7
The organizational structure of new social movements
in a political context
HANSPETER KRIESI
ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
Organizational infrastructure of social movements
Social movement organizations (SMOs) constitute crucial building blocks of
the mobilizing structures of a social movement. But, as John McCarthy has
pointed out in his introduction to Part II, they are by no means the only
components of a movement's mobilizing structures. Other elements of these
structures include kinship and friendship networks, informal networks
among activists, movement communities, as well as a host of more formal
organizations which contribute to the movement's cause without being directly
engaged in the process of mobilization for collective action. In conceptualizing
the more formal side of the mobilizing structure of a given movement,
I would like to suggest that we distinguish between at least four types
of formal organizations: SMOs, "supportive organizations," "movement associations,"
and "parties and interest groups." SMOs are distinguished from
the other types of formal organizations by two criteria: (1) they mobilize their
constituency for collective action, and (2) they do so with a political goal,
that is, to obtain some collective good (avoid some collective ill) from authorities.
By contrast, supportive organizations are service organizations such as
friendly media, churches, restaurants, print shops, or educational institutions,
which contribute to the social organization of the constituency of a
given movement without directly taking part in the mobilization for collective
action.1
"Supportive organizations" may work on behalf of the movement,
their personnel may sympathize with the movement, but their participation
in the movement's mobilization for action is at best indirect or
accidental. Movement associations are self-help organizations, voluntary asI
thank Veit Bader, Marco Giugni, John D. McCarthy, and Charles Tilly for their detailed comments
on earlier versions of this chapter.
New social movements in a political context 153
constituency/client orientation
service
supportive
organizations
"halfway
houses"
no direct participation
of
constituency
political
representation
interest
group,
party
self-help, altruism
movement
associatons
self-help group
voluntary association,
club
direct participation
of constituency
political
mobilization
SMO
authorities' orientation
Figure 7.1. Typology of movement-related organizations.
sociations, or clubs created by the movement itself in order to cater to some
daily needs of its members.2
The mutual benefit societies of the labor movement
provide a typical example.-1
Just as SMOs, "movement associations"
contribute to the mobilization of a movement's constituency, but they do so
in an exclusively constituency- or client-oriented way. That is, they contribute
to the process of "consensus mobilization" (Klandermans 1988) or to the
"creation of commitment" (Gamson 1975), but they do not directly contribute
to the "action mobilization" or the "activation of commitment" for a
political goal.4
Finally, SMOs are also to be distinguished from parties and
interest groups. While they pursue political goals just as do SMOs, parties
and interest groups do not normally depend on the direct participation of
their constituents for attaining these goals. They are specialized in political
representation. They have sufficient amounts of resources - in particular, institutionalized
access, authority, and expertise - which means that they normally
do not have to have recourse to the mobilization of their constituents.
While parties and interest groups also mobilize their constituencies from time
to time, this is not essential to their activities, which are typically carried out
by an elite. Moreover, this mobilization usually takes place within established
routines. Figure 7.1 summarizes these distinctions in a schematic way.5
All
SMOs of a given social movement form its SMO-infrastnicture (SMI). The
SMO-infrastructures of all the social movements in a given polity, in turn,
constitute the social movement sector (SMS). The SMIs of a movement family,
such as the new social movements (NSMs), represent a subsector of the
154 Hanspeter Kriesi
SMS.6
Given that SMOs constitute only part of the mobilizing structures of
a given movement, the SMS can also be considered to be a subset of the
mobilizing structures of all the movements in a society.
Parameters of organizational development
The notion of "organizational development" refers to all levels of the organizational
structure, to SMOs, SMIs, subsectors of the SMOs, and the whole
SMS. It has a large number of aspects. I propose four sets of parameters for
its analysis:7
parameters capturing organizational growth and decline, internal
organizational structuration, external organizational structuration, and
goal orientations and action repertoires. First, organizational growth and decline
refers to the changing size of the SMI - the number of SMOs in the
SMI and the amount of resources available to the various SMOs. In the
initial phases of a movement, the only resources available tend to be
the "active commitment, courage and imagination" of the movement's activists
and adherents (Koopmans 1992). In their early phases, the organizational
networks of social movements tend to be weak and informally structured.
Resources from conscience constituents and supportive elites are not easily
forthcoming. Movements have to attract public attention to their cause, they
have to create their constituency and elite patronage on their own, either by
explicit consensus mobilization (Klandermans 1988), or as a by-product of
their action mobilization (McAdam 1982: 125; Jenkins and Eckert 1986).
Typically, SMOs develop only in the course of the mobilization process of a
social movement. The flow of resources into the organizational network of a
given movement is a function of the stage reached by the series of action
campaigns constituting it. A well-resourced SMI is one of the results of consensus
and action mobilization of a newly developing social movement rather
than its origin. The resource flow, in turn, constitutes a crucial determinant
for the other aspects of the organizational development.
Internal structuration of SMOs is an immediate consequence of the resource
flow. This second set of parameters refers to processes of formalization,
professionalization, internal differentiation and integration. Formalization
means the development of formal membership criteria, the introduction
of formal statutes and established procedures, the creation of a formal leadership
and office structure. Professionalization means the management by paid
staff members who make careers out of movement work.8
Internal differentiation
concerns the functional division of labor (task-structure) and the territorial
decentralization (territorial subunits). The integration of the differentiated
functional and territorial subunits is achieved by horizontal
coordinating mechanisms, and by centralization of decisions. Oligarchization
- the concentration of power in the hands of a minority of the SMO
members - is the most well known "integrative mechanism" of SMOs. As
New social movements in a political context 155
SMOs grow, that is, as the amount of their resources increases, their internal
structuration will become more elaborate with respect to all of these dimensions.
The process of internal structuration is virtually inevitable, if the SMO
is to have success in the long run. The German Greens, not an SMO but a
party close to the NSMs, provide ample evidence of the inevitability of this
process. Their internal structural deficits imposed important restrictions on
their possible political success (Raschke 1991; Kleinert 1991). Internal structuration
also contributes to the stabilization of an SMO in periods of organizational
decline. McCarthy and Zald (1977) suggest that older, established
SMOs are more likely than newer ones to persist throughout the cycle of
organizational growth and decline. In a similar vein, Staggenborg (1988) argues
that formalized SMOs are able to maintain themselves - and the movement
- over a longer period of time than informal ones. This is particularly
important in periods of demobilization, when movement issues are less pressing.
Formal SMOs may perform important maintenance functions after the
victory or demise of informal ones (Jenkins and Eckert, 1986: 827). Finally,
as Staggenborg points out, formal SMOs which maintain themselves in periods
of demobilization are also prepared to take advantage of new political
opportunities which may arise at some point. Centralization contributes to
stability of an SMO, too. Thus, Taylor (1989) shows that in a period of decline
of the American women's movement, the major SMO of the movement
functioned almost entirely on the national level with a federated structure in
which local and state chapters had little autonomy. Centralization ensures a
relatively advanced level of specialized skills among core activists.
External structuration refers to the integration of an SMO in its organizational
environment. There are at least three dimensions to be taken into
consideration in this regard: the SMO's relation with its constituency, its allies,
and the authorities. By definition, an SMO is highly dependent on its
constituency, since its main activity consists in mobilizing its constituency for
collective action. Still, the dependency on the constituency can be of varying
degrees. By providing selective incentives to its constituency, an SMO may
be less dependent on fluctuating individual commitments. By appealing to
conscience constituents, by providing services to the general public or acquiring
public subsidies, the SMO may broaden its resource base. Diversification
of the resource base generally decreases dependency on a single supportive
group. This not only applies to the constituency, but also to allies and authorities.
SMOs develop in close interaction with their allies and the authorities
which they challenge. Support from a powerful ally is ambivalent from the
point of view of the development of an SMO: On the one hand, such an ally
may provide important resources; on the other hand, it may also reduce the
autonomy of the SMO and threaten its stability in the long run. Similarly,
the establishment of a working relationship with the authorities also has ambivalent
implications for the development of the SMO: On the one hand,
156 Hanspeter Kriesi
public recognition, access to decision-making procedures and public subsidies
may provide crucial resources and represent important successes for the
SMO; on the other hand, the integration into established systems of interest
intermediation may impose limits on the mobilization capacity of the SMO
and alienate important parts of its constituency, with the consequence of
weakening it in the long run.
