E Amenta
Biographic Data
| ID | 17049 |
|---|---|
| NAME | E Amenta |
| GIVEN NAMES | E |
| FAMILY NAME | Amenta |
| SIGNATURE | AMENTA E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Irvine |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7019-1656 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 71 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1202 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 71 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Beyond the protest paradigm: Four types of news coverage and America's most prominent social movement organizations
What determines the quality of coverage received by social movement organizations when they appear extensively in the news? Research on the news coverage of social movement organizations is dominated by case studies supporting the “protest paradigm,” which argues that journalists portray movement activists trivially and negatively when covering protest. However, movement organizations often make long‐running news for many different reasons, mainl…
What Drives the News Coverage of US Social Movements
What drives the news coverage of social movements in the professional news media? We address this question by elaborating an institutional mediation model arguing that the news values, routines, and characteristics of the news media induce them to pay attention to movements depending on their characteristics and the political contexts in which they engage. The news-making characteristics of movements include their disruptive capacities and organi…
Rough Draft of History: A Century of US Social Movements in the News
As a new view of twentieth-century US social movements, this book examines how national newspapers covered social movements and the organizations driving them. The book identifies hundreds of movement organizations, from the Women's Christian Temperance Union to Occupy Wall Street, and documents their treatment in the news. In doing so, it provides an alternative account of US history from below, as it was refracted through journalistic lenses. I…
Why U.S. Conservative Movements Are Winning: It’s Not Trump—it’s the Institutions
Why have conservative movements gained in U.S. policy over the last few decades, while progressive ones have lost ground? I outline policy advances by conservative movements, which are puzzling, because they are unpopular, opposed by progressive movements, and draw inferior mainstream news coverage. I argue that these policy advances and setbacks are due mainly to transformations in political institutional contexts surrounding movements. Party re…
Social Movements and “Social Security: Policy Ideas, Discursive Ratification, and the U.S. Old-Age Pension Movement
Under which conditions can social movements influence discursive struggles over public policies? Policy ideas are embedded in any new movement-relevant legislation, including categories, frames, justifications, and narratives. Moreover, when legislation passes, it receives a “discursive ratification” in the news media, which interprets its meaning. These cultural aspects of legislation define the constituencies of social movements and influence f…
Changing the Narrative
The difficulty of identifying and explaining movements’ cultural impacts should not stop movement scholars from trying to do so. In this introduction to the special issue, we outline some of the challenges of theorizing cultural influence and possible ways around them. We emphasize the role of the institutions that make up the public sphere—including but not limited to the news media-- in shaping movements’ impacts
The Mediation Model: How Non-Moderate Nonhuman Animal Advocacy Organizations Get the Media Coverage They Want
In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a marked increase in non-moderate, or “radical,” non-human animal advocacy organizations. Social movement scholars argued that these organizations have greater difficulty than “moderate” ones in receiving substantial news coverage. But forms of substantive news coverage have increased for both moderate and non-moderate animal advocacy organizations. To address this, media analyses were conducted using content cod…
A Nation Fragmented: The Public Agenda in the Information Age
What Drives Progressive Policy? Institutional Politics, Political Mediation, Policy Feedbacks, and Early U.S. Old‐Age Policy
What drives progressive public policy? Because progressive policy challenges the interests of powerful people and interests that dominate policy making, it is puzzling that progressive policy ever happens. This article addresses this question by modeling and appraising institutional political, political mediation, and policy feedback theories and models of progressive policy making. Institutional political theory focuses on political institutiona…
Making Good News: What Explains the Quality of Coverage of the Civil Rights Movement
When social movement organizations receive extensive newspaper coverage, why is it sometimes substantive and sometimes not? By “substantive,” we mean coverage that reflects serious treatment of the movement's issues, demands, or policy claims. Scholars agree that the news media are key to movement organizations' influence, helping them alter public discourse and effect political change, but often find that protests are covered nonsubstantively. E…
Social Movements, Political Consequences of
Scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the political or state‐related consequences of social movements. They refer to movements' attempts to change political institutions and their processes and outcomes as potential “external” consequences. In comparison to mobilizing supporters, fashioning identities among them, and choosing strategies, most macropolitical consequences of challengers are not directly implemented by them. But trans…
Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare Vol. 44 No. 3
