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