Finally, a fourth set of parameters of organizational development concerns
an SMO's goal orientations and action repertoires. According to the wellknown
Weber-Michels model, SMOs typically undergo three types of
changes as they age: oligarchization, goal transformation, and a shift to organizational
maintenance. In this model, goal transformation inevitably takes
the direction of greater conservatism - the accommodation of the SMO's
goals to the dominant societal consensus. Organizational maintenance is a
special form of goal transformation in which the primary activity of the SMO
becomes the maintenance of membership, funds, and other requirements of
organizational existence. In the process, the action repertoire of the SMO is
also expected to be modified. It is expected to become more moderate, more
conventional, more institutionalized. Zald and Ash (1966) have taken issue
with this model, maintaining that this type of transformation is not inevitable,
but that it depends on certain conditions. In a similar vein, I would like
to suggest that there are at least four possible transformations of an SMO
which correspond to the four types of movement-related organizations distinguished
in Figure 7.1: An SMO can become more like a party or an interest
group; it can take on characteristics of a supportive service organization; it
can develop in the direction of a self-help group, a voluntary association or
a club; or it can radicalize, that is, become an ever more exclusive organization
for the mobilization for collective action. Figure 7.2 presents the different
variants using the same format as the previous one.
Institutionalization implies a whole set of transformations in the course of
which an SMO becomes more like a party or an interest group. This set
includes the stabilization of an SMO's resource flow, the development of its
internal structure, the moderation of its goals, the conventionalization of its
action repertoire, and its integration into established systems of interest intermediation.
Commercialization is the transformation in the direction of a service
organization. Along this route, an SMO puts an increasing emphasis on
the provision of paid services to the members of its constituency. Many
SMOs use, of course, "selective incentives" to mobilize their constituencies
for collective action. According to Olson's (1965) theory of collective action,
there is actually no other way to get collective action going - except maybe
coercion. But usually, for an SMO the provision of "selective incentives" is
not an end in itself. To the extent that it becomes an end in itself, the SMO
has turned into a service organization or a business enterprise. Involution is
the path that leads to an exclusive emphasis on "social incentives," which
New social movements in a political context 157
constituency/client orientation
commercia-
lization
no direct participation
of
constituency
institutio-
nalization
involution
direct participation
of
constituency
SMO
authorities' orientation
radicali-
zation
Figure 7.2. Typology of transformations of goal orientations and action repertoires
of SMOs.
may stem from the solidary services to the constituency or from the social
activities with the other activists of the organization. In the first variant, the
SMO becomes a self-help group or a voluntary association, depending on
whether the beneficiaries are identical with its constituency or not. In the
second variant, it becomes a club. Radicalization, finally, is the path to reinvigorated
mobilization. Classic discussions of the subject such as the one of
Zald and Ash (1966) have focused on a juxtaposition of radicalization and
institutionalization, but have not taken into consideration the other two pos-
sibilities.
Determinants of organizational development
The organizational development is a function of factors both internal and
external to the SMS. With respect to internal factors we may distinguish
between the internal organizational dynamics and the type of the movement
in question. With respect to external factors, there are general economic and
cultural preconditions as well as political ones. Here, I shall focus on the
impact of the political context on the organizational development, but I do
not assume that the other aspects are unimportant, nor shall I neglect them
in the subsequent analysis.9
As far as internal organizational dynamics are
concerned, I have already pointed out that the internal structuration may
contribute to an SMO's stabilization over time. The internal structuration
may also affect the strategic and tactical choices of SMOs (Staggenborg
158 Hanspeter Kriesi
1988). For example, formalized and professionalized SMOs tend to engage in
institutionalized tactics and typically do not initiate disruptive direct-action
tactics. They prefer institutionalized tactics, because they are more compatible
with a formalized structure and with the schedules of professionals.
Moreover, the internal structuration also contributes to the integration into
established systems of interest-intermediation: SMOs with formalized and
professionalized structures tend to have easier access to public authorities,
because government bureaucracies prefer to deal with organizations with
working procedures similar to their own.10
The type of movement is quite crucial for the development of its organizational
infrastructure. Movements differ especially with respect to the composition
of their respective constituency, their goal orientation, and their action
repertoire. We shall deal here only with the so-called new social movements
(NSMs), a set of movements that have mobilized since the early seventies in
Western Europe. Instead of entering a theoretical discussion of what constitutes
a "new social movement," I shall simply give a list of the major examples
of NSMs: the ecology movement and its antinuclear branch; the solidarity
movement with its branches for humanitarian aid, political refugees,
political prisoners, human rights, and antiracism; the peace movement, the
women's movement, and the urban autonomous movement. While it can be
argued that these movements all share a common core constituency (Kriesi
1989a), it is useful to distinguish between three types of NSMs in the present
context (Koopmans 1990b): instrumental, subcultural, and countercultural
movements. Instrumental movements seek to obtain specific collective goods
or to prevent specific collective "bads." They are not much concerned with
the collective identity of their constituency. Typical examples are the peace
movement, the ecology movement, and the solidarity movement. By contrast,
subcultural movements, such as the gay movement or (parts of) the
women's movement, aim at the (re)production of a collective identity that
is primarily constituted in within-group interaction, but which depends on
authority-oriented action as well. Countercultural movements, such as the
urban autonomous movement, are also identity-oriented, but they constitute
their identity mainly in conflictual interaction with authorities or third
parties.
The differences in the general orientation of the three types of movements
tend to affect their organizational development in significant ways. The level
and type of resources of an SMI is likely to be a function of the movement's
general orientation. Thus, SMOs of instrumental NSMs are typically inclusive:
They try to mobilize as large a part of the population as possible to
obtain their issue-specific goal. For this reason alone, they can be expected
to accumulate more members and more financial resources than the identityoriented
movements. Identity is tied to certain specific characteristics of the
constituency, which implies exclusivity and a more circumscribed member-
New social movements in a political context 159
ship. On the other hand, exclusive, identity-oriented SMIs are likely to succeed
in mobilizing a more intensive commitment from their constituency.
This provides them with an alternative to internal structuration for their
stabilization in the long run. Thus, Kanter's (1972) research on American
communes concludes that groups characterized by high commitment are
more likely to retain participants and to endure. Commitment is especially
important for holding an SMO alive between stages of mass mobilization
(Taylor 1989). This line of argument suggests the SMIs of sub- and countercultural
movements to be particularly resistant to their movement's decline.
Within the category of instrumental movements, the institutionalization of
the resource flow seems to be especially problematic for all the movements
which are highly issue-specific as well as for movements that focus on international
issues. The more a movement focuses exclusively on a single issue, the
more it becomes dependent on the issue-attention cycle. For international
issues, in particular, this cycle seems to be typically quite short. Moreover,
international issues tend to be highly polarized in party-political terms,
which introduces an additional unpredictable element (see below). Given
these considerations, the peace movement and the solidarity movement
should generally have greater difficulties in stabilizing their resource base
than the ecology movement. Except for its antinuclear branch, which is also
rather issue-specific, the latter is confronted with a highly differentiated, complex
and national problem-structure. Finally, the type of movement may also
be expected to have an effect on the pattern of transformation followed by the
SMI: Instrumental movements are most likely to institutionalize, subcultural
movements are likely to follow the paths of involution or commercialization,
whereas countercultural movements typically radicalize.
