D S Meyer
Biographic Data
| ID | 172387 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D S Meyer |
| GIVEN NAMES | D S |
| FAMILY NAME | Meyer |
| SIGNATURE | MEYER D S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Irvine |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8511-9307 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 71 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1892 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 71 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Introduction
Visible injustice and dangerous and provocative policies are sometimes met with large and powerful social movements that sometimes generate favorable policy responses. But, more frequently, recognized dangers or injustices do not generate mass responses. Figuring out how to recognize a meaningful opportunity for mass concern and how to put a consequential movement together have long occupied activist organizers and scholars. Of course, effective …
How to Save the World
Approaching the task of generating a new citizen's movement for restraint on nuclear weapons, the article reviews the history and influence of previous movements against nuclear weapons, noting that urgent policy issues do not, by themselves, generate citizen engagement. Considering prior movements, the article notes that the Scientists Campaign, the Ban the Bomb Movement, the Campaign against Anti-Ballistic Missiles, and the Nuclear Freeze, all …
Profile
Revisiting the concept of the social movement society, we see the development of new media and datafication creating unanticipated challenges and constraints, in effect, new and different opportunities. The wired world reduces the costs of spreading information and mobilizing action, but also creates additional risks. I review the premises and blindspots of the 'social movement society' hypothesis, initially offered by David S. Meyer and Sidney T…
Protest During a Pandemic
This paper explores how a global health crisis affects the causes and consequences of social movements. Drawing on media coverage, press releases, emails, and other available primary data sources, we examine how the pandemic changed the opportunities and conditions for activists on the right and left and those they challenge. We begin by considering the nature of the COVID-19 pandemic and the concomitant government response, which alters the stru…
Dilemmas and Dimensions of Social Movement Escalation 1
Social movements must find ways to intensify their efforts to maintain political relevance—and potential influence. But escalation comes with risks in the potential reactions from authorities, supporters, potential supporters, and opponents. I argue that recognizing two elements of escalation can help. First, we need to acknowledge that movements are not unitary actors and that a large movement cannot always stop putative allies from escalating i…
Jerusha O Conner, The New Student Activists
Undercurrents
William A. Gamson and His Legacy for Academia and Social Movements
William A. Gamson's career was nothing less than remarkable. A prolific scholar, Gamson wrote at least eight books and more than a hundred articles from 1961 to 2014. And he bequeathed social movement studies substantial theoretical contributions and methodological innovations in numerous areas including coalitions, resource mobilization, political opportunities, framing, and culture. His legacy also includes pioneering simulation games both for …
Growth and Decline of Opposing Movements
Movement-countermovement pairs develop in opposition to one another as they battle for position, influence, and survival in a shifting political and cultural context. While theoretical work on countermovements and the political context posits a rough symmetry between opposing movements, our analysis demonstrates significant asymmetries in the fight over gun policy in the United States. Drawing on news accounts, government records, public opinion …
Movement Analysis on the Fly
Disciplined academic study of social movements should help us make sense of the movements and politics of our time, but social science often leads us astray. Particularly, the ideal of limiting the frame of analysis in terms of independent and dependent variables and in terms of time routinely neglects the disparate causes and effects of social protest. These challenges are particularly acute when considering contemporaneous campaigns, that is, a…
Tracking the Resistance
A massive, and very diverse, oppositional movement emerged in the wake of Donald Trump's 2016 election to the presidency. “The Resistance” mobilized people across the political spectrum, who were concerned with a wide range of policy issues. The movement includes new activists and institutional actors; grassroots groups and social movement organizations; and conservatives and progressives. The range of activists, concerns, and approaches to polit…
Gendered Activism and Outcomes
U.S. women’s peace and anti-war activism grew from their involvement in the abolition and suffrage movements of the nineteenth century, and some have continued to foster women-focused organizations in the twenty-first century. This chapter examines the relationship between the historical development of women’s peace activism and a U.S. political system that frequently excluded women from international relations. Women enlarged the U.S. peace move…
Political Opportunities
Political opportunity theory and political process accounts of protest movements emphasize the influence of the world outside a movement on the emergence, development, claims, and ultimate impact of a social movement. The wisdom, creativity, and outcomes of activists' choices, briefly their agency, can be understood only by looking at the political context and the rules of the games in which those choices are made, that is, structure. Although th…
