; an established public opinion establish- ment is not yet developed to apply its expertise to problems to which it is not ideally suited; and they have theorized about the importance of civil society too much to be partial to methodological individualism. But what models and methods are available with which to try to understand the wave of mass movements that still rock their part of the world?

Waves of Mobilization The basic problem that we face in

adapting the models and methods that came out of the sixties in the West to understand other periods of

mobilization is the level of analysis to which these approaches are directed. Social movements tend to cluster in distinct historical periods- what Hirschman has called periods of increased public involvements (1982) and I have elsewhere called "cycles of protest" (Tarrow 1989a, 1989b). Although most theories of cycles of mobilization have been developed in the context of liberal democratic states (for example, see Hirschman 1982), similar concepts have been used incisively to interpret the transitions to democracy in authoritarian states in Southern Europe and Latin America (O'Don- nell and Schmitter 1986).

Mass outbreaks of collective action are best understood as the collective responses of citizens, groups and elites to an expanding structure of political opportunities. Some brief examples can illustrate this:

1. Jack Goldstone's (1980) re-analysis of William Gamson's (1975) sample of conflict groups in American history showed that the majority of them were born in no more than a few crisis periods. Periods of increased political involvement, critical elections, and regime crises provided fertile sources for the birth of new movements and movement organizations. They also produced more than a proportionate share of the successful movements that Gam- son had identified.7

Mass outbreaks of collective action are best understood as the collective responses of citizens, groups and elites to an expanding structure of political opportunities.

2. Snyder and Tilly's analysis of strikes in France showed not only that a large share of all French strikes occurred in waves, but also that the waves coincided with the vulnerability of the state and the increase of political opportunities

March 1991 13



Understanding Political Change

(1972). Moreover, some of these opportunities were offered to unconventional political actors by conventional opportunities-particularly electoral ones.

3. The Leeds' (1976) comparison of protest movements in different Latin American cities attributed the differences among them to variations in political opportunity structure. Even as convinced a structuralist as Hobsbawm (1972) found that periods of major land occupations in highland Peru had been associated with political changes.

4. My work on Italy in the late 1960s and early 1970s showed that its major cycle of postwar protest differed from others in the West both by its length and its expansion to social actors other than students and workers (1989a: ch. 3). The reason can be found in the partial de-alignment of the Italian party system in the 1960s and its incomplete re-alignment around a mo4erate left-right axis in the 19709 (1989a: ch. 2).

Many of these political factors were well-known and accessible to movement scholars. But only seldom (for example, by McAdam 1982) have they been explicitly brought into the explanation of movement emergence and dynamics. The models and methods of social movements that emerged from the 1960s were either too microscopic in their focus on the internal lives of movements to com- prehend waves of mobilization (like resource mobilization theory), or too globally conceived (like "new" social movement theory) to adequately specify their institutional and political parameters. Let us look briefly at these two popular paradigms to illustrate this:

Resource Mobilization: In the 1970s, a highly articulated micro- sociological model of social movement organization-resource mobilization theory-drew on the experi- ence of the 1960s to show that a notable feature of that period was that movement entrepreneurs had access to new financial and organizational resources, creating professional social movement organizations (SMOs) and giving them access to external financial sponsors (McCarthy

and Zald 1973, 1977; Zald and McCarthy 1987). These authors also stressed the general context of what they called social movement "industries" (1980), but participation within SMOs was the area of their major impact on the field. 8

McCarthy and Zald were right about at least one new type of movement-the public interest group-- that was a product of the 1960s. But looking at the entire range of movements of the 1960s (and beyond the U.S. to Western Europe) we find a more varied picture. For example, during the early phases of the Civil Rights movement, disruptive net- works of insurgents were far more typical than professional movement organizations which enjoyed external sponsorship-these mainly developed towards the end of the cycle (Jenkins and Eckert 1986).

Moreover, by focusing on movement organizations, resource mobili- zationists left out many of the sites in which the energy of a wave of mobilization is expended-riots, crowds, industrial sabotage, gate- crashing and personal movements, on the one hand, and collective action within institutions, on the other. By focusing on organizations rather than on collective action in general, there is the danger of mis- taking the highly visible part for the less easily analyzed whole.

