Contentious politics refers to the use of political strategies and tactics that are aimed at achieving social and political change through confrontational and often disruptive means. These strategies can include protests, civil disobedience, strikes, boycotts, and other forms of collective action that challenge the status quo and demand attention to a particular issue or cause.
Contentious politics can take many different forms and can be driven by a wide range of motivations. For example, individuals or groups may engage in contentious politics as a way to advocate for social justice, civil rights, human rights, or environmental protection. These actions are often motivated by a sense of outrage or injustice, and may be directed at governments, corporations, or other institutions that are perceived as perpetuating or enabling such injustices.
Contentious politics can also be motivated by more narrowly defined interests, such as labor unions seeking to improve wages and working conditions for their members, or advocacy groups working to protect the rights of a particular minority group. In these cases, the goal of contentious politics is often to pressure decision-makers to address specific grievances or to enact specific policy changes.
While contentious politics can be a powerful tool for achieving social and political change, it can also be controversial and divisive. These actions often involve breaking laws or violating social norms, and may be met with resistance or backlash from those who disagree with the goals or tactics being employed. Additionally, contentious politics can be disruptive and may cause conflict or violence, which can further polarize society and hinder progress.
Overall, contentious politics is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that reflects the ongoing struggle for social and political change in democratic societies. While it can be a powerful force for bringing about positive change, it can also be controversial and divisive, and its effects and consequences must be carefully considered.
contentious politics definition
But in focusing on the public politics of contention, the new method ignored private forms of contention, such as the emotions in contentious politics, the construction of new collective actors e. Contentious politics, in the context of political science, means episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claims and their objects when: 1 at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the claims, and 2 the claims would, if realized, affect the interests of at least one of the claimants or objects of claims. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Scholars enumerate and analyze the number of events, numbers and composition of participants, their targets and degree of violence, and the kinds of performances they involve.
Contentious_politics : definition of Contentious_politics and synonyms of Contentious_politics (English)
We also welcome summaries of the state of knowledge on particular issues in contentious politics, explicitly theoretical work on how the politics of protest works in different settings, including different countries and regions of the world, as well as methodological advances that offer useful direction on how to study political contention. This does not imply that all forms of contention conform to a single general model. Suzanne Staggenborg is Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. Contention, of course, occurs both inside and outside of public politics, but political contention involves government, however peripherally, and thereby increases the likelihood of intervening coercive agents such as police and, on the average, increases the stakes of the outcome.
Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 1990. Alternatives To Structuralism In the 1980s, two alternative models began to challenge the hegemony of structuralism: a culturist model, which focused on emotions, cognition, discourse, and the construction of collective action; and a rationalist model focusing on the dispositional microfoundations of collective action. Building on the earlier insights of Mancur Olson in 1965, rationalists observed that rational people might very well avoid taking action when they see that others are willing to act on their behalf. We publish pieces of 20,000-30,000 words that allow in-depth yet concise treatment of an issue or case. Our focus is on political engagement, disruption, and collective action that extends beyond the boundaries of conventional institutional politics. Fearon and David D. Social movements, revolutionary campaigns, organized reform efforts, and more or less spontaneous uprisings are the important and interesting developments that animate contemporary politics; we welcome studies and analyses that promote better understanding and dialogue.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Processes can be either combinations of simultaneously developing mechanisms or regularly linked sequences of mechanisms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Coalitions and Political Movements:The Lessons of the Nuclear Freeze. By the turn of the century, the culturalist approach had developed into a wholesale critique of structuralism. New Social Movements in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis. Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State: A Comparative Analysis of Italy and Germany.
Indigenous unrest and the contentious politics of social assistance in Mexico
Our results show that high ethnic disparity in social assistance is not only due to higher poverty rates among the indigenous population. He has written extensively on social movements and public policy, mostly in the United States, and is a winner of the John D. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, 2nd ed. . In its extreme manifestations, it invited caricature by regarding collective action as the result of anomie, alienation, and even psychological disorder. When large-scale lethal contention is compared with social movements, similar mechanisms and processes emerge: environmental mechanisms, such as resource extraction or depletion; dispositional mechanisms, such as the hardening of boundaries between ethnic groups that formally lived together; and relational mechanisms, such as the brokerage of new connections between previously unconnected or weakly connected sites. The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements.
Some combinations of mechanisms are fortuitous or idiosyncratic, but others combine regularly in robust processes that can be observed in a wide variety of contentious episodes. Repertoires represent not only how people make claims, but also what they know about making claims and their reception by targets of their claims. For example, Tilly argues that the nature of contentious politics changed fairly dramatically with the birth of social movements in 18th-century Europe. The series is committed to discussion across a range of disciplines and to methodological pluralism. These results yield substantive support in arguing that the Mexican government uses social assistance to contain indigenous unrest.
Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Historical sociologist Charles Tilly defines contentious politics as "interactions in which actors make claims bearing on someone else's interest, in which governments appear either as targets, initiators of claims, or third parties. Considering the forms of contention in the same framework helps to understand three important properties of contentious politics: 1 the rapid formation and transformation of different forms of contention; 2 the interactions between actors that form across institutional boundaries; and most important, 3 the common mechanisms and processes that underlie and drive contentious politics. Until the late 1960s, the so-called collective behavior approach had dominated American studies of social movements. These were the major starting points for new approaches in the 1980s and 1990s. The term public excludes claim making that occurs entirely within well-bounded organizations, including churches and firms.
Contentious Politics Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire
Movements And Institutions In relating contentious politics to institutions, an earlier research tradition saw all political contention aimed against institutions. New York: Free Press, 1962. The case of Mexico shows that social assistance programs are disproportionately directed to indigenous populations, leading to diminished protest participation. What remained obscure in both culturalism and rationalism were the specific links between individuals and their opposite numbers, significant third parties, and institutions. Repertoires Of Contention The development of the political process approach was accompanied by systematic attention to the repertoire of contention—the sets of performances that people habitually use in mounting contention.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930—1970, 2nd ed. To solve this free-rider problem, rationalist-oriented scholars focused on the micro foundations of collective action, on movement organizations, and on the social networks that underlie collective action. Structural Approaches Structuralism took two forms: classical microstructural models descended from Marx, in which major societal changes directly produce shifts in contention; and models of political structure focusing on the opportunities and threats, along with the facilitation and repression induced by political institutions and regimes. Important dispositional mechanisms include the attribution of similarity e. .