In addition to the factors internal to the SMS, external factors also determine
its development. The economic development of a country determines
the level of resources generally available for the sector. According to the argument
of McCarthy and Zald (1977), an expanding supply of resources in a
society will incite political entrepreneurs to found new professional SMOs,
which will compete for these resources and contribute to the organizational
development of the movement. Cultural factors may also play a role. Such
factors as the Anglo-Saxon political culture or a strong Protestant heritage
have, for example, been invoked to explain the differences that exist with
regard to the participation in "voluntary associations" of different countries
(see Curtis, Grabb, and Baer 1992)." In the present essay, I shall above all be
interested in the way political factors contribute to the organizational development
of NSMs. In order to study their impact, I shall rely on the conceptualization
of the political opportunity structure (POS), which I have developed
previously (Kriesi 1991) and which we have already applied to the comparative
analysis of the level of mobilization (Kriesi et al. 1992). As in that previous
analysis, I shall use the same four countries - France, Germany, the
160 Hanspeter Kriesi
Netherlands, and Switzerland - to illustrate and test my propositions. If political
factors are not likely to have a direct impact on the internal structuration
of an SMI, they seem to be particularly relevant for the determination
of the level and type of resources available to an SMI, for its external structuration
as well as for the general patterns of its transformation in the course
of its organizational development.
THE POLITICAL CONTEXT
AND ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
The POS can be decomposed into three broad sets of properties: the formal
institutional structure of a political system, its informal procedures and prevailing
strategies with regard to challengers, and the configuration of power
relevant for the confrontation with the challengers. The first two sets provide
the general static setting for the organizational development, and they constrain
the relevant configuration of power. The formal institutional structure
determines the overall strength of the state. The latter may change over time,
as a result of electoral changes, strategic decisions, or the dynamic of the
interactions between challengers and authorities.
The generalpolitical context
On the basis of the first two sets, I have distinguished between four types
of general settings, each of which corresponds to one of the four countries
mentioned above. Figure 7.3 presents the four types. The combination of a
strong state and an exclusive dominant strategy defines a situation of selective
exclusion of challengers. In such a situation, the challenger can neither count
on formal nor on informal access to the political system. Because of its
strength, the state can often choose merely to ignore challengers; if it does
react, however, it will most likely confront the challenger with repression.
Moreover, since the state is strong, the challenger is unlikely to have some
veto power. But, depending on the composition of government, he may obtain
some substantive concessions. Thus, a government controlled by the Left
may use the state's capacity to act for concessions on behalf of the challenging
NSMs.12
This type is represented by France. At the opposite end of "selective
exclusion," we find the case of full procedural integration, which is
characterized by the combination of a weak state with an inclusive dominant
strategy. In such a situation, repression is comparatively weak and the challenger's
access to the system is formally as well as informally facilitated.
Given the weakness of the system, the challenger cannot count on important
substantive concessions, but he may be able to block decisions by exercising
a veto. This type is represented by Switzerland. The direct democratic institutions
as well as the federalist structure of Switzerland provide for a large
New social movements in a political context 161
Dominant
strategy
exclusive
inclusive
Formal institutional structure
Weak state
"formalistic inclusion"
- formal, but no informal
facilitation of access;
strong repression
- possibility of veto, but no
substantive concessions
(Germany)
"full procedural integration"
- formal and informal
facilitation of access;
weak repression
- possibility of veto, but no
substantive concessions
(Switzerland)
Strong state
"selective exclusion"
- neither formal nor informal
facilitation of access;
strong repression
- neither possibility of veto, sub
stantive concessions, depending
on configuration of power
(France)
"informal cooptation"
- no formal, but informal
facilitation of access;
weak repression
- no possibility of veto, but
substantive concessions
(Netherlands)
Figure 7.3. The general settings for the approach of members towards challengers.
number of formal access points for challengers. The traditionally integrative
strategy enhances the general effect of the formal structure. Germany represents
one of the two intermediate types, the one of formalistic inclusion. In
this situation, the challenger can count on formal, but not on informal facilitation
of access. There is a possibility of veto, but no concessions can be
expected. The federal structure of the German Republic allows for a multiplication
of points of access. Moreover, the strong position of the German judiciary
provides the challengers with another set of independent access points.
However, the repressive legacy of the system implies that those who articulate
themselves outside of the formally available channels will be confronted with
strong repression. The second intermediary case, the one of informal cooptation,
is represented by the Netherlands. In such a setting, challengers do not
have a lot of formal access, but they can count on informal facilitation. Since
the Dutch state is also quite strong, it is able to make considerable substantive
concessions, and it can prevent challengers from exerting a veto.
As Tocqueville has already observed, a strong state goes together with a
weak society and vice versa. The lack of decentralized access to the state
discourages self-organization at the local grassroots level. Similarly, a repres-
162 Hanspeter Kriesi
sive dominant strategy serves to discourage self-organization. In the tradition
of the French revolution, the French state in particular has long resisted the
formation of associations of any kind. Thus, the organizational development
of most associations in France has traditionally been less solid than in many
other countries. The comparative weakness of the French trade unions illustrates
this point (Rosanvallon 1988; Visser 1987), as does the comparative
weakness of French voluntary associations in general (Curtis et al. 1992).
Tilly, Tilly, and Tilly (1975: 43) have argued that this weakness of French
organizations may be more apparent than real. They point out that, in
France, associations often form as offshoots of organizations already in existence
- the Catholic Church, the Communist Party, and so on; and though
coherent and active, many do not acquire formal, legal existence. Moreover,
the state's active resistance to formally constituted associations may have
reinforced the tendency to form such groups in the shadows. But, informal
structures and dependency on external support are no signs of organizational
development. In fact, the arguments of the Tillys indicate an additional
mechanism that serves to weaken the French organizational structure, to
which I shall return below.
By contrast, Switzerland's weak state corresponds to a highly organized
society. The self-organization of society has gone very far in this country, the
central state having traditionally intervened only as a last resort. According
to the principle of subsidiarity, societal problems are first tackled by private
self-organization, then by the local or regional branches of the state. Only if
these subsidiary instances are no longer able to deal with a given problem, it
is up to the central state to find a solution. At first sight, the Netherlands'
strong, centralized state is not as propitious to organizational development
as the weak Swiss federal state. However, with respect to the stimulation
of society's self-organization, Dutch pillarization has long served as a functional
equivalent to Swiss federalism (Kriesi 1990). Pillarization implied
the construction of parallel organizational infrastructures in different walks
of social life; that is, it constituted a very strong stimulus to societal selforganization.
If both federalism and pillarization stimulate self-organization,
they have, however, quite different implications for organizational structuration:
Federalism is a state structure that stimulates the self-organization of
society but that also implies that the development of the societal organizations
is, as long as possible, left to their own devices. By contrast, pillarization
is a societal structure that, while having traditionally stimulated selforganization,
always coexisted with a centralized, strong state, that has
facilitated this self-organization, following its strategy of "informal cooptation."
Such facilitation includes public recognition, consultation, and
even subsidization. We would, therefore, expect the Dutch SMIs to be at least
as well developed as the Swiss ones, but possibly even more than the latter.
According to the comparative study of Curtis et al. (1992), the Dutch have,
New social movements in a political context 163
indeed, a very high level of membership in voluntary associations. Excluding
church and union memberships, their level turns out to the highest one of all
the countries compared." Although Switzerland has not been included in
this study, comparable figures are available from a study on Swiss values
(Melich 1992). It turns out that the Swiss level of membership in voluntary
associations is exactly as high as the one in the Netherlands if we exclude
both church and union memberships (which both are comparatively weak in
this country).14
Germany, finally, presents an intermediary case. The openness of the weak
state stimulates societal self-organization, but the repressive legacy and the
traditional distance between the state and German society suggest that, with
respect to the public sphere, this self-organization is less developed than in
the two smaller countries. Sontheimer (1989: 111) argues that Germany is
characterized by a well-organized private sphere, which is, however, not
sufficiently integrated into the structure of the public space. Private and public
spheres are not automatically complementary in this country. Thus, Almond
and Verba (1963) had found a rather high level of membership in voluntary
associations for Germany, but the percentage of active membership
was as low as in Italy or Mexico. They interpreted this result as an indication
that while the political structures in Germany were well developed, they did
not (yet) play a significant role in the lives of the citizens. Since the early
sixties, the attitude of the citizens toward their state has improved and political
participation has substantially increased. Germany has become a "normal"
Western democracy (Rudzio 1987; Koopmans 1992). According to the
data of Curtis et al. (1992), German membership in voluntary associations,
excluding church and unions, is slightly above the average of the countries
compared. It is certainly higher than in France, but lower than in the Netherlands
and Switzerland.
