After Success: What Sustains Social Movements? Evidence from Argentina

• In Event: Protest Dynamics and Social Change

Abstract

What sustains social movements? While the question of how social movements emerge has been extensively studied, the puzzle of how they evolve over time— particularly after achieving policy objectives—remains underexplored.
In this project, I start from the premise that, especially in the period surrounding victory, movement leaders have incentives to join the state bureaucracy (“integration into the state”) and/or to become more openly partisan, expressing support for the party or coalition that supported their demands (“partidization”). I contend that partidization and integration into the state signal a loss of autonomy of movement leadership.
My project focuses on the effect that this perceived loss of autonomy has on movement joiners. Crucially, I argue that movement leadership autonomy from political parties and the state may be valuable and mobilizing for social movement participants, particularly in settings with comparatively low levels of citizen trust in these organizations. For that reason, movement joiners—especially those not aligned with the political party that leaders have allied with—may demobilize when they regard movement leadership as having lost autonomy. Still, these individuals may have incentives to resume their participation in the movement when they perceive movement leaders as having regained autonomy. This resumption of autonomy might occur due to leaders exiting the state bureaucracy or following a change in the governing coalition.
Importantly, I argue that the salience of movement leadership autonomy is particularly magnified when the movement in question uses the “outsider status” —or the exclusion from political power of its leaders and participants—as a mobilizing frame, as in the case of women’s movements. Thus, to test this theory, I study two major feminist movements in the Argentine context: Ni Una Menos (“Not one [Woman] Less”) and the abortion rights movement, also known as the “green wave.” In this way, I contribute to understanding the determinants of women’s political engagement, especially non-electoral and contentious modes of participation, which has received less scholarly attention than the drivers of the gender gap in electoral engagement.
My project speaks to the question of the conditions under which social movements manage to sustain participation in mobilization. It does so by shedding light on an overlooked micro-foundation of political participation that may explain why social movements frequently appear to disintegrate after success, and how dormant social movements can become reactivated. Crucially, in-depth interviews conducted as part of this project suggest that social movement leaders face a "double bind." Partidization and integration into the state may be necessary for the movement to succeed or to guarantee the correct implementation of an achieved legislative change. However, movements lose joiners who value autonomy in the process, which may hurt the chances of maintaining mobilization and momentum to secure other victories.

Author

• Ana Sofia Elverdin, Yale University