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

Sociological Forum, Vol. 14, No. 1, 1999

Paradigm Warriors: Regress and Progress in
the Study of Contentious Politics
Sidney Tarrow1

Paradigm warfare is a well-worn way of engaging in the polemics of research,
but it frequently reduces paradigms to caricatures and turns complex reports
of empirical research into cartoons. This is illustrated by two one-sided
accounts of the Chiapas rebellion: one based on a simplistic "political oppor-
tunity" cartoon and the other on a foreshortened "culturalist" one. Reducing
the many-sided (and in some ways ambiguous) approaches of the "political
process" model to a supposedly hegemonic paradigm neglects many substan-
tive contributions and cuts with too broad a stroke at "social movements"
while ignoring the many-branched contributions of research and theory on
contentious politics.
KEY WORDS: social movements; contentious politics; political opportunities; repertoires of
contention; cycles of protest.

                            RASHOMAN IN CHIAPAS

     In 1994, the Mexican economy was overheating. The poor were getting
poorer and the rich-although richer—were dissatisfied with the palpable
corruption of their government. The dominant political party, the PRI, in
the saddle for a half-century, was divided between politicos and tecnicos.
Internally divided, the PRI oligarchs no longer dared to repress their oppo-
nents as they had done in the past. Opposition parties of the left and right
are gaining leverage in local and state politics. Sensing blood, they offered
their support to insurgent challengers outside the polity.

1 Department   of Government, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853.

                                             71

                                     0884-8971/99/0300-0071$16.00/0 © 1999 Plenum Publishing Corporation

72                                                                    Tarrow

     This was the opportunity insurgents had been waiting for. Taking
advantage of the structural determinants outlined here and of the resources
offered by indigenous anger, movement entrepreneurs launched a rebellion
in the state of Chiapas. The government's repressive efforts were feeble
and uncertain, and the opposition parties seized the opportunity offered
by the rebels to attack it. Facing pressure from the U.S. government, amid
a collapsing economy and increasingly bold challenges, the Mexican govern-
ment had no choice but to negotiate. The Chiapas social movement suc-
ceeded because—like social movements everywhere—it was able to seize
political opportunities.

     It is again 1994. The local people of Chiapas were suffering deprivation
caused not only by their material poverty but by their cultural isolation.
Made up largely of indigenous campesinos, they spoke languages unrelated
to Spanish, had little sympathy for those who ruled them from the capital,
and feared the loss of their native culture to North American market
forces and the government's neoliberal policies. Over the years, they had
constructed a worldview in which those who work the land possess virtue,
whereas those who own it lack legitimacy. The local cacique, the grain
merchant, the policeman: all were the linear descendants of the conquista-
dores who conquered their land and destroyed their ancient community.
     The rebellion of Chiapas was a rebellion in the name of these sup-
pressed indigenous identities. However, insurgent identities were not inher-
ited wholesale from the past; they were actively constructed through agency
into mobilized ones by cultural leaders. In this process, the personal narra-
tives of ordinary people were transformed into dynamic worldviews and
arrayed as collective stories in a cognitive struggle with hegemonic elites.
Symbols of the Mexican past, like Emiliano Zapata, inspired them, whereas
leaders resembling the heros of successful Latin American revolutions, like
subcomandante Marcos, assured them that the goals they sought were part
of a wider historical struggle for justice in the hemisphere.

                  CARTOONS AND CARICATURES

     The Rashomanic sketches presented here are, of course, cartoons.
Although both are recognizable as foreshortened versions of the rebellion
that was mounted in Chiapas in 1994, there are at least three things wrong
with them.
     First, each is inaccurate and misleading in crucial details. Both ignore
the considerable importance of the international media and of North Ameri-
can Email networks in publicizing the claims of the insurgents (Bob, 1997).

Regress and Progress in the Study of Contentious Politics                  73

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

  PARADIGM WARFARE IN SOCIAL MOVEMENT RESEARCH

    I have, of course, drawn these cartoons tongue-in-cheek to illustrate
the dangers of one-sided and simplistic renderings of social movements