The configuration of power
With respect to the configuration of power in the party system of relevance
for NSMs, I have maintained that particular attention should be paid to the
configuration of power on the Left (Kriesi 1991). The supporters of NSMs
have typically been recruited from the political Left. Only more recently, the
parties of the Right have made attempts - especially in the area of environmental
politics - to take up some of the demands on the agenda of the
NSMs. To the extent that they become more open to NSMs' demands, we
would expect the configuration of power of the parties on the Right to become
more relevant, too. Two aspects of the configuration on the Left are of
particular importance: whether or not the Left is divided between a major
Communist current and a Social Democratic/Socialist one, and whether or
not the Left participates in government. Among our four countries, France
164 Hanspeter Kriesi
is the only one with a split Left. This has implied a strong polarization within
the Left as well as between the Left as a whole and the Right. Under conditions
of a split Left, both major currents within the Left try to instrumentalize
the NSMs for their own purposes: first, to gain ascendancy on the Left
and then to win the electoral competition with the Right. From the point of
view of the organizational development of a movement's infrastructure, all
party political instrumentalization is likely to have a destabilizing effect. The
SMI becomes dependent on the vicissitudes of party politics. If the terms of
party competition change, the Left is likely to abandon its support for the
SMI in question. This has happened in France, when the Left came to power
in 1981 (Duyvendak 1992). The implications for the overall resource levels
of the SMIs of the NSMs can be expected to have been very serious, given
that these movements have become highly dependent on the support by the
Left. Moreover, the Communists' strategy with respect to NSMs has particularly
negative implications for the development of an SMI: while the Social
Democrats tend to ally themselves more loosely to already existing SMOs in
a given movement, the Communists tend to create their own SMOs in order
to dominate the SMI of the movement in question (see Garner and Zald
1987: 313f.). The presence of SMOs colonized by the Communist Party is
bound to introduce competitive tensions within the SMI, since not all SMOs
are likely to associate themselves with the Communist cause, and most are
unlikely to accept the Communists' claim to leadership. We should add that
the Communists' strategy to control SMIs has not touched all NSMs to the
same extent. It has been especially virulent in the case of instrumental NSMs
related to international issues that concern the competition between the former
Communist regimes and the West, that is, in the case of the peace movement
and the solidarity movement. The ecology movement, by contrast, has
been much less affected by this strategy. Ceteris paribus, we, therefore, expect
that the French peace and solidarity movements have particularly weak
SMIs.
Party political instrumentalization of NSMs with all its negative consequences
for the stabilization of the SMIs is less conspicuous in the other three
countries. But the Left in other countries has not been free of attempts to
instrumentalize certain movements for its own purposes: Thus, the Dutch
Social Democrats have been very supportive of the peace movement's campaign
against cruise missiles. After it had turned out that this support did
not pay off in electoral terms, the Social Democrats abandoned the movement
after their defeat in the 1986 elections, contributing to its decline (van
Praag, Jr. 1992). This is an example of the atypical case of a Social Democratic
Party in the opposition that withdraws from supporting an NSM. By
moving closer to the center, the Dutch Social Democrats hoped to become a
viable coalition partner again for the governing Christian Democrats. There
is also an example of the unlikely case of a Socialist government supporting
New social movements in a political context 165
the mobilization of a new movement: The French socialists in government
lent a helping hand to SOS racism, thus reinvigorating the French solidarity
movement beyond what I have just expected. The Socialists' support of this
particular movement was part of their strategy against the extreme Right in
France, which proved to be increasingly menacing in electoral terms (Duyvendak
1992). These two examples serve to relativize the general notion that
the Left in government will not facilitate the mobilization of NSMs, while it
will do so when in government.
DATA
In a research project on the development of NSMs in Western Europe during
the eighties, systematic information has been gathered on the organizational
development of five NSMs in the four countries introduced above.15
The five
NSMs studied include the three most important instrumental movements the
peace, ecology, and solidarity movements, a subcultural movement - the
gay movement, and a countercultural movement - the urban autonomous
movement. At the outset, we decided to study in detail at least the five most
important SMOs of each movement. For various reasons, the number of
SMOs finally studied is more variable than we had originally planned. In
some cases, we have information on less than five SMOs, mainly because of
problems of access (especially in the case of the urban autonomous movement),
but also because there simply were not enough SMOs of some importance
(in the cases of the gay movements in Germany and Switzerland). For
some instrumental movements, considerably more than five SMOs have been
studied, mainly for reasons linked to the respective country studies. This uneven
character of the data base obviously poses a problem of comparability.
At various points, I shall, therefore, analyze subsamples of organizations
which are more comparable than the sample as a whole in order to check for
the latter's representativeness. Table 7.1 gives a summary view of the set of
organizations included in the study.
The data were collected on the basis of documentary materials and of personal,
highly structured interviews with representatives of the SMOs. They
include information about all aspects of the organizational development that
have been discussed. Most of the data concern the situation in 1988-89. For
some aspects, we have obtained rough indicators of time trends during the
eighties. In some instances, we have been able to obtain yearly figures for
membership and financial resources concerning the period from 1975 to
1989. Unfortunately, the quality of the data is rather low. There are many
missing values, and many rough estimates based on informed judgment by
the interviewers or interpolations by the author. SMOs typically do not busy
themselves with keeping detailed records of their own development. Moreover,
to the extent that such records exist somewhere, the present-day staff
166 Hanspeter Kriesi
Table 7.1. Data base
Country
Movement
Peace movement
Ecology movement
Solidarity movement
Gay movement
Autonomous movement
Total
Netherlands
2
10
7
4
1
24
Germany
4
11
8
3
2
28
France
5
4
8
7
1
25
Switzerland
6
10
13
3
5
37
All
17
35
36
17
9
114
has often not been able or willing to unearth them and to make them available
for research. Given the limited number of cases and the low level of
measurement, the subsequent analysis will typically be quite simple.
Before turning to the presentation of some results with respect to each one
of the four sets of parameters of organizational development, I would like to
draw the reader's attention to one more limitation of this dataset: Data on
the most important SMOs of a social movement give only a partial idea of
the extent and the character of its organizational development. In fact, these
SMOs constitute only the tip of a movement's organizational iceberg. Moreover,
this tip is likely to represent the SMI's most developed part. The following
analyses shall, therefore, without any doubt overestimate the extent of
the organizational development of the organizational infrastructure of the
NSMs as a whole. There is one exception to this limitation: With respect to
the transformation of the movements' action repertoires some additional
data are available. Following the lead of others (Kriesi et al. 1981; McAdam
1983b; Tarrow 1989a; Tilly et al. 1975), we have collected systematic data on
protest events by analyzing the Monday editions of one major newspaper in
each country for the period 1975-1989. For each event, we have coded a
limited number of facts, among which the the identities of up to three (if
any) SMOs that were associated with it. These data provide an opportunity
to compare the development of the action repertoires of the various movements
and of different parts of their organizational infrastructures in the four
countries.
ORGANIZATIONAL GROWTH AND DECLINE
The two indicators for the level of resources to be used here are membership
size and amount of financial resources in 1988-89. The most important
SMOs of a movement typically include those most richly endowed with re-
New social movements in a political context 167
Table 7.2. Membership offour international SMOs in 1989 by country (in
thousands)
SMO
Greenpeace
WWF
Amnesty International
Terre des Hommes
Total (absolute)
Total (per million inhabitants)
NL
640
100
120
66
926
62
Country
G
600
75
23
40
738
12
F
5
-"
21
28
54
1
CH
24
130
47
30
231
36
"No information.
sources, although this has not been the only criterion for their selection.
Some SMOs may be important for their mobilization capacity, even if they
do not have many members or much financial resources at their disposal.
The German BBU (Federal League of Citizen Initiatives for Environmental
Protection), for example, is a peak association of the ecology movement with
no direct membership and only a small amount of resources, but with an
impressive mobilization capacity and an important impact on public opinion
during most of the period studied (Rucht 1989a: 73). I shall use three types
of comparisons with respect to resource levels: (1) the comparison of four
international SMOs with chapters in all four countries, (2) the comparison
of the four largest SMOs per movement in each of the four countries, and
(3) the comparison of our whole sample of SMOs across the four countries
and the five movements. The four counties are, of course, of widely different
size, with the German and French populations being about four times as
large as that of the Netherlands and about ten times as large as that of Switzerland.