Experiences and Responses to Microaggressions on Historically White Campuses: A Qualitative Interpretive Meta-Synthesis- Y. Kafi Moragne-Patterson and Tracey M. Barnett Civic Engagement and Institutional Trust among South Africans- Yoosun Chu and Ce Shen How the Immigration and Deportation Systems Work: A Social Worker’s Guide- Carol Cleaveland Immigrant Health Disparities: Does Neighborliness Improve Health?- Kofi Danso Are Older Adults Who Part…
From bias to coverage: What explains how news organizations treat social movements
Why do newspapers cover social movement actors, and why is this coverage sometimes favorable? Early scholarship saw the news media mainly as a source of data on collective action, and sought to ascertain its biases, but scholarship has increasingly focused directly on why movements gain coverage, especially coverage that can advance their goals. To understand why and how newspapers cover movement actors, we start with the insight that movements r…
All the Right Movements? Mediation, Rightist Movements, and Why US Movements Received Extensive Newspaper Coverage
Under which conditions do social movements receive coverage by the mainstream news media? News coverage matters for movements for political, cultural, and organizational reasons, but only rarely have scholars analyzed the coverage of movements comparatively and at the movement level. To address the question, we apply a political mediation model of the influence of movements to professional news media, using ideas from the social organization of t…
Thinking about the Influence of Social Movements on Institutions
Recipes for Attention: Policy Reforms, Crises, Organizational Characteristics, and the Newspaper Coverage of the LGBT Movement, 1969–2009
Why do some organizations in a movement seeking social change gain extensive national newspaper coverage? To address the question, we innovate in theoretical and empirical ways. First, we elaborate a theoretical argument that builds from the political mediation theory of movement consequences and incorporates the social organization of newspaper practices. This media and political mediation model integrates political and media contexts and organi…
Political Reform and Newspaper Coverage of U.S. Movements in Depression, Recession, and Historical Perspective
The Great Depression and the Great Recession in the United States both saw upsurges of social movement activity and newspaper coverage, but why did movements of both the right and left surge during the leftwing regimes of these periods? Why did the Barack Obama administration not produce the lasting leftwing mobilizations characteristic of the Franklin Roosevelt era? To address these questions and locate these episodes in historical perspective, …
Neoliberal Globalization, Democratization, and Movement Responses
Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Edwin Amenta; NEOLIBERAL GLOBALIZATION, DEMOCRATIZATION, AND MOVEMENT RESPONSES. Mobilization: An International Quarterly 1 December 2016; 21 (4): 389–391. doi: https://doi.org/10.17813/1086-671X-21-4-389 Download citation file: Ris (Zot…
Raising the Bar for Scholarship on Protest and Politics
Breaking Down the State: Protestors Engaged
Recent years have seen an explosion of protest movements around the world, and academic theories are racing to catch up with them. This series aims to further our understanding of the origins, dealings, decisions, and outcomes of social movements by fostering dialogue among many traditions of thought, across European nations and across continents. All theoretical perspectives are welcome. Books in the series typically combine theory with empirica…
Put Me in, Coach? Referee? Owner? Security? Why the News Media Rarely Cover Movements as Political Players
How to Analyze the Influence of Movements
Political Reform and the Historical Trajectories of U.S. Social Movements in the Twentieth Century
We propose a political reform theory, a political and historical institutionalist argument that holds that shifts in political structures, partisan regimes and policy greatly influence movements. We appraise this argument, along with resource mobilization, political opportunity and media alternatives, by analyzing 600,000 articles in the New York Times and Washington Post that mention national U.S. social movement organizations (SMOs) in the larg…
Making An Impact: Conceptual And Methodological Implications Of The Collective Goods Criterion
Research Methods
The Political Consequences of Social Movements
Research on the political consequences of social movements has recently accelerated. We take stock of this research with a focus on movements in democratic polities and the United States in comparative and historical perspective. Although most studies demonstrate the influence of the largest movements, this research has not addressed how much movements matter. As for the conditions under which movements matter, scholars have been revising their i…
States and Social Policies
Comparative social scientists have developed various arguments about the determinants of social policies, especially those connected with twentieth-century 'welfare states.' Structure-functionalists argue that the social policies of modern nations necessarily converge due to an underlying logic of industrialism, while neo-Marxists treat such policies as state responses to the social reproduction requirements of advanced capitalism. Yet most stude…
Age for Leisure? Political Mediation and the Impact of the Pension Movement on U.S. Old-Age Policy
This article elaborates a political mediation theory of the impact of social movements on states and policy, positing that the influence of mobilization and specific strategies of collective action depends on specified political contexts and the type of influence sought. Examining the influence of the U.S. old-age pension movement, which involved millions of people, this article appraises the mediation model using state-level data from the 1930s …