Democratizing Inequalities
Opportunities to “have your say,” “get involved,” and “join the conversation” are everywhere in public life. From crowdsourcing and town hall meetings to government experiments with social media, participatory politics increasingly seem like a revolutionary antidote to the decline of civic engagement and the thinning of the contemporary public sphere. Many argue that, with new technologies, flexible organizational cultures, and a supportive polic…
High profile rape trials and policy advocacy
Activists try to use high profile trials to advance their political agendas, and we want to understand why they occasionally succeed in promoting policy reforms. We begin by reviewing literature on agenda setting and social problem construction, conceptualising high profile trials as “focusing events” that offer activists a chance to advance their definitions and remedies for particular social problems. We next outline the feminist movement again…
Citizenship, political opportunities and social movements
Organizing around Gender Identities
This article studies gender movements. The discussion focuses on social movements and not entirely on feminism or women’s movements, looking at the ways that gendered identities help shape movements, along with the ways that movements function in gendered environments. Next, it identifies and differentiates antifeminist, nonfeminist, and feminist movements, before studying the role of gender in each. The article also lists a wide range of movemen…
Human Rights, State Compliance, and Social Change
National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs) – human rights commissions and ombudsmen – have gained recognition as a possible missing link in the transmission and implementation of international human rights norms at the domestic level. They are also increasingly accepted as important participants in global and regional forums where international norms are produced. By collecting innovative work from experts spanning international law, political sc…
The Women's Movement Inside and Outside the State by Lee Ann Banaszak
Sources of Certification and Civil Rights Advocacy Organizations
The Dynamics of Contention program emphasizes the role of external authorities as key to the certification of social movement actors. Its examples highlight the power of authorities to legitimate and affect the flow of resources to challengers. We focus on the continual work done by a social movement organization to be certified by multiple sources as the legitimate representative of its respective group or constituency, through an iterative and …
Seasons of Change
The events that began in Tunisia with Mohamed Bouazizi’s dramatic suicide in December of 2010 and continue to develop throughout the Middle East challenge our politics and our political imaginations. The challenges to social science theories of movements, revolutions and social change are likely less pressing than those to contemporary politics, but they are the ones that we are better prepared to engage. The wave of political contention in the M…
Social Movements and Contentious Politics
How The Cold War Was Really Won
Constructing Threats and Opportunities After 9/11
President Bush war on terror emphasized domestic surveillance, enhanced police powers, and military adventures abroad, and virtually all political debates focused on the administration's initiatives. This was not inevitable. An alternative response to the threat of terrorism could include, for example, expanded funding for language instruction and comparative religion in American schools, improved training for first responders in medical emergenc…
The Role of Religion in Public Life (2006)
‘Ein Tzaddik Ela Memaheh’, ‘no-one can pretend to be a Tzaddik – righteous – unless one is ready and willing to intervene in the affairs of the world’. I open with this particular Talmudic phrase because I believe that in many respects this teaching is key to the role of religion in society
Protest and Political Opportunities
I review the development of the political opportunity or political process perspective, which has animated a great deal of research on social movements. The essential insight-that the context in which a movement emerges influences its development and potential impact-provides a fruitful analytic orientation for addressing numerous questions about social movements. Reviewing the development of the literature, however, I note that conceptualization…
Movements, Countermovements, and the Structure of Political Opportunity
Movement-countermovement interaction is an ongoing feature of contemporary social movements and, indeed, of contemporary politics. Yet the interplay of contending movements is understudied and undertheorized. This article begins to remedy this deficit by arguing that new work on political opportunity structure provides important insights and significant theoretical leverage for this study. Through a review of the literatures on countermovements a…
Social Movement Spillover
Social movements are not distinct and self-contained; rather, they grow from and give birth to other movements, work in coalition with other movements, and influence each other indirectly through their effects on the larger cultural and political environment. Building on both political process and collective identity perspectives, this paper uses a case study of the women's movement's impact on U.S. peace movement activity in the 1980s to develop…
Conceptualizing Political Opportunity