To take these differences into account, I present not only absolute
figures but also corresponding relative figures per 1 million inhabitants.
Table 7.2 presents the first comparison for size of membership. The four
SMOs compared include Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
from the ecology movement, and Amnesty International and Terre des Hommes
from the solidarity movement. The results are quite clear: In absolute
and in relative terms, these organizations are strongest in the Netherlands,
followed by Germany (in absolute terms) and Switzerland (in relative terms),
while their French counterparts are much weaker. The exceptional size of the
Dutch and German branches of Greenpeace are particularly noticeable.
Their weight will make itself felt in all the following analyses. If we take the
four largest SMOs per movement and compare across countries, these first
168 Hanspeter Kriesi
results are largely confirmed.16
Table 7.3 shows the French SMOs again to be
by far the weakest. The Swiss SMOs now appear to be about as strong as the
Dutch, if the different sizes of the countries are taken into account. In absolute
terms, the Dutch SMOs can count on the largest membership, although
the country is much smaller than Germany or France. Taking into account
the size of the countries, German SMOs take an intermediary position. In
addition, Table 7.3 indicates systematic differences between the membership
levels of the various movements, which are largely independent of the country
under study. In line with our expectations, instrumental movements typically
have more members than the subcultural movement." Moreover,
among the former, the ecology movement has by far the largest number of
members, and the peace movement by far the least. The only exception from
this general pattern turns out to be France. In France, the four largest SMOs
of the solidarity movement have more members than their counterparts in
the ecology movement. The explanation rests with the fact that in France, as
we have seen, the solidarity movement has received strong support from the
Socialist government, whereas the same government has not been supportive
at all with regard to the ecology movement. As a matter of fact, the French
Socialist government has launched an outright attack on Greenpeace: With
its consent, the French secret service bombed the Rainbow Warrior in
New Zealand in 1985, killing one man. Greenpeace France suffered much
from this blow, losing both members and financial support in its aftermath.
The results for financial resources (not shown here) largely parallel those
for membership, since, as we shall see below, membership contributions are
generally the most important source of income of the SMOs. In particular,
the analysis of the financial resources again reveals the striking weakness of
the French ecology movement. As a matter of fact, roughly 80 percent of
the financial resources of the French NSM subsector are in the hands
of the SMOs of the solidarity movement.
Our data allow a more detailed analysis of membership growth of the ecology
movement in the three countries, where this movement has come to dominate
the NSM subsector. Figure 7.4 shows how the three (or four) largest
SMOs of the movement have developed in the period 1975-1989. Overall, all
three SMIs have grown impressively during this period. Analyzing the pattern
of growth in more detail, we notice that traditional conservationist
SMOs - such as the German association for bird protection (DBV) or the
Dutch association for the protection of nature {natuurmonumenteri) - which
had been founded long before the rise of NSMs, grow very slowly or have
an essentially stable membership. Somewhat older environmentalist SMOs such
as the WWF in Switzerland - which adopt a pragmatic attitude toward
the preservation and improvement of the human environment, no longer
grow very much either. In fact, the rapid growth of these SMIs in the eighties
is primarily due to the spectacular growth of newly created environmentalist
or ecologist SMOs - such as the Swiss transport association (VCS) and,
New social movements in a political context 169
Table 7.3. Membership of thefour largest SMOs in 1989 per movement and
country"
SMO
(in thousands)
Ecology movement
Solidarity movement
Peace movement
Gay movement
Total (absolute)
Total (per million inhabitants)
(in %)
Ecology movement
Solidarity movement
Peace movement
Gay movement
Total
NL
1,026(4)
165 (3)
24(3)
1,215(10)
81
84
14
_*
2
100%
Country
G
1,024(4)
113(4)
25(3)
19(3)
1,181 (14)
19
86
10
2
2
100%
F
12(3)
77(4)
31(4)
35(4)
155(15)
3
8
50
20
23
100%
CH
373 (4)
93(4)
16(4)
1(3)
483 (15)
74
77
19
3
0
100%
"In parentheses: number of cases.
*No information.
above all, Greenpeace.18
The Swiss pattern proves to be particularly interesting,
since it implies a diversification of the SMI to a new policy area - transport
policy - which is accompanied by an increase in the division of labor
and horizontal coordination among the SMOs in the sector. Thus, the newly
founded VCS concentrates on transport issues, while the Swiss energy foundation
focuses on energy policy, the small Swiss association for the protection
of the environment on questions such as air pollution, and the WWF as well
as the large, traditional Swiss federation for the protection of nature deal in
the first place with the conservation of the environment. In comparison to
the Swiss pattern, the development of the German and Dutch SMIs appear
to be more fragile, given the competitive attitude Greenpeace has adopted
with regard to the other SMOs in the field.
As I have argued here, early in the mobilization process of a social movement,
its SMOs cannot yet count on a stable resource flow. Instead, they
depend on ad hoc commitments of activists. To the extent that they survive
the vicissitudes of the early phases of the mobilization process and that they
are able to establish a certain reputation for themselves, SMOs are likely to
acquire a stable membership and a continuous financial resource flow. In
other words, we expect that the amount of resources of a given SMO is not
170 Hanspeter Kriesi
Switzerland
.2
400000 "I
300000 "
•- 200000 -
3 100000 -,
year
Netherlands
1000000 1
800000 -
600000 -
400000 -
200000
natuuimonum
milieudefensie
year
1000000 -i
800000-
600000 -
400000 -
200000 -
Germany
so 85 90
year
Figure 7.4. Membership growth of major SMOs of the ecology movement in three
countries.
New social movements in a political context 171
only a function of the political context and the type of SMI it is operating
in, but also a function of its age. For a test of this hypothesis, I distinguish
very roughly between SMOs founded before 1965 - that is, before the first
mobilizations of the NSMs took - and those that have been founded later
on. As the discussion of the patterns of growth of the ecology movement have
already indicated, we have included SMOs of the movements in question that
had been created long before the so-called NSMs were first mobilized. The
fact that these SMOs had already been established when the NSMs first appeared
does not exclude them from being part of the SMIs of the respective
movements. As a matter of fact, many of the classic SMOs have been reinvigorated
by the new waves of mobilization, they have transformed their goals
and action repertoires in accordance with these NSMs, and they have integrated
themselves into the SMIs of these movements. Independently of the
political context of the specific SMI, these classic SMOs can be expected to
have more members and more financial resources than the SMOs that have
been founded by the NSMs themselves.
Table 7.4 shows that, in general, this is, indeed, the case. On the average,
classic SMOs have more members and more financial resources than the
more recently founded SMOs. But there is one exception to this generalization,
which is so important that it reverses the relationship in one of our four
countries, that is, in Germany. The exception concerns Greenpeace. If we
include Greenpeace in the analysis, the more recently founded SMOs in Germany
turn out to be more resourceful than the classic ones. If we exclude
Greenpeace from the analysis, Germany joins the general pattern. Germany
is special in that the enormous mobilization by Greenpeace far exceeds
anything that has previously been known in this country. In a sense, this
exceptional situation confirms our general discussion of the German political
context. As I have argued, political participation has traditionally been low,
which would explain the relatively low level of membership of the classic
SMOs. With the rise in the level of political involvement, especially in the
younger generations, it is the newcomers to the political scene who have been
likely to profit the most. From this perspective, it is also quite telling that the
resource level of the classic German SMOs is close to the French one, which
is extraordinarily low compared to the corresponding levels in the Netherlands
and Switzerland. By contrast, the resource level of the more recent
German SMOs more closely resembles the corresponding levels in the
smaller European countries. This result is in line with the general idea of
Germany becoming a "normal" democracy.