Stolen Thunder? Huey Long's "Share Our Wealth," Political Mediation, and the Second New Deal
In 1934 Huey Long created Our a national challenger that sought economic redistribution. Our study explores the outcomes of this insurgency and the reasons for its successes and failures. We first review perspectives on success for social protest movements and provide a new definition of success, based on securing collective goods for a beneficiary group through movement organization efforts. Next we elaborate a theory of movement success. This t…
All the Movements Fit to Print: Who, What, When, Where, and Why SMO Families Appeared in the New York Times in the Twentieth Century
Why did some social movement organization (SMO) families receive extensive media coverage? In this article, we elaborate and appraise four core arguments in the literature on movements and their consequences: disruption, resource mobilization, political partisanship, and whether a movement benefits from an enforced policy. Our fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analyses (fsQCA) draw on new, unique data from the New York Times across the twentieth …
US Social Policy in Comparative and Historical Perspective: Concepts, Images, Arguments, and Research Strategies
In this article we review theory and comparative and historical research on US social policy. We discuss first the conceptual frameworks used to think about social policy, the changing images of American social policy implied by these different frameworks, and the questions they raise. From there we examine the arguments offered to answer questions about US social policy as well as the research strategies and evidence used to appraise the argumen…
Democratic States and Social Movements: Theoretical Arguments and Hypotheses
In this paper we theorize the impact of democratic states on state-oriented challengers. We argue that aspects of states influence the overall mobilization of state-oriented challengers and the forms of their mobilization and collective action. We develop 12 hypotheses about the impact of state political institutions, democratic processes, bureaucracies, and policies on mobilization and provide illustrative evidence for each from studies of socia…
Wage Wars: Institutional Politics, WPA Wages, and the Struggle for U.S. Social Policy
The WPA was the most expensive and politically prominent U.S. social program of the 1930s, and the generosity and very nature of U.S. social policy in its formative years was contested through the WPA. In this article, an institutional politics theory of social policy is elaborated that incorporates the influence of both institutional conditions and political actors: Institutions mediate the influence of political actors. Specifically, it is argu…
Did Capitalists Shape Social Security
It Happened Here: Political Opportunity, the New Institutionalism, and the Townsend Movement
How to Analyze the Influence of Movements
The Strategies and Contexts of Social Protest: Political Mediation and the Impact of the Townsend Movement in California
We contend that the collective action of state-oriented challengers is politically mediated, and that the impact of collective action will differ according to political contexts. More specifically, we argue that mobilization and limited protest will yield collective benefits in specified favorable political circumstances; more assertive action is required in specified less favorable circumstances. In addition to specifying these arguments, we go …
Not for Widows Only: Institutional Politics and the Formative Years of Aid to Dependent Children
Les AA. s'interessent au systeme d'aide sociale americain et plus particulierement a l'« Aid to Dependent Children » qui offre une assistance aux femmes elevant seules leurs enfants. Ils retracent les conditions de la mise en place de ce type d'aide en 1935, ainsi que son evolution sur le plan juridique. Ils montrent que cette mesure de protection sociale a ete appliquee de manieres tres diverses selon les Etats. Ils s'efforcent de comprendre et …
Where to Begin: A Survey of Five Approaches to Selecting Independent Variables for Qualitative Comparative Analysis
The problem of selecting independent variables for qualitiative comparative analysis (QCA) is addressed. This is a different problem for QCA than for inferential statistical methods, for both technical and epistemological reasons. Technically, QCA can manipulate only a few variables at one time. Epistemologically, QCA expects causation to work in a combinatorial fashion. The authors isolate and reject four ways of choosing independent variables f…
The Political Origins of Unemployment Insurance in Five American States
The last decade has been a time of rapid development in comparative social scientific research on modern welfare states—or more concretely, research on social insurance, pensions, and public assistance policies. Synchronic studies, using highly aggregated measures to make causal inferences about policy developments in all the nations of the world, have declined in favor of longitudinal comparative studies of up to eighteen advanced industrial cap…
The Formative Years of U.S. Social Spending Policies: Theories of the Welfare State and the American States During the Great Depression
This paper reports the results of a cross-sectional analysis of emergency relief, unemployment insurance, and old-age pensions in the 48 American states. It analyzes six outcomes: state emergency-relief expenditures andfederal emergencyrelief expenditures from 1933 to 1935; the timing of passage of unemploymentcompensation legislation; the timing of passage of old-age pension legislation; and the contents of old-age pension and unemployment-compe…
Making Good News: What Explains the Quality of Coverage of the Civil Rights Movement
