Unconventional protests: partisans and independents outside the Republican and Democratic national conventions

Protests at national party conventions are an important setting in which political parties and social movements challenge one another. This article examines the motivations of participants in these events. Drawing upon data from surveys of protesters outside the 2008 national party conventions, it focuses on how partisan and independent political identifications correspond with the reasons that individuals give for protesting. The results demonstrate that there are some conditions under which independents place a greater focus on issues than do partisans and under which partisans place a greater focus on presidential candidates than do independents. However, there are also conditions under which independents are inclined to work alongside partisans, such as trying to stop the election of a threatening candidate and in championing an issue outside their opposing party’s convention. The article argues that micro-level partisan identifications are thus likely to affect the broader structure of party coalitions. These considerations promise to become increasingly relevant as social movements – such as the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter – launch new campaigns against or within established parties

Solidariedade nacional ou vontade colectiva de defesa

The Million Mom March (favoring gun control) and Code Pink: Women for Peace (focusing on foreign policy, especially the war in Iraq) are organizations that have mobilized women as women in an era when other women's groups struggled to maintain critical mass and turned away from non-gender-specific public issues. This article addresses how these organizations fostered collective consciousness among women, a large and diverse group, while confronting the echoes of backlash against previous mobilization efforts by women. We argue that the March and Code Pink achieved mobilization success by creating hybrid organizations that blended elements of three major collective action frames: maternalism, egalitarianism, and feminine expression. These innovative organizations invented hybrid forms that cut across movements, constituencies, and political institutions. Using surveys, interviews, and content analysis of organizational documents, this article explains how the March and Code Pink met the contemporary challenges facing women's collective action in similar yet distinct ways. It highlights the role of feminine expression and concerns about the intersectional marginalization of women in resolving the historic tensions between maternalism and egalitarianism. It demonstrates hybridity as a useful analytical lens to understand gendered organizing and other forms of grassroots collective action

Competition, Concentration, and Consumer Welfare in the Deregulated Airline Industry

“Turbulent is the best way to describe the airline industry of the 1990s. Since deregulation in 1978, terms such as air wars, hubs, frequent-flyer, and, of course, Chapter 11, have become a familiar part of airline discussions. Long gone are the days of a bloated, unresponsive, complacent industry that must verify its every move with Washington bureaucrats. Although the level of uncertainty and instability in the airline industry has increased since the days of government regulation, most observers agree that deregulation has had some success (Sandler 1988, p. 332). However, it remains an open question as to whether or not the deregulated airline industry is headed in the direction of the public interest. This article will explore and evaluate changes that have taken place in the airline industry since deregulation. The first section takes a step back to review the history of regulation and the reasons policymakers chose to deregulate the industry. The second examines empirical data concerning concentration and con testability. The third and fourth sections consider the dynamics of the industry in the context of structural changes and strategic developments, such as hubs and frequent-flyer programs. Finally, recommendations are made for changes in public policy to improve consumer welfare

Protest at the center of American politics

Recognizing the increasing ubiquity of protest in the United States, this article considers why protest has become so central to American politics. It argues that three factors contribute substantially to this situation: institutional illegitimacy, political polarization, and decentralization of communications media. Institutional illegitimacy means that Americans are less likely to trust the prevailing system of government, such as selecting the president through the Electoral College, making them more likely to believe that protest is necessary to have their voices heard. Political polarization coincides with having elected officials on the extremes of the political spectrum, rather than toward the moderate center. Citizens are thus more likely to be dissatisfied with elected officials and to turn out to protest them. Decentralization of communications media, especially social media (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram), allows activists to communicate with one another more readily and, therefore, to organize protests quickly and with few financial resources. These conditions are unlikely to change in the near future outside of a major partisan realignment. Recent protests organized by Black Lives Matter and related groups, in response to the deaths of George Floyd and many other African Americans, illustrate the contemporary nature of activism, social movements, and protest in the United States

Multiplex Networks and Interest Group Influence Reputation: An Exponential Random Graph Model

Interest groups struggle to build reputations as influential actors in the policy process and to discern the influence exercised by others. This study conceptualizes influence reputation as a relational variable that varies locally throughout a network. Drawing upon interviews with 168 interest group representatives in the United States health policy domain, this research examines the effects of multiplex networks of communication, coalitions, and issues on influence reputation. Using an exponential random graph model (ERGM), the analysis demonstrates that multiple roles of confidant, collaborator, and issue advocate affect how group representatives understand the influence of those with whom they are tied, after accounting for homophily among interest groups

Getting Rid of the Old Gas-Guzzler: The Federal Gasoline Tax as a Tool of Public Policy

On August 9, 1993, U.S. President Bill Clinton signed into law a 4.3 cents per gallon increase in the federal gasoline tax. This increase, which brought the new federal tax level to 15.4 cents per gallon, was chosen from a menu of alternate options for energy taxation, including a British Thermal Unit (BTU) based tax and a tax on sulfur emissions. The increase was met with considerable political resistance and only passed by a narrow margin-2 votes in the House of Representatives and a tie broken in the Senate by the Vice President-after a protracted ten month debate. Although it has been estimated that the increased gasoline tax will raise $25 billion per year in tax revenues (D\u27Amato 1993, p. S7730), its passage seems to have been motivated primarily by a desire to achieve environmental and public policy objectives. In this article I will explore the economic rationale behind use of the federal gasoline tax, examine whether additional gasoline taxes are needed in the United States, employ economic reasoning to consider some of the tax\u27s possible effects, and consider ways in which stated policy objectives might be achieved more effectively

Tweeting #RamNavami: a comparison of approaches to analyzing bipartite networks

Bipartite networks, also known as two-mode networks or affiliation networks, are a class of networks in which actors or objects are partitioned into two sets, with interactions taking place across but not within sets. These networks are omnipresent in society, encompassing phenomena such as student-teacher interactions, coalition structures, and international treaty participation. With growing data availability and proliferation in statistical estimators and software, scholars have increasingly sought to understand the methods available to model the data generating processes in these networks. This article compares three methods for doing so: (1) Logit; (2) the bipartite Exponential Random Graph Model (ERGM); and (3) the Relational Event Model(REM). This comparison demonstrates the relevance of choices with respect to dependence structures, temporality, parameter specification, and data structure. Considering the example of Ram Navami, a Hindu festival celebrating the birth of Lord Ram, the ego network of tweets using #RamNavami on April 21, 2021 is examined. The results of the analysis illustrate that critical modeling choices make a difference in the estimated parameters and the conclusions to be drawn from them

Intersectionality at the grassroots

Intersectional activism is organizing that addresses more than one structure of oppression in the struggle for social justice. The rise of the Women’s March as a massive effort to mobilize women primarily on the basis of gender coincided with calls for it to pay greater attention to intersectionality. This study considers the effectiveness of the Women’s March at using intersectional activism as a collective action frame. Drawing on surveys conducted at Women’s March events in five cities and four other Washington, DC activist events in 2018, this study examines the extent to which activists think that the movements should place a priority on intersectional activism. The results show that participants in Women’s March events were more supportive of prioritizing intersectional activism than were activists at comparable protest events that were not mobilized using intersectional collective action frames. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that ideology may be a barrier to embracing intersectional activism, with more moderate and conservative activists placing a lower priority on intersectionality than did more liberal activists. Women’s March activists were more likely to prioritize intersectional activism if they were trans- or LGBTQIA+-identified, or if they had a history of backing intersectionally marginalized causes, than if they did not

The contentious politics of Scottish independence

No abstract available