INTERNAL STRUCTURATION
While the political context has been shown to have a strong influence on the
resource level of the SMIs of NSMs, with respect to the internal structuration
172 Hanspeter Kriesi
Table 7.4. Average resource levels by date
SMO Before 1965
offoundation and country"
Date of foundation
After 1965
(including
Greenpeace)
After 1965
(without
Greenpeace)
Average membership (in thousands) per million inhabitants
NL
G
F
CH
Total
5,710(4)
790 (6)
250 (7)
6,310(6)
2,920 (23)
3,530 (17)
1,140(13)
80 (17)
1,680 (26)
1,640 (73)
1,080(16)
411 (12)
80 (16)
1,600 (25)
920 (69)
Average financial resources (in thousand dollars) per million inhabitants
NL
G
F
CH
Total
928 (2)
56(7)
16(6)
827 (6)
348 (21)
142(11)
60 (20)
8(15)
89 (22)
70 (68)
105 (12)
31 (19)
8(14)
69 (21)
50 (64)
Total*
3,940 (21)
1,020 (19)
130(24)
2,550 (32)
1,950(96)
252(13)
58 (27)
10(21)
246 (28)
132 (89)
"Number of cases between parentheses.
^Corresponds to the respective columns in the previous table.
of the SMOs it is likely to be only of indirect significance. As suggested above,
we expect the internal structuration to be mainly driven by the level of available
resources and by the age of the SMO. The older and the more resourceful
an SMO, the more likely it is to formalize, professionalize, and to differentiate
its internal structure. Indirectly, by facilitating or constraining the
amount of resources available to an SMO, the political context may contribute
to the level of its internal structuration. As a first approximation, however,
we may assume the internal structuration to result from internal organizational
dynamics.
I have two indicators of internal structuration at my disposal, one for an
SMO's degree of formalization and one for its degree of professionalization.
Formalization is operationalized by a scale which takes into account whether
an SMO has a legal status, whether it has a formal membership criterion
(possibly based on financial obligations of one kind or another), whether it
has institutionalized formal functions, and, if so, whether it has differentiated
only the most basic functions (president, secretary, and treasurer) or also
some more specialized ones. The resulting scale has a maximum value of 5.
Only a small minority of the SMOs we studied have a structure which is not
New social movements in a political context 173
formalized at all. More than half of them (57%) score on four or all five
points considered. In other words: The overall level of formalization reached
by the SMOs in our sample is quite considerable. It is a far cry from the
decentralized, segmented, and informal organizational networks which have
been said to be typical of NSMs. One should, of course, immediately add
that our sample is not representative of the SMOs of the movements in question,
since we have only considered the most important SMOs in each movement.
Nevertheless, the relatively high level of formalization of these SMOs
indicates that, at their center, the organizational networks of the NSMs have
undergone substantial structural change by the end of the 1980s.
Professionalization is simply measured by the number of paid personnel.
Admittedly, this gives us only an approximation of the actual level of professionalization,
since not all the paid personnel are of a professionalized type.
On the average, the SMOs in our sample have a paid staff of fourteen persons.
The mean does not take into account large differences which exist in
this respect: Roughly one-fourth of the SMOs do not have any paid staff at
all, and about one-half do not have more than four paid staff members. On
the other hand, about 10 percent of the SMOs have fifty paid staff members
or more.
Formalization and professionalization are positively correlated, as are
both of these indicators with the resource level and the age of an SMO. Table
7.5 presents these correlations (excluding Greenpeace). Independently of
type of movement and country, the two parameters of internal structuration
are a positive function of an SMO's age and resources, as we have expected."
But how are they precisely related to age and resources? We already know
that resources are a positive function of age and I have already mentioned
that financial resources are a direct function of a membership. In addition,
it can be shown that the degree of formalization is a direct function of age
and of the size of membership, but not of the level of financial resources. It
is the complexity involved with large numbers of members which exerts pressure
for formalization. Formalization, in turn, can be shown to be a first step
in the direction of professionalization. Moreover, the greater the number of
members and the larger the amount of financial resources available, the
greater the need for professionalization, but also the more important the
means allowing for this step to take place.20
Given that, in absolute terms,
they have a larger number of members and greater financial resources than
their French and Swiss counterparts, the German and Dutch SMOs are more
professionalized. The average number of persons employed varies between
23.5 and 18.2 for Germany and the Netherlands, on the one hand, and 9.2
and 8.6 for France and Switzerland, on the other hand. One may wonder
why the Swiss SMOs are no more professionalized than the French, since
they have considerably more resources at their disposal. The answer may
again have to do with the peculiar political context of Switzerland: The fact
174 Hanspeter Kriesi
Table 7.5. Bivariate correlations between characteristics of organizational
structure (n = 72; without Greenpeace)
1 2 3 4
1 age
2 membership
3financialresources
4 formalization
5 professionalization
-
.42
.33
.35
.32
-
.78
.39
.68
-
.29
.64 .42
that the whole Swiss political system is still today functioning on a militia
basis - another example of the pervasive applicability of the subsidiarity
principle in this country - may account for the relative lack of professionalization
of Swiss SMOs. Still, it should be noted that not all Swiss movements
are unprofessional: The Swiss ecology movement turns out to be highly professionalized.
In all the countries, the differences between the degree of
professionalization of the various movements generally correspond to their
levels of resources. Thus the ecology and solidarity movements are generally
the most professionalized, while the urban autonomous movement and the
peace movement are least professionalized.
EXTERNAL STRUCTURATION
Contrary to the internal structuration, the external structuration is, of course,
a direct function of the political context. I have two indicators at hand for
the analysis of this aspect of the organizational development of SMOs: the
party preference of its membership base, and its alliances with partners outside
of the subsector of the NSMs. With respect to the party preferences of
the membership base, we find that virtually all the SMOs in all four countries
have a membership preferring parties on the political Left. However, in addition
to partisans of left-wing parties, some SMOs also recruit sympathizers
of parties on the political Right. It comes as no surprise that, on the one
hand, these SMOs are most numerous in Switzerland, where 43 percent
of the SMOs also recruit sympathizers of the Right, and that, on the other
hand, there exists not a single SMO recruiting sympathizers of the Right in
France. The strong party-political polarization forces all the participants in
French politics to take sides (Duyvendak 1992), while the less conspicuous
character of the opposition between Left and Right in Switzerland allows for
crossing the fault lines. Germany and the Netherlands lie between the extremes
with 32 percent and 14 percent SMOs respectively that also recruit
partisans from the Right.
New social movements in a political context 175
Table 7.6. Allies outside of the subsector of the NSMs: percentages ofSMOs
maintaining a given type of alliance
Type of alliance
All movements
Left parties as a whole
Social Democrats
Communists
New Left/Greens
Unions
Churches
Authorities
n
NL
38%
25
6
25
25
25
44
(16)
G
67%
67
15
26
37
33
4
(27)
Country
F
68%
21
21
55
37
5
0
(19)
CH
52%
24
14
48
48
38
5
(21)
In three of the four countries, a majority of the SMOs are also allied to
parties on the Left, as is shown by Table 7.6.21
Only two SMOs in our sample
seem to be allied to a party on the Right - one in the Netherlands and one
in Switzerland. Although SMOs of NSMs generally tend to have alliances
with parties of the Left, there are some differences between the countries with
respect to the most preferred alliance partner among the parties of the Left:
While, in Germany, at the end of the 1980s the SPD was clearly the most
likely alliance partner of the SMOs in our sample, in France and in Switzerland
our SMOs preferred alliances with the Greens or with one of the small
parties of the New or "Second" Left, which were founded in the aftermath
of the students' movements of the late 1960s and have always been close to
the cause of NSMs. The Dutch case is ambiguous in this regard. The Communists
are a nonnegligible partner of these SMOs, but nowhere do they
constitute their preferred ally, not even in France. It is tempting to interpret
the differences between Germany, on the one hand, and Switzerland and
France, on the other, by the fact that in Germany, the SPD has been out of
government since the early 1980s, whereas the PS has been the governing
party in France during most of the 1980s and, in Switzerland, it has participated
in the governing coalition ever since 1959. While the SPD looked for a
closer relationship with the NSMs in the course of the 1980s, chose a candidate
for the chancellorship whose position was rather close to that of the
supporters of NSMs, and allied itself with the Greens on the level of several
Lander, the French PS has largely abandoned the NSMs' cause; Duyvendak
(1992) even speaks of betrayal.