When social movement organizations receive extensive newspaper coverage, why is it sometimes substantive and sometimes not? By “substantive,” we mean coverage that reflects serious treatment of the movement's issues, demands, or policy claims. Scholars agree that the news media are key to movement organizations' influence, helping them alter public discourse and effect political change, but often find that protests are covered nonsubstantively. E…
The State of the Art in Welfare State Research on Social Spending Efforts in Capitalist Democracies Since 1960
In the last generation, social scientists have made great advances in un-derstanding the forces behind the welfare state-or public social spend-ing and provision. Scholars have asked why those aided by the state get what they do in the ways that they do for a number of circumstances affecting income and life chances. Typically, the object of study has been the state's efforts through spending or services to ameliorate routine and foreseeable pred…
From bias to coverage: What explains how news organizations treat social movements
Why do newspapers cover social movement actors, and why is this coverage sometimes favorable? Early scholarship saw the news media mainly as a source of data on collective action, and sought to ascertain its biases, but scholarship has increasingly focused directly on why movements gain coverage, especially coverage that can advance their goals. To understand why and how newspapers cover movement actors, we start with the insight that movements r…
Political Reform and the Historical Trajectories of U.S. Social Movements in the Twentieth Century
We propose a political reform theory, a political and historical institutionalist argument that holds that shifts in political structures, partisan regimes and policy greatly influence movements. We appraise this argument, along with resource mobilization, political opportunity and media alternatives, by analyzing 600,000 articles in the New York Times and Washington Post that mention national U.S. social movement organizations (SMOs) in the larg…
Social Politics in Context: The Institutional Politics Theory and Social Spending at the End of the New Deal
In this article, we develop an institutional politics theory of public social provision and examine U.S. social spending programs at the end of the New Deal. This theory integrates key insights of institutional and political theories of social policy. Drawing on institutional arguments, our theory holds that the willingness or ability of pro-spending actors to promote social spending initiatives depends on institutional conditions, especially the…
Capitalists Did Not Want the Social Security Act: A Critique of the "Capitalist Dominance" Thesis
All the Right Movements? Mediation, Rightist Movements, and Why US Movements Received Extensive Newspaper Coverage
Under which conditions do social movements receive coverage by the mainstream news media? News coverage matters for movements for political, cultural, and organizational reasons, but only rarely have scholars analyzed the coverage of movements comparatively and at the movement level. To address the question, we apply a political mediation model of the influence of movements to professional news media, using ideas from the social organization of t…
Recipes for Attention: Policy Reforms, Crises, Organizational Characteristics, and the Newspaper Coverage of the LGBT Movement, 1969–2009
Why do some organizations in a movement seeking social change gain extensive national newspaper coverage? To address the question, we innovate in theoretical and empirical ways. First, we elaborate a theoretical argument that builds from the political mediation theory of movement consequences and incorporates the social organization of newspaper practices. This media and political mediation model integrates political and media contexts and organi…
When Movements Matter: The Townsend Plan and the Rise of Social Security
When Movements Matter accounts for the origins of Social Security as we know it. The book tells the overlooked story of the Townsend Plan--a political organization that sought to alleviate poverty and end the Great Depression through a government-provided retirement stipend of
Did Capitalists Shape Social Security
States and Social Policies
Comparative social scientists have developed various arguments about the determinants of social policies, especially those connected with twentieth-century 'welfare states.' Structure-functionalists argue that the social policies of modern nations necessarily converge due to an underlying logic of industrialism, while neo-Marxists treat such policies as state responses to the social reproduction requirements of advanced capitalism. Yet most stude…
The Political Origins of Unemployment Insurance in Five American States
The last decade has been a time of rapid development in comparative social scientific research on modern welfare states—or more concretely, research on social insurance, pensions, and public assistance policies. Synchronic studies, using highly aggregated measures to make causal inferences about policy developments in all the nations of the world, have declined in favor of longitudinal comparative studies of up to eighteen advanced industrial cap…
Compromising Possessions: Orwell's Political, Analytical, and Literary Purposes in Nineteen Eighty-Four
The Politics of Social Policy in the United States
The Formative Years of U.S. Social Spending Policies: Theories of the Welfare State and the American States During the Great Depression
This paper reports the results of a cross-sectional analysis of emergency relief, unemployment insurance, and old-age pensions in the 48 American states. It analyzes six outcomes: state emergency-relief expenditures andfederal emergencyrelief expenditures from 1933 to 1935; the timing of passage of unemploymentcompensation legislation; the timing of passage of old-age pension legislation; and the contents of old-age pension and unemployment-compe…