New social movement theory: At the opposite pole from resource mobilization theory, this school of thought took from the 1960s their countercultural, anti-institutional commitment and fashioned a model of movements founded directly on the contradictions of advanced industrial society.9 The macrosociological model which resulted was both attractive and intuitively plausible, providing a global answer to the question of why protest broke out all over the West in the same years. But it ignored the great variations in the character of the movements it studied -mainly, the women's, environmen- tal and peace movements-by placing them indifferently under the very large umbrella of "life space." 10 Moreover, because of their global focus, theorists of the new social movements underspecified the char- acteristics of the political contexts in which the new movements appeared

-which could have helped to explain the variations in outcome from one movement and country to the next. "

Interestingly, the small body of professional writing on collective action in Eastern Europe has been little influenced by either school (but see Touraine, et al. 1983). The reasons are not far to seek: in the repressive atmosphere of state socialism, approaches which emphasized the resources of SMOs would be hard to establish; and in their eco- nomically-depressed conditions, it would have taken real optimism to find the macrosociological sources for "life-space" movements.

The political constraints of life under repressive regimes has made Eastern Europeans more sensitive to their few and well-hidden political opportunities. The literature on civil society that developed in the 1980s can be read as a sign of this recogni- tion. 12 Ostensibly sociological-just as many of the most acute political thinkers in Eastern Europe worked in departments of sociology-this literature examined the opportunities for political action where they could be found: that is, outside of the formal political institutions where little real politics took place. And this takes us to an alternative to both resource mobilization and new social movement theories-political opportunity structure.

Political Opportunity Structure: East and West

The concept of political opportunity structure first appears in Peter Eisinger's 1973 article in the Ameri- can Political Science Review, in which he adopts Tocqueville's notion that revolts occur, not when people are most oppressed or best repre- sented, but when a closed system of opportunities has begun to open up.13 Though Tocqueville's theory was inherently temporal in nature, Eisinger compared urban protest movements cross-sectionally in cities whose institutions were more open and less open to influence. Looking instead at political opportunity structure as a temporally varying construct, scholars like McAdam (1982) and Tarrow (1989a) have identified four ways in which it can be seen





to expand (or, alternatively, to contract):

1. (in line with Eisinger's main thrust) when levels of access to institutional participation have begun to open up;

2. when political alignments are in disarray and new re-alignments have not yet been formed (Piven and Cloward 1977: ch. 1);

3. when there are major conflicts within the political elite that challengers can take advantage of (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986: ch. 3; Tarrow 1989: ch. 2);

4. when challengers are offered the help of influential allies from within, or outside the system (Jenkins and Perrow 1977).

The onset of a wave of mobilization can be seen as a collective response to generally expanding political opportunities, in which the costs and risks of collective action are lowered and the potential gains increase. A simple example is the strike rate: it tends to increase when full employment is approached and declines-other things being equal- when unemployment rises. 14 As in a business cycle, other players respond to this new situation: some imitative- ly; others reactively; still others repressively (Tarrow 1989a: ch. 3).

It will be interesting to see whether the new movements now forming in Eastern Europe build on extensions of the themes of 1989 or-as some have feared-return to "primordial" sentiments.

At the start of the wave, we typically find small vanguards-- "exemplary individuals," in O'Don- nell and Schmitter's terminology (1986: ch. 3)-who challenge authority with daring or confrontational actions. Movement organizations are often present at the outset, but their leaders are consistently taken by sur-

prise at the magnitude of popular protest. This was as true for the Western student movement in the 1960s as it was for the Czech Charter 77 leaders in November 1989. En- couraged by the appearance of large new constituencies, newly-organized groups form on the crest of the wave, experimenting with the forms of collective actions initiated by the early risers and forming a new generation of movement organizations.

The vulnerability of the authorities to protest sets off a kind of assur- ance game (Bunce and Chong 1990; Granovetter 1978). But as it spreads to new sectors and even different countries, the forms of collective action change. In Italy, protest spread from the early peak of confrontational mass protest in the uni- versities both to more conventional strikes and demonstrations by groups that were normally quiescent, and to high-school students who used violence against others that had hardly been seen at the peak of the cycle (Tarrow 1989a: ch. 3).