176 Hanspeter Kriesi
Table 7.6 also contains some information with respect to three other possible
alliance partners: the unions, the churches, and the authorities. With
respect to unions, I have argued in a previous paper (Kriesi 1991) that highly
encompassing, corporatist union systems - such as the German one - are
not very likely to facilitate the mobilization of NSMs. In addition, I have
suggested that in union systems which are fragmented along party lines and
dominated by a Communist controlled federation - such as the French system,
there is a chance that a minoritarian union might appeal to segments of
the new middle class which tend to be neglected by the dominant federation.
The CFDT in France provides an illustrative example. Finally, I have suggested
that union systems - such as the Dutch and the Swiss systems, which
are fragmented along religious lines, but integrated into policy networks and
pacified, provide the most favorable context from the point of view of NSMs.
Not only has the class struggle been pacified in these countries, but the fragmentation
of the union system makes for competition among unions, from
which NSMs stand to profit. The present results do not allow any confirmation
of these hypotheses, since there are no significant differences in the extent
of support received by the NSM subsectors in the four countries. In all
four cases, union support is substantial. A more detailed analysis shows that
union support in all four countries primarily goes to SMOs of the peace and
the solidarity movement, that is, to the two movements that have typically
been most politicized by the Left: 38 percent of the SMOs of the peace movement
and 61 percent of those of the solidarity movement have been supported
by unions. Germany is the only country where also some SMOs of
the ecology movement receive union support.
The peace movement and the solidarity movement are also the only ones
that receive church support in all countries except France: overall, 25 percent
of the SMOs of the peace movement and 49 percent of those of the solidarity
movement have received support from churches. It is, of course, well known
that churches are involved in these two movements. But it comes as a surprise
to me that churches in France do not seem to share this involvement. The
question is, whether this apparent absence of the churches from the two
French movements is also a consequence of the strong politicization of these
two movements in terms of the polarization between Left and Right.
Finally, the Netherlands turn out to be exceptional with respect to the large
share of their SMOs which count the authorities among their allies. Almost
half of the Dutch SMOs of our sample seem to be allied to some authorities,
while there are no such ties in France and only one case each in the two other
countries. If we analyze in more detail, we note that it is above all in the
Dutch ecology movement, where these ties are frequent: All of the SMOs of
this movement maintain alliances with authorities! This is the result, on the
one hand, of the "new realism" adopted by the Dutch ecology movement in
the course of the eighties (Cramer 1989), but, on the other hand, it also re-
New social movements in a political context 177
fleets the strategy of "informal cooptation" so typical for the Dutch author-
ities.
The diversification of alliance relationships may prove to be crucial for an
SMO. This point is illustrated by a Swiss organization of the solidarity movement
that mobilized for the solidarity with immigrant laborers in Switzerland
(Cattacin and Passy 1992). It received substantial financial support from the
major union of construction workers, a larger majority of whose members
are immigrants from Southern Europe. The SMO defended the cause of the
union in the delicate political issue of the statute for seasonal workers,
allowing the union to keep a low profile without losing face. When this issue
lost its political explosiveness, the union also lost interest in the SMO and
stopped its support, which left the SMO with insufficient resources for survival.
The number of external allies may serve as a rough indicator of an
SMO's diversification of its external relations.22
According to this indicator,
the Swiss SMOs generally have a more diversified network of alliances than
the SMOs in the other countries. Controlling for the impact of the political
context, SMOs from instrumental movements have more diversified networks
than the sub- and countercultural ones, with the networks of the
SMOs from the peace and solidarity movements being most diversified.
TRANSFORMATION OF GOALS AND ACTION REPERTOIRES
Goal transformation is difficult to capture by the kind of structural data I
have at my disposal. However, indirectly, by analyzing the sources of revenue
of an SMO, it is possible to get some limited idea of the direction of goal
transformation. We have asked questions about the shares of an organization's
revenue coming from membership contributions, public subsidies, allies
and other sources. The lower the share of membership contributions to an
organization's budget, the more autonomous it is with respect to its members
and the greater the likelihood that goals which are not of immediate concern
to its members are playing an important role in the considerations of the
organization's dominant coalition. The overall distribution of an SMO's revenue
over the four sources of income gives an idea of the degree to which its
resource base is diversified and of its degree of autonomy with respect to any
specific type of environment. The share of public subsidies in particular not
only indicates the extent to which an SMO is integrated into established systems
of interest intermediation, but also serves as an indicator of a certain
pragmatism in terms of its goal orientation.23
As is shown by Table 7.7, there are important country-specific differences
with regard to the sources of revenue. Swiss SMOs turn out to be more dependent
on their membership than the SMOs in the other three countries.24
This
means that the Swiss subsector which has the most diversified network of
alliances is at the same time the one most reliant on its own devices - a result
178 Hanspeter Kriesi
Table 7.7.
Country
NL
G
F
CH"
Movement
Ecology
Solidarity
Peace
Gay
Autonomous
Grand mean
Sources of revenue
Membership
55%
60
61
81
55
56
68
60
94
63%
of SMOs (average shares of total revenue)
Subsidies
22%
16
9
5
23
12
2
14
5
13%
Allies
7%
14
8
1
5
16
21
4
0
8%
Other
sources
16%
9
22
13
17
16
9
22
0
16%
(16)
(23)
(25)
(12)
(22)
(18)
(9)
(13)
(2)
(78)
"Information on some SMOs of the solidarity movement only.
^Excluding the Swiss SMOs.
which perfectly reflects the specificity of the Swiss political context: It is a
context which allows for extensive consultation and political concertation,
but which also puts a prime on self-reliance and self-organization following
the principle of subsidiarity (see Kriesi 1980). The Dutch context, by contrast,
not only favors mutual concertation, but it tends to lend a helping hand
as well. The ecology, solidarity, and the gay movements all receive important
subsidies in the Netherlands. This difference is illustrated by the sources of
income of the Dutch Nicaragua Committee and the corresponding Swiss
Committee for Central America: while the former is 60 percent subsidized
by public authorities, the latter depends 90 percent on its membership and
10 percent on "other" sources. Pursuing this example one step further, we
may note that the French Nicaragua Committee gets 50 percent of its revenue
from its membership and 50 percent from "other sources" - "other sources"
which are generally more important in France than elsewhere - compensating
for the lack of membership and government support in this country.
Public subsidies are most prominent for the ecology movement and the gay
movement, which have received such support not only in the Netherlands,
but also in the other countries. Thus 45 percent of the budget of the German
BBU - the peak association of the citizens' action groups for environmental
New social movements in a political context 179
protection - is covered by public subsidies, as are roughly one-third of the
budgets of the French Amis de la Terre and of the FFSPN - the French
professional peak association for environmental protection. If, in Switzerland,
public support is still not forthcoming for the ecology movement, it has
become important with respect to the gay movement in this country, too,
as a consequence of the AIDS crisis. Everywhere, the governments are now
collaborating with the subcultural SMOs that serve as intermediaries with
respect to a population at risk to which the authorities have little access
otherwise. The AIDS crisis provides an example of "suddenly imposed grievances"
which restructure the external relations of an SMI and transform its
goal orientations in a dramatic fashion, irrespective of the political context.
Financial support from allies is most likely for SMOs of the peace movement
(in France), and for those of the solidarity movement (in the Netherlands
and Germany). In France, the major SMOs of the peace movement are
either allied to the Communist Party - such as the Mouvement de la Paix
and the Appel des Cent, or to the New Left (the "Second Left") - such as
CODENE (the committee for nuclear disarmament in Europe). They receive
between 40 percent and 50 percent of their revenue from these allies. Needless
to say that such support comes with strings attached. It illustrates once
again the general point made about the politicization of the French peace
movement in particular.