The Great Depression: Delayed Recovery and Ecomomic Change in America, 1929-1939. Michael A. Bernstein
Class Struggle and the New Deal: Industrial Labor, Industrial Capital, and the State. Rhonda F. Levine
The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism Across Nations
John Maynard Keynes once observed that the of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. The contributors to this volume take that assertion seriously. In a full-scale study of the impact of Keynesian doctrines across nations, their essays trace the reception accorded Keynesian ideas, initially during the 1930s and then in the years after World War II, in…
State Responsiveness and State Activism. Jerald Hage , Robert Hanneman , Edward T. Gargan
Making the Most of a Case Study: Theories of the Welfare State and the American Experience
It Happened Here: Political Opportunity, the New Institutionalism, and the Townsend Movement
Capitalists Did Not Want the Social Security Act: A Critique of the "Capitalist Dominance" Thesis
A Hero for the Aged? The Townsend Movement, the Political Mediation Model, and U.S. Old-Age Policy, 1934-1950
During the Depression, the Townsend movement enjoyed varied success in seeking pensions for the aged. Social-movement models predict that success depends on the mobilization of resources or on collective action. Other theories predict that economic or political conditions cause the emergence of movements and changes in public spending. The political mediation model used here holds that, to succeed, a movement must reinforce political action with …
Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement.Dennis Chong
The State of the Art in Welfare State Research on Social Spending Efforts in Capitalist Democracies Since 1960
In the last generation, social scientists have made great advances in un-derstanding the forces behind the welfare state-or public social spend-ing and provision. Scholars have asked why those aided by the state get what they do in the ways that they do for a number of circumstances affecting income and life chances. Typically, the object of study has been the state's efforts through spending or services to ameliorate routine and foreseeable pred…
Stolen Thunder? Huey Long's "Share Our Wealth," Political Mediation, and the Second New Deal
In 1934 Huey Long created Our a national challenger that sought economic redistribution. Our study explores the outcomes of this insurgency and the reasons for its successes and failures. We first review perspectives on success for social protest movements and provide a new definition of success, based on securing collective goods for a beneficiary group through movement organization efforts. Next we elaborate a theory of movement success. This t…
Where to Begin: A Survey of Five Approaches to Selecting Independent Variables for Qualitative Comparative Analysis
The problem of selecting independent variables for qualitiative comparative analysis (QCA) is addressed. This is a different problem for QCA than for inferential statistical methods, for both technical and epistemological reasons. Technically, QCA can manipulate only a few variables at one time. Epistemologically, QCA expects causation to work in a combinatorial fashion. The authors isolate and reject four ways of choosing independent variables f…
It Happened Here: Political Opportunity,the New nstitutionalism,and the Townsend Movement
The Townsend movement, which sought pensions for the elderly in the Great Depression, was much larger in some states than others and its size fluctuated in the 1930s. Frustration or grievance theory predicts that the movement would be stronger when and where old people suffered more. The challenger perspective expects greater growth when and where indigenous organizations of the aged already existed. Political opportunity theories expect challeng…
Taxation and Democracy: Swedish, British, and American Approaches to Financing the Modern State
Not for Widows Only: Institutional Politics and the Formative Years of Aid to Dependent Children
Les AA. s'interessent au systeme d'aide sociale americain et plus particulierement a l'« Aid to Dependent Children » qui offre une assistance aux femmes elevant seules leurs enfants. Ils retracent les conditions de la mise en place de ce type d'aide en 1935, ainsi que son evolution sur le plan juridique. Ils montrent que cette mesure de protection sociale a ete appliquee de manieres tres diverses selon les Etats. Ils s'efforcent de comprendre et …
The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty
Social Politics in Context: The Institutional Politics Theory and Social Spending at the End of the New Deal
In this article, we develop an institutional politics theory of public social provision and examine U.S. social spending programs at the end of the New Deal. This theory integrates key insights of institutional and political theories of social policy. Drawing on institutional arguments, our theory holds that the willingness or ability of pro-spending actors to promote social spending initiatives depends on institutional conditions, especially the…
Actively Seeking Work? The Politics of Unemployment and Welfare Policy in the United States and Great Britain.Desmond King
Building a Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s, by David Plotke
Journal Article Building a Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s, by David Plotke Get access Building a Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s by David Plotke. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1996. 388 pp. $49.95. Edwin Amenta Edwin Amenta New York University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterl…
Political science (62 works) · Law (56 works) · Sociology (56 works) · Politics (54 works) · Political economy (37 works) · Law (34 works) · Economics (28 works) · Social movement (26 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (26 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (19 works)