The current wave of collective action in Eastern Europe began with largely peaceful, but highly confrontational demonstrations as well. As it began to spread outward from the initial peak of mobilization to occu- pational groups, on the one hand, and to ethnic groups on the other, we have begun to see a similar dif- ferentiation-from the highly organized strikes of taxi drivers and workers to the sometimes violent expres- sions of ethnic and territorial groups.

New movements can form around a variety of claims, but there is fre- quently a "master frame" in a cycle -like the role of civil rights in the American movements of the 1960s- that links movements to one another and sets the theme for both future movements and elite responses (Snow and Benford 1988). 15 "Master frames" often carry over into strange rivulets and counter-movements, like the "rights of the unborn" in the anti-abortion movement in the United States. It will be interesting to see whether the new movements now forming in Eastern Europe build on extensions of the themes of 1989 or -as some have feared-return to "primordial" sentiments.

Protest cycles can either end sud-

denly, through repression, or more slowly, through a combination of features: the institutionalization of the most successful movements, factionalization within them and between them and new groups which rise on the crest of the wave, and the exhaustion of mass political involvement (Hirschman 1982; O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986: 26). The combination of institutionalization and factionalization often produce determined minorities, who respond to the decline of popular involvement by turning in upon themselves and- in some cases-using organized violence (Tarrow 1989a: ch. 12; della Porta 1990).

In the East, we already witness signs of all three tendencies: institutionalization in the attempts of former dissident movements to become political parties; factionalism in the splits both within them and between them and newer, especially ethnic movements; and a general decline of public involvement, after more than a year of continual exhilaration and tumultuous public activity. But we also see the rise of some "second- generation" movements around con- tinued unresolved problems, which suggests that the wave of mobilization may be far from over.

Expanded political opportunities during waves of mobilization have effects at the citizen, group and elite levels: expanding the space within which ordinary citizens perceive that they can legitimately make claims; providing new opportunities for organizers to build movements with which to attract the support of these citizens and for existing movement organizations to increase their support; and offering new opportunities for elites within the polity to expand their influence and achieve their policy goals. It is the interaction among these elements that move the cycle along from one phase to the next and determine its outcome (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986: ch. 3).

The recent upheavals in Eastern Europe offer examples of all three kinds of expanded opportunity-but for some more than for others. After years of immobility, they offered opportunities for ordinary citizens to express and expand their demands. For dissident organizations-many of

March 1991 15




which had been bravely working in the wilderness for years-they offered the chance to take the reins of mass movements. Even for reform communists, they offered a chance to stay afloat on the tidal wave that was coming. That their attempts have so far been unsuccessful indicates not only the depth of revulsion against their regimes, but also their isolation from the currents in their societies.

The political opportunities that triggered these upheavals in the East became widely understood only after Gorbachev's well-publicized refusal to use military force, and with the vast population movement from the GDR in the summer of 1989 (a movement in both senses of the word). But to dissident groups in various East European countries, they were manifest years before, with the signature of the Helsinki Final Act. That document, as Jan Urban observed, not only "described the landscape we yearned to join, a place where one could achieve not only his military but also his moral, ecological and economic limits" (1990: 12), but also provided a common metric with which dissidents could claim theoretically available rights- much as the "practice of the objec- tive" provided a set of tactical guide- lines to activists in the West in the 1960s.

It is clear that political opportunity structure is a construct that must be differentially specified and operation- alized for different waves of mobilization. For example, electoral de- alignment-which proved so useful an indicator of the Civil Rights movement's emergence in the U.S. (Piven and Cloward 1977: ch. 4)- would be unlikely to have much importance in authoritarian regimes. On the other hand, the splits between hardliners and softliners that gave popular politics an opening are general features of cycles of protest, naturally taking different forms from case to case.

All that this means is that an effort of comparative conceptualization is an essential first step, prior to carrying out research on waves of mobilization in different systems and periods, and that methods and models that emerged from the 1960s in the West should be examined critically before being applied to the

East today. This is no more than what would be necessary for any theoretically guided comparative analysis, but it raises some contro- versial issues for western scholars attempting to retool to carry out research in Eastern Europe.

Studying Waves of Mobilization

There are at least four methodological correlaries to the above perspective of studying movements as part of waves of mobilization.