Turning now to the transformation of the action repertoires, we should first
note that there are country-specific differences of action repertoires which
correspond to what we would have expected on the basis of the differences
in the political contexts (Kriesi et al. 1992): The French movements tend to
be most radical; that is, they use unconventional and even violent forms of
action more frequently than the movements in the other countries. The Swiss
movements tend to be most moderate, given their frequent use of conventional
channels of articulation of protest, while, overall, the action repertoires
of Dutch and German movements tend to be of an intermediary degree of
radicality.25
In addition to these systematic overall differences, we also find
important differences with respect to the transformation of the action repertoires
over time which are related to differences in the corresponding political
contexts. I would like to illustrate this point by studying more closely the
development of the action repertoire of the ecology movement in particular.
Figure 7.5 presents the development of the yearly percentages of unconventional
events, smoothed over adjacent periods of three years for the ecology
movement in each one of the four countries.26
For France, we note that the
percentage of unconventional events increases during the period 1975-1989.
This indicates that the French ecology movement, which was already the
most radical at the beginning of the period, radicalized even more throughout
the 1980s. This development is in stark contrast with the strongly increasing
conventionalization of the Dutch and the German branches. At the end
180 Hanspeter Kriesi
100 -\
80 -
60 -
40 -
20 -
7 5 80 8 5 90
year
Figure 7.5. Development of the action repertoire of the ecology movement in the
four countries.
of the 1970s, the action repertoires of both the German and the Dutch movements
were about as radical as that of their French colleagues as a result of
their radicalization in the course of the conflict about nuclear energy. Since
the early 1980s, however, the repertoires of the German and Dutch movements
have become more conventional, developing in the direction of the
very conventional Swiss movement. These differences reflect the inverse
changes in the configuration of power in France and Germany: Although the
ecology movement lost its strongest ally, when the PS came to power in
France in 1981, it gained an ally in Germany with the SPD losing power in
1982. In the case of the Netherlands, the conventionalization rather reflects
the "new realism" of the ecology movement which came to dominate it after
the defeat of its antinuclear energy branch in the early 1980s. However, not
all the new social movements in a given country follow the same pattern of
transformation of their action repertoire. There are differences in this respect
between the various movements within a given country, which can, at least
in part, be explained by movement-specific differences in political opportunities
within one and the same country. This is illustrated by a comparison
of the French ecology and solidarity movements (Figure 7.6). While the
French ecology movement radicalized in the eighties, the French solidarity
movement, which was also quite radical at the beginning of the eighties,
deradicalized as it received increasing support from the governing PS.
It is possible to refine the analysis of the transformation of the action repertoire
of the ecology movement somewhat further by looking more specifically
at the organizations responsible for the various types of protest events.
Even if not all events of a given movement are produced by its own SMOs,
the general trend of the action repertoire of the movement as a whole is likely
New social movements in a political context 181
a
a>
, * •
u
c
0
at
s0
us
sS
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
ecology
solidarity
80 85 9 0
Figure 7.6. Development of the action repertoire of the French ecology and solidarity
movements.
to bear the marks of the development of its organizational base, and, in turn,
is bound to have repercussions on it.27
For this analysis, I introduce a distinction
between the most important, relatively professional SMOs - that is, between
the most developed part of the SMI of the ecology movement and
organizationally less developed, more informal citizens' action groups.28
Given the assumption that the large professional SMOs typically have a more
moderate action repertoire than the latter groups, the development of the
action repertoire of a given movement may be the result of a transformation
of the action repertoire of each one of the two types of organizations or of a
shift of the initiative from the one type to the other. Figure 7.7 allows a
separation of these two effects for three of the four countries under study.29
It shows the development of the total number of events and of the number
of unconventional events for both professional SMOs and citizens' action
groups for Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands. In other words, it
not only shows trends (as the previous two figures) but it also gives an idea
of the level of mobilization by the different types of SMOs. As we can see, in
all three countries, the citizens' action groups have demobilized to a considerable
extent toward the end of the 1980s. This demobilization has contributed
to the deradicalization of the movements in Germany and the Netherlands,
but not in Switzerland, since the Swiss citizens' action groups have always
been rather conventional and since they have above all reduced the conventional
part of their activities. In Germany and Switzerland, the demobilization
of citizens' action groups was accompanied by a parallel increase of the
protest activities of the professional SMOs. As far as the latter are concerned,
their mobilization was almost exclusively conventional in Switzerland, some-
83
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New social movements in a political context 183
what more radical in Germany. In the Netherlands, finally, the initiative
did not go over to the professional SMOs. With the demobilization of the
citizens' action groups, the whole movement seemed to demobilize. This
difference between Germany and Switzerland, on the one hand, and the
Netherlands, on the other hand, may be interpreted in the light of an earlier
result: As we have seen, the Dutch ecology movement has been integrated
into established systems of interest intermediation; it is recognized and subsidized
by the authorities to an extent which is as yet unknown in Switzerland.
In other words, the Dutch professional SMOs no longer need to mobilize
at all, in order to introduce their points of view into the political process
and to get things done. In Switzerland and Germany, the movement has also
gained more access to the system, which is reflected in the conventionalization
of its action repertoire. But even the professional SMOs still rely on
(mainly conventional) mobilization of protest in order to get things done. If
the ecology movement as a whole is by far the most institutionalized movement
among the five compared, the SMOs of the Dutch ecology movement
seem to have traveled farthest in the direction of becoming established interest
groups.30
CONCLUSION
In this essay I have analyzed the internal and external determinants of the
organizational development of NSMs, putting most emphasis on the impact
of the political context without, however, focusing exclusively on political
factors. If the general political setting and the configuration of power in the
political system are important for the development of the organizational infrastructure
of NSMs, they are not the only factors of some relevance. First,
this analysis has confirmed the idea that the internal structuration mainly
follows internal organizational dynamics. Moreover, it has also indicated that
there exist important differences between the organizational development of
different movements, which are independent of the political context. Thus,
the ecology movement is typically the most richly endowed, whereas the
peace movement, the gay movement, and the urban autonomous movement
have generally only few resources. We have also found movement-specific
differences of external support: in general, the peace and solidarity movements
are strongly supported by the Left - including unions - and by
churches, whereas the gay movement, as a result of the AIDS crisis, receives
public aid in all the countries. In addition, as we have expected, the different
types of movements typically undergo different forms of transformation:
although our indicators are far from optimal, they support the hypothesis
that subcultural movements tend to commercialize or to follow the path of
involution, while instrumental movements tend to institutionalize. Among
the latter, the solidarity and peace movements typically have more difficulties
184 Hanspeter Kriesi
stabilizing than the ecology movement, given their particular problem structure,
which makes them susceptible to conjunctural variations in public attention
cycles and party politics. The ecology movements have typically gone
farthest in the direction of institutionalization as an interest group.
There are exceptions to these general patterns - exceptions which can be
accounted for by country-specific variations in the political context. Thus,
the particular weakness and the low level of institutionalization of the ecology
movement as well as the comparative strength of the solidarity movement
in France have been related to the specific strategies of the socialist
government. The unexpectedly weak professionalization of Swiss SMOs
made sense, if interpreted in terms of the prevalence of the militia system in
Swiss politics, and the unexpected impact of an SMO's age on its resource
level in the case of Germany could be interpreted in the light of the distant
relationship that traditionally existed between the state and society in that
country. But the political context is not only relevant for the explanation of
deviant cases with respect to movement-specific patterns. Its impact on resource
levels, external structuration, and the transformation of goal orientations
and action repertoires has been shown to be pervasive and systematic.
Thus, the French SMOs are generally weak, most radical, and most strongly
politicized by their partisan environment. By contrast, the SMOs in the two
smaller European democracies have a comparatively large membership, are
relatively well endowed with resources, relatively well integrated into established
systems of interest intermediation and comparatively moderate. The
Dutch SMOs not only have the highest resource levels (in absolute terms),
but they also have the most elaborate relations with authorities. The Swiss
SMOs are different from the Dutch to the extent that they have the most
diversified alliances and political recruitment patterns, but receive hardly any
support from authorities. German SMOs finally take an intermediary position
with respect to most aspects of the organizational development we have
been discussing here. These results generally confirm the relevance of the
political context for the mobilization of NSMs as well as the specific hypotheses
that have been formulated with regard to context-specific differences in
the organizational development of these movements.