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This chapter examines grassroots activism in the Liberal Democrat Party. The results suggest that party activism can be explained by a combination of the individual’s psychological engagement with both politics and the party, together with their judgements about the costs and benefits of political engagement. Resources play a role in this, but it appears that incentives, and the choices associated with them, are particularly important in influencing the individual’s decision to be active.

Analysis of 579 environmental protest events in Greece, reported in Eleftherotypia during 1988–97, showed an uneven decline of protest during the decade, an overrepresentation of urban environmental claims, and the prominence of nature conservation, pollution, urban, and industrial claims made by both formal and informal environmental groups. Claims involving the health effects of environmental degradation declined, due to a steeper reduction in the reported incidence of grassroots environmental activism. In general, there was limited variation in the tactics used, with conventional protest predominating, followed by confrontation and demonstrations, and rarely by violence. Community activists tended to opt more often for confrontational or violent actions than did formal NGOs. The observed patterns are influenced by the changing political and economic opportunity structure associated with economic liberalization, the pattern of newspaper coverage, and the organization of social space.

This chapter shows how structural processes, policies, and national trends intersected with the particular history, geography, and reputation of the Boston area to produce the set of juxtapositions—between history and progress, tradition and technology, open-mindedness and exclusivity, meritocracy and equality—that characterized the physical landscape and political culture of the Route 128 suburbs and the political ideology of many of their residents. It reveals that homeowners' view of themselves in rural Lincoln and cosmopolitan Newton fueled grassroots activism on a range of liberal issues. This sense of individual and collective distinctiveness simultaneously made many residents see themselves as separate from, and not responsible for, many of the consequences of suburban growth and the forms of inequality and segregation that suburban development fortified.

This chapter examines how a new populism took root in small towns. In particular, it considers the ways that residents of small towns show antipathy toward big government, such as concerns about the scale of big bureaucracy, its inability to adapt to the norms and practices of small towns in which people know one another, and government's unresponsiveness to the needs of small communities in comparison with its attentiveness to problems in cities. The chapter first provides an overview of small-town politics before explaining how antipathy toward government is further reinforced by negative opinions about people on welfare. It also discusses the reasons for the popularity of Republicans in small towns and concludes by assessing the possibilities present in small towns for grassroots activism.

How can the jury—or something like it—increase its standing within criminal justice? The American Bar Association and other organizations concerned about the jury’s decline have urged a “more active jury” with measures like jury note taking and questions for witnesses. Academic supporters endorse these reforms but overlook the possibility of broader institutional change. By contrast, grassroots activists advocating the “fully informed juror” seek to redress power imbalances within the courtroom through nullification. This chapter argues that both movements needlessly accept a dichotomy between lay and professional judgment; each favoring a different side, neither conceive co-responsibility for criminal justice. It suggests two institutional changes instead. First, carefully crafted jury sentencing authority—accepted practice for capital cases, for some components of civil cases, and in a handful of states for noncapital cases—can transparently rather than covertly empower laypeople in the court and may also moderate citizen influence on sentencing. Second, limits on plea bargaining should be considered. While plea bargaining is often justified by reasons of efficiency and cost, the penal state has its own inefficiencies and high economic and social costs that can be fully comprehended by the public only via greater participation in the criminal justice process.

This chapter focuses on the Tea Party movement's mobilization of grassroots activism since 2009 to demonstrate how populist mobilization builds from public sentiments of inequality and democratic deficits in the political system. In particular, it highlights the tension between grassroots mobilizations animated by democratic rhetoric and their potentially less democratic claims on policy. The chapter first considers the history of social movements before situating the Tea Party and its right-wing populism within social movement theory, along with inconsistencies/disagreements within the Tea Party. It then explores political opportunity theory in order to elucidate how the Tea Party's claims, tactics, and trajectory are affected by the world outside the movement, with particular emphasis on formal politics. It also discusses the Tea Party's resource mobilization and concludes by explaining how inequality allowed for new mobilization opportunities in the movement's case despite their largely undemocratic nature.

On March 1, 1969, a riot broke out following the Chinese New Year Festival. Grant Avenue consisted mainly of white tourists and various Chinatown gangs. Although there was a confrontation earlier in the day at the festival street fair, the first real fights started around 10:30 P.M., and took place between Chinese American male youths and their white counterparts. Through an examination of the “sideshows” in the ethnic festival and an analysis of the defiance of authority among Chinese American youth, this chapter illuminates not only grassroots activism within the ethnic community, but also minority youth resistance within the larger American society. It investigates the conflicts between the image promoted by festival organizers and the militant yellow power deployed by a number of youth groups. The chapter examines the militant masculinity manifested by male and female gang members, radicals, and student activists who chose to use violence and political demonstrations to protest racial, gender, and class oppression. Their actions changed the dominant racial discourse, which now categorized Chinese Americans as a “New Yellow Peril” in addition to model minorities.

This introductory chapter discusses how the police and white dailies in New York City invariably incriminated the black community; thus, culminating in black's migration to Harlem—a large neighborhood within the northern section of the New York City borough of Manhattan. In relation to this case, black grassroots activism around local issues challenged various manifestations of racial injustice and raised the racial and political consciousness of the black community. While blacks agreed with the claim that Harlem belonged to them, they often disagreed about whose vision of Harlem should take precedence in ways that contributed to intraracial conflict as well as racial solidarity.