The first follows from what was argued earlier about methodological individualism and movement organization. Because most successful social movements arise as part of general periods of political disorder -and not directly out of individual motivation or from organizational resources-when we limit our analyses of movements either to individuals' orientations or to the internal lives of SMOs, the incentives and constraints of the general political opportunity structure may easily elude us.

The example of the other minority rights movements that followed the Civil Rights Movement in the United States illustrates this well. These arose on the swell created by the earlier efforts. If we looked only at the internal resources of Chicanos, Native Americans, Gays and Les- bians in the 1970s, it would have been hard to predict the outcomes of their respective mobilizational efforts -for example, the gains made by Chicanos in municipal employment (Browning, Marshall and Tabb 1985). Only in the light of the expanded "rights frame" (Snow and Benford 1988) created by the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s can we understand how such resource-poor groups could make major gains in the 1970s. These aspects of general opportunity structure were an important part of the spread and outcomes of the cycle.

Second, when we derive the motivation to participate in collective action from psychological states or from personal resources, without reference to the political context in which people make the decision to participate, it is difficult to include in

their calculations the risks and costs of collective action and the probabilities of success. Other things being equal, the propensity to protest is connected to a high endowment of education, wealth or position (Barnes and Kaase 1979). But just as individuals make the decision to participate within what McAdam has called "micromobilizational contexts" (1988), groups make such decisions within collective contexts that give them the opportunity to protest and the incentive to do so (Fireman, et al. 1978; Piven and Cloward 1977: ch. 1). These contexts should be part of the research design.

Third, waves of mobilization are often looked at as upward blips on a linear time series. Tracking the magnitude of collective action has the virtue of facilitating the correlation between collective action and serial indicators of ecological or social change. But if, as has been argued above, a cycle of protest is the outcome of the interaction of the three kinds of opportunity outlined above -those of citizens, groups, and elites -then it follows that the relationship between the variables within each cycle may be different (Isaac and Griffith 1989). These variables should be analyzed within, and not only between waves of mobilization.

Take the changing meanings of the same form of collective action over time: if workers went on strike against their masters in Toulouse in the 1830s, it would have a more disruptive effect than in the 1980s, when the strike had become an accepted part of the repertoire of contention (Tilly 1978). The changing legitimacy of the strike would lead us to predict a sequence of strike-and- repression in the first case and of strike-and-collective bargaining in the second. Merging the two periods in the same linear model would produce results in which the relations among these variables could well be can- celled out.

With respect to authoritarian regimes, the magnitude of collective action may not increase very much as a wave of mobilization approaches. However, the relations between the variables may already be changing as such regimes attempt to liberalize (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986: ch. 1). For example, towards the end of





the Second French Empire, a period that saw increased electoral involvement, those Republicans who were able to contest elections did so without suffering systematic repression. This provided signals to a broader public that political opportunities existed for collective action, and these developed strongly around electoral contests (Snyder and Tilly 1972).

This takes us to my final theme- collective action as a moving target. Forms of protest that would have revolutionary implications in one system or time period may be treated as routine in another. This means that comparisons between cycles-and even between societies undergoing the same wave of mobilization-must be made in the light of what is con- sidered disruptive, challenging and efficacious in that system. If we wish to understand this, we must root our analyses of similar social processes within specific institutional and political contexts, focusing on the existing boundaries of the permissible against which the insurgents edge.

To make progress along these lines means going beyond generic notions of "unconventional political behavior" and turning to the visible actions of real people with concrete demands, who make challenging claims against those who resist them. States set the boundaries of this interaction by defining the boundaries of the permissible and re- sponding to the early salvos by moving the line in one direction or another; by facilitating one group of insurgents and repressing another; and by sometimes co-opting protesters, sometimes pre-empting their demands, and-more rarely-giving up the ghost. Much of what we have learned about waves of mobilization comes from theory and research on just such a process of strategic interaction (Tilly 1978; DeNardo 1985).

To study these processes, we cannot freeze protest propensity into the still photograph produced by the public opinion poll. Rather, such an effort requires us to utilize instru- ments that can capture fleeting moments of contention. For unlike elections, interest groups, and parliaments, social movements have a brief life upon the stage. They create previously unknown constituencies,

mobilize them through innovative tactics, and often vanish as quickly as they have arisen. Studying waves of mobilization requires us to collect and analyze a wider range of data than we would need to study elections or public opinion.

