Abstract
In the run-up to the 2003 U.S. war in Iraq and during the next few years, there was an outpouring of protest in the United States. The U.S. military is still at war in the Middle East, but protests have long since dissipated. What accounts for this?
Michael T. Heaney and Fabio Rojas’s Partyin the Street argues that this decline in protest poses both empirical and theoretical puzzles. The continuation of war in Iraq and Afghanistan without protest defies historical precedent. When Richard Nixon replaced Lyndon Johnson in 1969, anti-Vietnam War protest did not at all slow down. The recent decline of protest also confounds the political opportunity model of social movements, which expects movements to be spurred when their allies are in power and to decline when they are not. In the U.S. setting, Democrats are typically considered allies of left-wing movements and Republicans allies of right-wing ones. Yet antiwar mobilization was spurred by Republican regimes and depressed by Democratic ones.
The authors see the solution to the puzzles in the identities of the protesters. The antiwar protesters were not just against the war, but were also Democratic partisans who opposed many policies of the George W. Bush administration and supported others championed by Democrats. Once the Democratic party captured Congress in the 2006 midterm elections and especially once the antiwar and progressive Democrat Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, the movement stopped protesting—even as war dragged on. Party in the Street is innovative in addressing a question mainly neglected by social movement scholars: why movements decline.
More important, the book focuses on the relationships between movements and political parties, which is something of a no-man’s-land in scholarship. Sociologists tend to address movements, while political scientists address parties. But scholars have been increasingly paying attention to the connections between movements and parties (Goldstone 2003; Amenta 2006; McAdam and Tarrow 2010). And so this book is a timely collaboration between a political scientist (Heaney) and a sociologist (Rojas) who are able to break through the usual disciplinary walls to produce an extremely valuable contribution that will be of interest to scholars in both disciplines.
Party in the Street’s main analytical advance is tipped off by the title. Here Heaney and Rojas augment V. O. Key’s (1942) three-part model of political parties. The party organization includes official national and subnational party organizations. The party in the electorate comprises those citizens affiliated or identifying with the party and participants in its primaries. The party in the government includes its elected officials. The party in the street addresses the overlap between a party and movements linked to it. For instance, the labor movement and the civil rights movement have been closely affiliated with the Democratic party and have worked for it in elections, whereas the Christian right and the Tea Party have functioned similarly for the Republican party. Movement organizations and individual activists affiliated with a party constitute the party in the street.
Another advance comes in theory. To explain the decline of protests, the authors apply intersectionality theory to politics, drawing on arguments about cognitive dissonance and contrasting their claims with ones involving crosscutting cleavages. They also incorporate recent research about the impact of partisanship on perception. In brief, they argue that political actors have multiple identities and that during times of conflict partisan identities tend to trump movement ones, given that movement identities tend to be more marginal, in their view. Collective identity explains movement trajectories and individual characteristics explain macro results, with organizations viewed like individuals. In the case of the antiwar movement, activists mistakenly conflated partisan success with policy success and then demobilized.
But the greatest contribution of the book comes in its prodigious empirical analyses. The authors collect new and relevant data ranging from surveys of thousands of protestors to detailed estimates of all protest, from comprehensive information on organizations and coalitions calling for protests to the sponsorship of all antiwar legislation before Congress. These data are used to test a range of hypotheses about movements and partisanship with rigorous regression and network analyses. The individual treatments are compelling, and Heaney and Rojas raise the bar very high for research on protest and its connection to institutional politics.
Much of the evidence in Party in the Street was published previously in article form, and the research is so extensive it is difficult to do it justice even in a long review. The authors demonstrate conclusively that protest declined after the Democrats took over Congress in 2007 and even further after Obama occupied the White House in 2009. The authors wisely address the size of protests rather than simply counting protest events and dodge standard problems with these data by analyzing protests in orders of magnitude. They then test several hypotheses with extensive survey data cleverly collected from two waves of protests: one in 2004 and 2005 during the years of Bush and Republican dominance, and a second from 2007 to 2010, after Democrats had taken Congress and then the White House. These are compared with surveys of Social Forum protests and of delegates to the 2008 Democratic convention. The results indicate that protesters’ Democratic identities influenced their susceptibility to frames, participation in antiwar activities, and views about how war was being prosecuted.
Two other sets of analyses focus on movement and public-interest advocacy organizations that opposed the war and the antiwar efforts of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Heaney and Rojas demonstrate that many of these organizations have partisan identities. Democratic identities drew thousands of protestors into anti-Iraq war mobilizations during the Republican-dominant years but also contributed to their abandoning these efforts once Obama was elected. Coalitions that broadened during the run-up to the Iraq war and its first years narrowed after 2008. As for antiwar resolutions in Congress, Democrats supported them more frequently than Republicans, but the partisan composition of Congress and the Oval Office also strongly influenced support, as Heaney and Rojas hypothesize; Democrats in Congress relied on them when Bush was president and Republicans when Obama took office. Also, however, Democratic measures became more substantive and less symbolic when Democrats gained power in Congress.
The authors conclude by comparing the antiwar movement with the Tea Party and Occupy, arguing that the Republican-partisan Tea Party has strong similarities to the antiwar movement in its movement-party linkages, whereas the anti-partisan Occupy did not. This chapter is not some broad comparison, however, but is based on extensive research including surveys at rallies and is better researched than some books on these subjects. On top of all that, Heaney has taken many telling photographs documenting the protests. It is an impressive achievement that is in no way diminished by what I am saying next.