74                                                                                  Tarrow

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

Regress and Progress in the Study of Contentious Politics                                  75

the tradition in specifying political variables, their narrowing of focus actu-
ally leads them to overlook one of its dangers—excessive syncretism (see
the critique in Lichbach, 1997).
     Indeed, in the best tradition of paradigm warfare, Goodwin and Jasper
reduce their focus to one aspect of the approach they criticize, in this
case, to the concept of political opportunity structure. They deal with the
extensive work on mobilizing structures and framing in the tradition as if
they were afterthoughts of a structuralist fixation, largely ignoring the con-
cepts of repertoires and cycles in the political process approach (Tilly, 1978;
McAdam, 1983; Traugott, 1995). Most important, they elide the interest in
the mutual interaction among challengers, opponents, and third parties that
has been central to this tradition since Tilly's construction of a polity model
in the late 1970s. Although practitioners can certainly be found who me-
chanically regard political opportunity structure as the be-all and end-all
of mobilization, in centering around that concept as a kind of Rosetta stone
of political process theory, Goodwin and Jasper ignore the fact that most
political process theorists since Tilly (1978) try to explain movements as
the outcome of a combination of structural and cultural as well as long-term
and contingent factors and of the interactive logics of the political struggle.
     Goodwin and Jasper quote my Power in Movement to the effect that
"people join in social movements in response to political opportunities and
then, through collective action, create new ones" (this issue, p. 30; Power
in Movement, 1994:17-18). It is de bonne guerre in paradigm warfare to
extract a snippet of an author's work to reduce it to inconsequence. Yet
turning only eight pages back in the same book, they would have found
the following:
    Movements do have a collective action problem but it is social: coordinating unorga-
    nized, autonomous and dispersed populations into common and sustained action.
    They solve this problem by (1) responding to political opportunities through the
    use of (2) known, modular forms of collective action, by (3) mobilizing people
    within social networks and (4) through shared cultural understandings. (1994:9)

     This fixation on POS is unfortunate, for it allows Goodwin and Jasper
to paint their opponents as advocates of invariant models and to virtually
ignore their emphasis on identity formation within collective action (Tar-
row, 1998, ch. 7; Tilly, 1997), the historical rootedness of their work (Costain,
1992; Meyer, 1990; Piven and Cloward, 1971, 1977; McAdam, 1988; Tarrow,
1989; Schneider, 1995; Tilly, 1978, 1986, 1995); the nesting of social move-
ments in broader historical cycles (Brockett, 1995; Goldstone, 1980; Mc-
Adam, 1995; Tarrow, 1989; Tilly, 1995); and especially their bringing interac-
tion with states, opponents, and significant others into the study of
contention (Brockett, 1995; Costain, 1992; della Porta, 1995; Kriesi et al.,
1995; Schneider, 1995).

76                                                                     Tarrow

     Paradigm warfare need not be reductionist. Consider the creative en-
counter between the advocates of European "new" social movement theory
and their American positivist opponents in the 1980s, documented in a
series of conference volumes (Klandermans et al., 1988; Morris and Mueller,
1992). It led, among other things, to new social movement theorist Hans-
peter Kriesi and his collaborators' Politics of New Social Movements in
Western Europe (1995). Or think of the sharpening of perspectives about
the concept of "globalization" and its implications for transnational con-
tention in Margaret Keck and Katherine Sikkink's Activists Beyond Borders
(1998) or the recent debate on global flows of labor and capital in Interna-
tional Labor and Working-Class History (1995). In contrast with these
careful and subtle debates, Goodwin and Jasper employ an ax to chop
down a shrub of their own invention, in place of the scalpel that would be
needed to dissect the many-branched plant that their subjects have been
cultivating over three decades of work.

         FROM SOCIAL MOVEMENT REDUCTIONISM TO
                  CONTENTIOUS POLITICS

     Let me illustrate the dangers of paradigm warfare with one example.
Goodwin and Jasper argue that advocates of political process models prom-
ise "a causally adequate, universal theory or 'model' of social movements"
(this issue, p. 28). Now social movements make a nice target; but in nar-
rowing their scope to movements, Goodwin and Jasper ignore a major
innovation of the political process approach over its predecessors: to embed
the study of movements within a larger universe of contentious politics and
thence to politics in general (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, 1997; Oliver,
1989; Tarrow, 1998; Tilly, 1995).
     Political process theorists argue that the social movement is a histori-
cally specific subtype of contentious politics, and not its sole and universal
expression (Tarrow, 1998; Tilly, 1995). That argument cannot even be
examined by critics who assume that "social movements" are the alpha
and omega of the writers they criticize. Ignoring it leads Goodwin and
Jasper to elide some of the major contributions of the political process
tradition: its discoveries about the modularity and institutionalization of
repertoires of contention (Tilly, 1978, 1986, 1995, and the contributions to
Traugott, 1995); its work on the complex and recursive reciprocity between
movement challengers and members of the polity (Costain, 1992; Tarrow,
1989, 1998; Tilly, 1978, 1995); how the structure of opportunities intersects
with historical cleavage structures to produce substantially different pat-
terns of contention from country to country (Kriesi et al., 1995) or from

Regress and Progress in the Study of Contentious Politics                   77

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

                            ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

   I am grateful to Ron Aminzade, Clifford Bob, Judy Hellman, Doug
McAdam and Charles Tilly for help in preparing this article.