This article reviews central problems in political opportunity theory and explores the implications of adopting certain conceptualizations of political opportunities for explaining the emergence, development, and influence of protest movements. Results from multivariate analyses of civil rights protest, organizational formation, and policy outcomes indicate significant variation depending on (1) whether the political opportunity structure is conc…
Coalitions and Political Context
Although social movements in the United States are staged by coalitions, the politics of movement coalitions and the internal and external factors that affect their formation, maintenance, and dissolution are understudied. Here, we use the 2002-2003 movement against the impending war in Iraq to refocus analytical attention and sharpen theory on social movement coalitions. We contend that external circumstances, or political opportunities, are cri…
Missed Opportunities
Social movements can continue in hostile political climates by adapting abeyance structures, that is, disengaging from active challenge to the state on policy matters to focus instead on preserving enduring values and identity. But doing so can be politically costly. In this article we provide a theoretical framework for understanding the political outcomes of movement abeyance, drawing from recent work on political opportunity structure and poli…
Protest Cycles and Political Process
Since the dawn of the nuclear age small groups of activists have consistently protested both the content of United States national security policy, and the process by which it is made.Only occasionally, however, has concern about nuclear weapons spread beyond these relatively marginal groups, generated substantial public support, and reached mainstream political institutions.In this paper, I use histories of peace protest and analyses of the insi…
The Challenge of Cultural Elites
Although celebrities have become a regular fixture in modern social movements, there is little explicit theory on why, or on how they may affect the movements in which they participate. We begin by discussing the resources celebrities can bring to bear on social protest movements, as well as the risks that celebrity participation entails both for the movement and for the celebrity. We suggest a notion of political standing, which sets limits on t…
Signals and Spillover
The watershed Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education affected activist politics on issues that extend well beyond African-American civil rights or education. The apparent success of the Court decision in spurring social change encouraged activists in other social movements to emulate the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's litigation strategy, and to adapt organizational structures, political strategies, and rhetoric borrowed from the civil…
Claiming Credit
Taking credit for achieving some desirable outcome is an essential element of politics, and the stakes of doing so are particularly high for social protest movements. Popular narratives of social change assign some movements a critical role for promoting change, but ignore the influence of others. Winning acceptance of a preferred narrative of influence is a neglected, but important, social movement outcome. I use disparate stories of movement su…
Framing national security
Political discourse can provoke, preempt, or quell social movements, identifying which issues are most accessible for challenge and how. Movements are not simply reactive, however, and can affect public discourse, forcing political leaders and established elites to respond to their concerns. As a result public discourse may reflect the conflict between various actors, as challengers seek to redefine the issues of their concerns and shape viable p…
Inequality and American Democracy
Institutionalizing dissent
Political Opportunity and Nested Institutions
Scholars use the concept of 'political opportunity structure' to explain how the political context affects the differential development and influence of ostensibly similar movements. Although the concept promises to become an important analytical tool for comparative studies, to date it is underspecified and undertheorized. It also faces new challenges in this era of increased transnational activism and more extensive scholarly recognition of act…
Peace Protest and Policy
The tremendous fluctuations in public mobilization against United States nuclear weapons policy, a relatively stable policy over four decades, present a difficult riddle to social scientists. Since the dawn of the nuclear age small groups of activists have consistently protested both the content of United States national security policy and the process by which it is made. Only occasionally, however, has this protest spread beyond a handful of re…
Political opportunity and the rise and decline of interest group sectors
Interest group activity is always affected by the political environment in which groups operate. As a result, effective study of public interest groups must situate them in a larger political context. We propose a means of doing so by building on theoretical and empirical studies of both social movements and interest groups. We argue that groups can best be understood by changing the unit of analysis from an individual group to the set of groups …
Protest and Political Incorporation
Protest has become a useful window for examining all sorts of broader political phenomena. Using event data from newspaper reports, we trace protest by Vietnamese Americans since the first major wave of immigration. By looking at the issues, tactics, and development of protest within the Vietnamese American community in Orange County, California, we get a view of the development and incorporation of that community into contemporary American polit…
Citizenship Rights and Social Movements