For unlike elections, interest groups, and parliaments, social movements have a brief life upon the stage.

Charles Tilly and scholars who have followed his methodological lead have used such methods to develop extensive datasets on collective action in different periods and countries, based mainly on the systematic reading and coding of news- paper sources.16 Tracing a wave of mobilization in declining authoritarian regimes will also require the use of the handbills, manifestos, speeches and minutes of meetings. 17" Oral accounts of participants-both ordinary citizens and leaders-can be precious additions to the public record, for the diverse frames of meaning that animate the mass public during the course of mobilization may turn out, on examination, to be very different than the grand and tidy ideologies that crystallize as the dust settles.

Evidence on the evolving repertoire of collective action is the logical centerpiece of such a research program. 8 As well as telling us what forms of collective action people inherit from their political cultures, it helps us to see what tactics and themes animate a mass audience; which strategies people use against which targets (Tilly 1990); where the boundaries of the permissible lie and how they move; what the typical paths of diffusion are; and how pro- spective constituents, authorities, and the forces of order react to different challenges. Surveys and documents can provide evidence on key turning- points in this process, but if we want to understand waves of mobilization, we should focus in the first place on how people act collectively.

Eastern Europe: An Incomplete Wave of Mobilization

This is the right time for social scientists to ask what we need to know in order to integrate the dramatic events in Eastern Europe into our body of knowledge of waves of mobilization. One way to do this is to ask which parts of the recent rebellions in these countries resonate with what we learned from the last wave of mobilization in the West, and which aspects appear to respond to factors specific to Eastern Europe.

For example, what was the role of the media-so crucial to the strategy of the New Left in the U.S. (Gitlin 1980; Oberschall 1978)? When the curve of mobilization in those countries is over, will its trajectory resem- ble more the dramatic but rapidly concluded "Events of May" in France, or Italy's "rolling May" (Salvati 1981; Tarrow 1985)? In the West, movements arose sequentially around the claims of students, ecolo- gists, women and advocates of peace. But the countries of Eastern Europe may not have the luxury of dealing in sequence with new demands; now that the focusing target of state socialism is gone (Bunce 1990), the new conflicts that have emerged in the East may overload the system with a cacophony of claims. Finally, much more than in the West (where the influence of the Vietnam war in triggering an international wave of movements should not be dis- counted), the rebellions in the East were set off by a radically new international opportunity structure. Given the enormous weight of the problems -many of them transnational-currently faced by these countries, will they end in the international arena as well?

The recent wave of movements in Eastern Europe is not yet over-but there is already a danger that its precious findings will be lost as leaders reify their experiences, and the ephemera of popular politics dis- appears into people's attics and selec- tive memories. For scholars of collective action, the recent movements in Eastern Europe offer an important challenge. As Jan Urban observed not long after the Prague Fall of

March 1991 17




1989: "The big European wall has been broken through, and the barbed wire barriers have been cut. And it turns out that was the easiest part" (1990: 3).

"The big European wall has been broken through, and the barbed wire barriers have been cut. And it turns out that was the easiest part. "

Notes 1. Interview with Jan Urban, November

27, 1990. I am grateful to Mr. Urban for the insights he offered, which he will find scat- tered throughout this article.

2. For the argument that intermediate processes should be given far more attention in the creation of social movements, see Klandermans, Kriesi and Tarrow (1988), especially the contributions to that volume of Bert Klandermans, Doug McAdam, Alberto Melucci, and David Snow and Robert Ben- ford. Klandermans has elaborated further on his notion of "consensus mobilization" (1989) in a major conceptualization of these intermediate processes.

3. The most extensive comparative work was done by Barnes, Kaase and their associ- ates (1979), who studied general samples of the population in five countries (the Nether- lands, Britain, the United States, West Ger- many, and Austria); by Muller (1979), who studied "aggressive political participation" in 12 sampling sites in West Germany in which opposition sentiment was known to be great; by Sniderman (1981), who studied identifiers with social movements in California; and by Klandermans (1984), who studied identifiers with the Dutch labor, feminist and peace movements and linked motivation to expectations of success in specific conflicts and protests.

