McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001

McAdam, D., Tarrow, S. G, & Tilly, C. 2001. Dynamics of contention. New York: Cambridge University Press.


Chapter 1:

• contentious politics: episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claims and their objects when (a) at least one government is a claimant, and object of claims, or a party to the claims, and (b) the claims would, if resolved, affect the interests of as least one of the claimants  (5)
• episodic is key to this being contentious politics, and not just "normal" politics
• this definition is broad to combat the fact that the study of institutional/non-institutional politics has gotten too narrow, and often politics (contentious or otherwise) can go in and out of institutional realm (6)
• contained versus transgressive contention: (govt is involved in both in some way)
• contained contention
• cases of contention in which all parties are previously established actors employing established means of claim making (7)
• transgressive contention:
• at least some of the actors involved are newly self-identified political actors AND/OR at least some parties employ innovative collective action (7-8)
• "many instances of transgressive contention grow out of episodes of contained contention" (8)
• "substantial short-term political and social change more often emerges from transgressive contention than from contained contention", contained contention often just reifies existing regimes (8)
• "insted of seeking to identify necessary and sufficient conditions for mobilization, action, or certain trajectories, we search out recurrent causal mechanisms and regularities in their concatenation (13)
• seem to be looking for similarities across different cases
• pursuing "partial parallels" (13-14)
• four overlapping and competing lines fof explanation of contention (20)
• (21) structural analysis -- interests + capacities = action or not
• rationalist analysis -- individuals are rational and decide
• phenomenological analysis -- plumbing states of awareness for explanations of involvement in contentious politics
• cultural approaches -- norms, beliefs, and symbols that affect/create contention
• mechanism: a delimited class of events that alter relations among specifified sets of elements in identical or closely similar ways over a variety of situations (24)
• types:
• environmental mechanisms (25): extnerally generated changes to social conditions, ie resource depletion
• cognitive mechanisms (26): alterations of individual and collective perceptions
•  relational mechanisms (26): alter connections among people, groups, and interpersonal networks
• processes: regular sequences of mechanisms that produce similar transformations (24)
• families of processes:
• mobilizations
• political identity formation
• the family of repression, diffusion, and radicalization (28)
• episodes: continuous streams of contention including collective claims-making (24)
• combine all these things above
•