Smith, a sociologist, contends that the politicization of “place” deserves serious attention, and she contests the common view, especially on the Left, that local, place-based politics is inadequate, futile, and reactionary for confronting globalization. Highlighting exemplary grassroots strategies in Appalachia that she describes as “making space,” “crossing space,” and “transgressing space,” she points toward potentially effective forms of locally based global politics of place that challenge the neoliberal privatization of common places and resources described, in her words, as analogous to prison “lockdowns.”

The Introduction provides an overview of the book’s arguments, methodology, and archive. During the 1970s, in prisons and in the “free world” outside their walls, radical women forged an organized resistance to the gendered and racialized violence of the U.S. carceral state. All Our Trials traces the making of this anticarceral feminism at the intersections of struggles for racial and economic justice, prisoners’ and psychiatric patients’ rights, and gender and sexual liberation. Drawing on extensive archival research and first-person narratives, the book explores the organizing, ideas, and influence of activists who placed criminalized and marginalized women at the center of their antiviolence mobilizations.

This chapter offers both theoretical and pragmatic contextualization as activist narrators describe the diverse ways they conceive of and negotiate narrative frames and strategies toward the goal of immigration reform. The chapter chronicles the public work of undocumented immigrants who use their own stories as persuasive evidence that immigrants deserve a path to citizenship, and the narrators discuss the power and limitations of different immigrant rights strategies. I illuminate the strategies the narrators describe by way of textual analysis of some exemplars of each, demonstrate the ways members of the movement have lobbied for necessary shifts in the framing of their messages, and explore how these negotiations are promoted and implemented in grassroots activism. The resulting work reveals the power of storytelling in public media and the centrality of strategic communication to social movements.

This chapter traces the history of the early paths of engaged scholarship blazed by progressive labor economists who, at some professional risk, gave birth to labor history as a serious field of inquiry and by the subsequent pioneering work of two labor historians and activists: E. P. Thompson and David Montgomery. Thompson and Montgomery not only reshaped the academic field but influenced subsequent generations of engaged scholars. Of particular importance were Thompson's and Montgomery's experiences outside of academia, notably in labor and left political circles. The chapter points out that the generation of labor historians following Thompson and Montgomery shared their attention to class, their affinity for grassroots activism, and their advocacy for participatory democracy. At the same time, the succeeding generations of scholars, responding to changed political and intellectual contexts, have pursued new forms of engagement.

This chapter examines Japan's nuclear policy after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, with particular emphasis on the fifty-year history of the interplay between top-down directives and grassroots activism. It begins with a discussion of the Japanese population's development of a social condition known as kaku arerugi, or nuclear allergy, along with Japan's top-down policy. It argues that the triple disaster of 3/11 may topple the pronuclear iron triangle of government officials, local politicians, and business interests. It considers how citizens are taking scientific measurements, organizing large-scale protests, and articulating new energy and health priorities in the wake of the crisis. It also tackles two questions that remain unanswered: first, whether Japanese people and businesses are willing to bear the costs and suffer the externalities of nonnuclear energy sources in the future, and second, whether these alternative sources of energy will result in less harm to the environment.

This chapter sets out the grassroots activism of a group of four young people aged 24 to 29 who were seeking asylum in the UK during the hostile environment. Moving away from normative definitions of political participation as the formal activities of citizens, the work drew upon second wave feminist and Classical Marxist understandings of collective action. The chapter argues that by ‘speaking bitterness’ and creating ‘language from below’ in order to craft a play to dramaturgically depict their lived realities, the young people formed collective action and did politics ‘differently’. They engaged in biographically-meaningful, ‘personal-political’ and ‘political-personal’ activism that focused on the particular needs of their wider group. They also made ‘democracy anew’ by practicing democracy informally and in alternative, co-equal, meaningful and purposeful ways, within a hostile environment that ‘others’ them and alienates them from political and social participation.

This chapter presents Aoki’s return to grassroots activism. The twentieth and thirtieth anniversaries of the Third World strike and the launching of BPP commemorations, the growing social movements of the 1990s, and his own retirement in the late 1990s, facilitated his return to grassroots activism. Aoki as a social worker, sociologist, and radical continued to see a need for the far-reaching transformation of social structures. After 9/11, he was energized by the possibilities presented to him to engage in activist work no longer “too reformist” for his political proclivities. Aoki continued his Marxist analysis of war and imperialism but his experiences in the intervening two and a half decades left him with a more flexible approach to social change.

Chapter 11, “Podemos: A Hybrid Party?” traces the evolution of Podemos from its inception through its two constituent assemblies to address the question of whether movement and party logics can ever be reconciled. This chapter provides an analysis of the tensions and contradictions of hybrid parties. Hybrid or movement parties—initially at least—need to satisfy and maintain legitimacy with their movement base, which in the case of Podemos is 15-M. Since its inception, Podemos has struggled to satisfy the expectations of its activist base and to strike a balance between (horizontal) movement and (vertical) party, a challenge all the more difficult given the 15-M movement’s commitment to participatory democracy. The chapter explores the central tension between movement and party by analyzing internal and 15-M movement critiques of the party and the challenges it faces in trying to maintain the support of its activist grassroots base.