Although the book proceeds in a coherent manner from protesters to organizations to congressional activity to comparisons across movements, I think the book’s origins in articles testing individual hypotheses and its focus on the micro determinants of movements leads it to miss some key big-picture issues. Specifically, I question the authors’ explanation for the contrast between the decline of the recent antiwar movement and the expansion of the anti-Vietnam War movement, the analytical conflation of antiwar protest and antiwar movements, and their empirical conflation of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These issues are also tied to the authors’ decision not to seek explanations for the antiwar movement’s rise or its consequences, which they claim are trivial. The long U.S. tradition of antiwar activism ensured a strong antiwar movement, they argue, and the fact that antiwar movements must confront an enormous national security apparatus makes them always unlikely to be influential.
The authors attribute the contrast between the vigor of the anti-Vietnam War movement during the post-Johnson (Nixon) years and the weakness of the antiwar movement during the post-Bush (Obama) era to the less intense partisanship of the earlier period. It is true that U.S. politics in the late 1960s featured many conservative southern Democrats and moderate Republicans, but partisanship remained important and influenced political contention against the war. In addition, the earlier antiwar movement was boosted by Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War, which was revealed to be intensive bombing of Vietnam and then invading Cambodia. Moreover, unlike recent history, there was a draft and no news blackout on Vietnam War destruction and deaths, each of which spurred continued movement activity in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is a significant oversight because it underlines the difficulties faced by antiwar movements today.
Moreover, in their discussions the authors often conflate large protests and social movements, an issue that is connected to their claim that the antiwar movement lacked influence. The last large protest was in January 2007, and they see the antiwar movement as declining after that. But despite the slowing of protest efforts, the anti-war movement remained active and influential—largely because several elections broke their way, making institutional action possible. Democratic officials and candidates opposed the war in Iraq and were elected to power in Congress in 2006 due significantly to public dissatisfaction with the war. As the authors note, antiwar legislation became far more substantive with the new Democratic majority, placing considerable pressure on the Bush administration. Moving from contention based solely on protests to gaining leverage within democratic political institutions does not necessarily signify the decline of a movement, but is often a sign of influence. Since Michael Lipsky (1968), scholars have seen protest as only a minor political resource, and so having political leaders press a movement’s issue may indicate movement strength rather than weakness. After all, the five years of antiwar protests accomplished little. When Barack Obama edged Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries, significantly because of his opposition to the war in Iraq, the issue became more prominent. When Obama was easily elected president (mainly due to an economic crisis), he wound down the war in Iraq and changed official U.S. policy to “no more dumb wars.” I read this episode as the movement winning as much as was possible and then demobilizing.
Ascertaining the influence of a movement usually proceeds by addressing counterfactuals. What would have happened had the movement not existed or engaged in the strategies that it did? Statements by the failed Republican presidential candidate John McCain and other key Republicans indicate that they would not have withdrawn from Iraq nearly as quickly. It also seems unlikely that a Republican president (or Hillary Clinton) would have shown the restraint Obama has to avoid new wars in Iran or Syria. The authors are right to note that antiwar movements face stronger opposition and a more difficult path to influence than other movements do, as Marco Giugni (1994) and others argue. For antiwar movements to be influential in the U.S. setting usually means to wind down existing wars or to prevent new ones rather than to gain new state policies and bureaucratic footholds, as is often possible for other movements. But if scholars miss when antiwar movements do have influence it makes it difficult to draw lessons from them. And if antiwar movements can never hope to be influential, why is it worth studying them?
The authors’ most puzzling decision—to combine analytically the war in Iraq and the one in Afghanistan—challenges their account of movement decline. This conflation of the two wars is central to their puzzle—why did the antiwar movement end while war kept going? But the contrast in opposition to the two wars answers this better than the rise to power of a Democratic president. The war in Afghanistan, beginning almost immediately after the September 11 attacks, drew the protest of only scattered anti-imperialist, anarchist, and other small-bore groups. That war was waged on a Taliban regime and its ward al Qaeda, which had planned the attacks, and generated public support. By contrast, even before the war in Iraq began, it drew extensive opposition from a broad coalition of organizations and participants; it was clear during its lengthy run-up that Iraq had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks and that the Bush administration claims of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction were questionable. Without this war of choice, or “dumb war,” as Illinois state senator Barack Obama referred to it in 2002, it seems unlikely there would have been much antiwar activity or an antiwar movement. As president, Obama quickly wound down the Iraq war, the one that the movement opposed. And so it is not surprising that antiwar activity slowed and did not return, even after the 2009 surge in Afghanistan, as there was never any real movement against that war. The origin of the mass antiwar movement in opposition to the Iraq war—in its gratuitousness, deviousness in justification, and bungled execution—helps to explain the decline of this movement, as it ended as that war ended. The authors’ point is well taken that protest declined after partisan government changed, but the decline of movements is also typically related to their emergence and their influence; and thus any analysis of decline should address these influences.
Despite my big-picture criticisms, I remain somewhat in awe of Party in the Street. It isone great book. It provides the most impressive treatment to date of the relationship between a movement and a party, addressing the antiwar movement from every political angle: through its individual supporters and protest activity, organizational manifestations, and political advocates. It has both comparative and historical dimensions. Heaney and Rojas’s conceptual breakthroughs and arguments will be ones all scholars hoping to address these topics in the future must take into account. In its thoroughness in drawing connections from protest through organizations to institutional politics and in its comparisons across movements, I hope that the publication of Party in the Street will mark a turning point for scholarship on social movements.