4. Tilly's definition is apposite. A social movement, he writes, is "an organized, sus- tained, self-conscious challenge to existing authorities" (1984: 304). To track phenomena like these, investigators need an instrument much more like a moving-picture camera than the still camera of the survey instru- ments which began to be widely used in the 1960s. An advance on single-point surveys came with the panel techniques employed by Inglehart (1990), Jennings (1987) and Fend- rich and Kraus (1978). However, in all three cases, the investigators were limited to individual reports of participation in, and dispositions towards collective action.

5. Interestingly, Olson never attempted to apply his insights to social movements, pre- ferring the more stable world of interest associations. See his passing reference to "the forgotten groups" in The Logic of Collective Action.

6. In the case of relative deprivation theory, most of the data that were correlated with collective action were not individual in nature, but inferred states of deprivation from aggregate data (Tilly 1978: 23). Adding more variables to the equation-as Gurr and Duvall did in their 1973 article-improved the predictive power of the model but did little to validate its psychology. The Olsonian para- digm-which stressed the costs of collective action within organizations-was poorly adapted to the field of social movements, where many of the most important actions take place outside of organizations-witness the Czech story above. Moreover, while Olson stressed the difficulty of getting people to participate, in social movements the risks and costs of collective action may be induce- ments to participate (Hirschman 1982: ch. 5).

7. But see Gamson's (1980) response to Goldstone's criticisms, as well as the additions to the re-edition of his book in 1990.

8. Although a broader set of "external" resources had been included in McCarthy and Zald's original work, it was not until the mid-1980s that they developed an explicitly political-and comparative-context for resource mobilization theory (Garner and Zald 1985).

9. For a more detailed discussion of the varieties of new social movement theory and of some of the theoretical problems it raises, see Klandermans and Tarrow (1988). For an interesting comparative study, see D'Anieri, Ernst and Kier (1990).

10. For a more rigorous and differentiated conceptualization of new social movements, see Kriesi (1988).

11. For presentations of new social movement theory that specify its political process- ing more completely, see Offe (1990), Kitsch- elt (1985) and Neidhardt and Rucht (1991).

12. I am grateful to my colleague David Stark, who himself has contributed signifi- cantly to this literature, for this observation.

13. Other sources were Wilson's important article on black civic action (1961), Lipsky's work on rent strikes (1968, 1970), and Piven and Cloward's research on the welfare state (1971).

14. For the most important findings on variations in employment and the strike rate, see Ashenfelter and Pencavel (1969), Hibbs (1976) and Keenan (1986). Periods like the mid-1930s in France or the U.S. disconfirm the correlation between employment and the strike rate because of the availability of broader political resources and social movements. On this period, see Goldfield (1989).

15. In Eastern Europe, the main framing of revolt followed from the monopoly of power exercised by the state socialist regimes, but an interesting minor theme was the public outrage against official corruption, especially in the former GDR.

16. For a discussion of Tilly's most advanced work, which will combine a major macrohistorical theory with significant innovations in interactive data entry and analysis, see Horn and Tilly (1986) and Tilly (1990). For other scholars' work which build on Tilly's innovations in studying collective action, see Olzak (1989, 1991), Paige (1975), Sugimoto (1981), Tarrow (1989a), and White (1989).

17. Such a data archive is currently under construction by Laszlo Bruszt and David

Stark at Cornell for Hungary in 1989. They eventually hope to compare the transition to democracy in Hungary with that in Poland during the 1980s.

18. The concept of the repertoire was first proposed by Tilly (1978). An attempt to use it as a tool to study waves of mobilization comparatively will be found in my forthcom- ing Power in Movement: Collective Action, Social Movements and Revolutions in the Modern World (New York: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, in preparation).

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March 1991 19




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About the Author Sidney Tarrow is Maxwell M. Upson Pro-

fessor of Government at Cornell University. He is completing a comparative study of waves of mobilization, Power in Movement, which will be published by Cambridge Uni- versity Press.