Journal Article Citizenship Rights and Social Movements: A Comparative and Statistical Analysis Get access Citizenship Rights and Social Movements: A Comparative and Statistical Analysis by Joe Foweraker and Todd Landman. New York, Oxford University Press, 1997. 296 pp. $65.00. David S. Meyer David S. Meyer City College of the City University of New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Qu…
Changing Political Opportunity
Both the legal definition of rape and the social responses to it have changed dramatically over the last twenty-five years. The sorts of assaults classified as criminal, the willingness of women who have been raped to turn to the criminal justice system, the rules of prosecution, and the penalties imposed on those found guilty have all been the explicit subjects of public debates initiated in the early 1970s by activists who broke the silence of …
Protest During a Pandemic
This paper explores how a global health crisis affects the causes and consequences of social movements. Drawing on media coverage, press releases, emails, and other available primary data sources, we examine how the pandemic changed the opportunities and conditions for activists on the right and left and those they challenge. We begin by considering the nature of the COVID-19 pandemic and the concomitant government response, which alters the stru…
Growth and Decline of Opposing Movements
Movement-countermovement pairs develop in opposition to one another as they battle for position, influence, and survival in a shifting political and cultural context. While theoretical work on countermovements and the political context posits a rough symmetry between opposing movements, our analysis demonstrates significant asymmetries in the fight over gun policy in the United States. Drawing on news accounts, government records, public opinion …
Sources of Certification and Civil Rights Advocacy Organizations
The Dynamics of Contention program emphasizes the role of external authorities as key to the certification of social movement actors. Its examples highlight the power of authorities to legitimate and affect the flow of resources to challengers. We focus on the continual work done by a social movement organization to be certified by multiple sources as the legitimate representative of its respective group or constituency, through an iterative and …
Seasons of Change
The events that began in Tunisia with Mohamed Bouazizi’s dramatic suicide in December of 2010 and continue to develop throughout the Middle East challenge our politics and our political imaginations. The challenges to social science theories of movements, revolutions and social change are likely less pressing than those to contemporary politics, but they are the ones that we are better prepared to engage. The wave of political contention in the M…
Platform Leadership
The authors identify and describe a distinct type of social movement leadership, oriented toward promotion of a distinct position or set of arguments rather than toward any kind of grassroots mobilization. Platform leaders mold their organizations into vehicles that facilitate their interaction with mass media and mainstream political institutions. These leaders serve as the sole voice for their organizations in making public claims and exercise …
A Research Agenda
On Windigo Psychosis
A Research Agenda
Star Wars, Star Wars , and American Political Culture 1
Where's the peace movement when you need it
The opportunity to remake U.S. foreign and military policy—and indeed the entire international system—has never been better, partly because of groundwork done by the strong peace movements in the United States and Western Europe during the 1980s. Just when the chances and challenges for peace activism in the United States are the greatest, however, the peace movement approaches a historic low point in its strength and visibility. Just when the ma…
Institutionalizing dissent
Political opportunity and the rise and decline of interest group sectors
Interest group activity is always affected by the political environment in which groups operate. As a result, effective study of public interest groups must situate them in a larger political context. We propose a means of doing so by building on theoretical and empirical studies of both social movements and interest groups. We argue that groups can best be understood by changing the unit of analysis from an individual group to the set of groups …
International Conflict Resolution
Protest Cycles and Political Process
Since the dawn of the nuclear age small groups of activists have consistently protested both the content of United States national security policy, and the process by which it is made.Only occasionally, however, has concern about nuclear weapons spread beyond these relatively marginal groups, generated substantial public support, and reached mainstream political institutions.In this paper, I use histories of peace protest and analyses of the insi…
Peace Protest and Policy
The tremendous fluctuations in public mobilization against United States nuclear weapons policy, a relatively stable policy over four decades, present a difficult riddle to social scientists. Since the dawn of the nuclear age small groups of activists have consistently protested both the content of United States national security policy and the process by which it is made. Only occasionally, however, has this protest spread beyond a handful of re…
Political Opportunity After the Cold War
The end of the cold war dramatically altered the prospects for challenging movements in both the East and the West. Because the international context in which social movements occur has so radically changed, their form and content is also likely to change radically. In this article, the author uses the concept of political opportunity structure to discuss the likely opportunities, issues, and constituencies of challenging movements after the cold…