The "East" Becomes the "South"? The "Autumn of the People" and the Future of Eastern Europe Adam Przeworski, University of Chicago

The "Autumn of the People" of 1989 was a dismal failure of the predictive power of political science. Any retrospective explanation of the fall of communism must not only account for the historical developments but must also identify those theoretical assumptions that pre- vented us from anticipating these developments. If we are so wise now, why were we not equally sage before?

As I learned recently, most ter- minal cancer patients die of pneu- monia. Social science is not very good at sorting out underlying causes and precipitating conditions: witness the 50 years of controversies over the fall of Weimar. And the response to the question "why communism collapsed?" is not the same as to "why did it collapse in the autumn of 1989?" It is easier to explain why communism had to fall than why it did.

The theory of "totalitarianism" could not answer either question: it could not diagnose the cancer and hence the vulnerability to pneu-

monia. The totalitarian model was more ideological than the societies it depicted as such. This model denied the possibility of conflict within communist societies because it saw them as based on dogma and repression. Yet from the late fifties, ideology

It is easier to explain why communism had to fall than why it did.

was no longer the "cement," to use Gramsci's expression, that held these societies together.

I remember how startled I was by the leading slogan of May Day, 1964, in Poland: "Socialism is a guarantee of our borders." Socialism-the project for a new future-was no longer the end; it became an instrument of traditional values. And by the seventies, repression had sub- sided: as the communist leadership became bourgeoisified, it could no longer muster the self-discipline

required to crush all dissent. Party bureaucrats were no longer able to spend their nights at meetings, to wear working class uniforms, to march and shout slogans, to abstain from ostentatious consumption. What had developed was "goulash communism," "Kadarism," "Brezh- nevism": an implicit social pact in which elites offered the prospect of material welfare in exchange for silence. And the tacit premise of this pact was that socialism was no longer a model of a new future but an underdeveloped something else. Already Khrushchev set as the goal of the Soviet Union to catch up with Great Britain; by the 1970s, Western Europe became the enviable standard of comparison and these comparisons became increasingly humiliating.

As Polish and Hungarian surveys showed, the outcome was a society that was materialistic, atomized, and cynical. It was a society in which people uttered formulae that they did not believe and that they did not expect anyone else to believe. Speech became a ritual. I am haunted by a




Article Contentsp. 12p. 13p. 14p. 15p. 16p. 17p. 18p. 19p. 20

Issue Table of ContentsPS: Political Science and Politics, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Mar., 1991), pp. 1-136Front Matter [pp. 1-28]In Focus: Reorganization of the National Science FoundationFrom the Editor [pp. 4-6]Testimony by Warren E. Miller before the N. S. F. Biological and Behavioral Science Task Force on Reorganization, November 29, 1990 [pp. 7-9]The Future for a New Directorate [pp. 9-11]

Understanding Political Change in Eastern Europe"Aiming at a Moving Target": Social Science and the Recent Rebellions in Eastern Europe [pp. 12-20]The "East" Becomes the "South"? The "Autumn of the People" and the Future of Eastern Europe [pp. 20-24]The Economics of Transitions to Democracy [pp. 24-27]

The Ups and Downs of Elections, or Look before You Swing [pp. 29-33]Rotation in Office: Rapid but Restricted to the House [pp. 34-37]Presidential Prerogative Power: The Case of the Bush Administration and Legislative Power [pp. 38-42]Lyndon Johnson: Campaign Innovator? [pp. 42-45]Advertising on Cable Television in the Presidential Primaries: Something to Look for in '92 [pp. 45-47]The Political Science TeacherLiberal Learning and the Political Science Major: A Report to the Profession [pp. 48-60]

The ProfessionOut of the Past: Theoretical and Methodological Contributions of Congressional History [pp. 61-64]The Political Scientist as Comparative Election Observer [pp. 64-70]Why a Political Film Society? [pp. 70-71]

People in Political Science [pp. 72-80]Association News [pp. 81-86+88+90]Regional and State Association News [pp. 92-93]Listing of Regional and State Political Science Associations [pp. 94-98]Announcements [pp. 99-103]Research and Training Support [pp. 104-109]Upcoming Conferences and Calls for Papers [pp. 110-115]Gazette [pp. 116-132]Back Matter [pp. 87-136]

"aiming at a moving target": social science and the recent rebellions in eastern europe

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