Public Policy for Democracy
A fundamental rethinking is under way about the roles of government, citizens, and community organizations in public policy. Can government be reconstructed to make public policies more responsive to citizens and thus more effective? This challenge is apparent in the activist policy agenda of the Clinton administration, which supports national service programs, government-voluntary collaborations, and community-based development projects. Public …
Shannon's Deal
Mobilizing Against Nuclear Energy
Social Movement Spillover
Social movements are not distinct and self-contained; rather, they grow from and give birth to other movements, work in coalition with other movements, and influence each other indirectly through their effects on the larger cultural and political environment. Building on both political process and collective identity perspectives, this paper uses a case study of the women's movement's impact on U.S. peace movement activity in the 1980s to develop…
Reading and Teaching Peace Studies
Book reviewed in this article: Peace/Mir: An Anthology of Historic Alternatives to War , edited by Charles Chatfield and Ruzanna Ilukhina. Realizing Peace: An Introduction to Peace Studies , by Thomas Keefe and Ron E. Roberts. Peace and World Security Studies: A Curriculum Guide (6th edition), edited by Michael T. Klare
Polite Protesters
Framing national security
Political discourse can provoke, preempt, or quell social movements, identifying which issues are most accessible for challenge and how. Movements are not simply reactive, however, and can affect public discourse, forcing political leaders and established elites to respond to their concerns. As a result public discourse may reflect the conflict between various actors, as challengers seek to redefine the issues of their concerns and shape viable p…
The Challenge of Cultural Elites
Although celebrities have become a regular fixture in modern social movements, there is little explicit theory on why, or on how they may affect the movements in which they participate. We begin by discussing the resources celebrities can bring to bear on social protest movements, as well as the risks that celebrity participation entails both for the movement and for the celebrity. We suggest a notion of political standing, which sets limits on t…
Framing political opportunity
The concept of political opportunity structure is in trouble, in danger of becoming a sponge that soaks up virtually every aspect of the social movement environment – political institutions and culture, crises of various sorts, political alliances, and policy shifts. As Tarrow notes (1988: 430), "Political opportunity may be discerned along so many directions and in so many ways that it is less a variable than a cluster of variables – some more r…
Movements, Countermovements, and the Structure of Political Opportunity
Movement-countermovement interaction is an ongoing feature of contemporary social movements and, indeed, of contemporary politics. Yet the interplay of contending movements is understudied and undertheorized. This article begins to remedy this deficit by arguing that new work on political opportunity structure provides important insights and significant theoretical leverage for this study. Through a review of the literatures on countermovements a…
Rethinking Abortion
Journal Article Rethinking Abortion: Equal Choice, the Constitution, and Reproductive Politics, by Mark A. Graber Get access Rethinking Abortion: Equal Choice, the Constitution, and Reproductive Politics by Mark A. Graber. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1996. 244 pp. $29.95. David S. Meyer David S. Meyer City College of New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volum…
Changing Political Opportunity
Both the legal definition of rape and the social responses to it have changed dramatically over the last twenty-five years. The sorts of assaults classified as criminal, the willingness of women who have been raped to turn to the criminal justice system, the rules of prosecution, and the penalties imposed on those found guilty have all been the explicit subjects of public debates initiated in the early 1970s by activists who broke the silence of …
Citizenship Rights and Social Movements
Journal Article Citizenship Rights and Social Movements: A Comparative and Statistical Analysis Get access Citizenship Rights and Social Movements: A Comparative and Statistical Analysis by Joe Foweraker and Todd Landman. New York, Oxford University Press, 1997. 296 pp. $65.00. David S. Meyer David S. Meyer City College of the City University of New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Qu…
Coalitions and Political Movements
This work employs multidisciplinary perspectives to better understand the nuclear freeze movement, a movement that at one time produced a vast national network of activism and the largest political demonstration in the history of the United States
Missed Opportunities
Social movements can continue in hostile political climates by adapting abeyance structures, that is, disengaging from active challenge to the state on policy matters to focus instead on preserving enduring values and identity. But doing so can be politically costly. In this article we provide a theoretical framework for understanding the political outcomes of movement abeyance, drawing from recent work on political opportunity structure and poli…
Political science (67 works) · Law (62 works) · Politics (59 works) · Sociology (57 works) · Law (42 works) · Social movement (33 works) · Political economy (30 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (20 works) · Economics (18 works) · Computer Science (14 works)