University of Maryland i
Sociology 432: Social Movements
Doug McAdam ,
"Tactical Innovation and the Pace of Insurgency"
(chapter 26 in the McAdam and Snow reader, pages 340-357)

This article first appeared in 1983 in the leading American sociology journal. It was one of the first to point to the importance of tactics as a central concern in studying social movements. It also keeps a focus on movement success and failure as central to understanding how social movements develop over time.

Concepts and theory

How does McAdam get from Gamson's research on disruptive tactics to his own theory about tactical innovation?

McAdam also introduces other concepts that will become important in our study of social movements but seem to me less essential for this article:

The last part of the introduction reviews the historical evidence that the Southern civil rights movements should, in fact, be counted as a successful movement. What is the evidence?

Methods

What is McAdam's data source? How is his method similar to and different from Tarrow's?

Results

Figures 1 to 3 are the crucial part of McAdam's quantitative analysis. Figure 1 is a description of what McAdam is trying to explain (his "dependent variable"). Be able to describe what is important here. [This is not McAdam's main point, but is Figure 1 consistent with Tarrow's analysis in the previous reading?] How do Figures 2 and 3 establish the causal relationship that is the central them in McAdam's article?

Why are some tactics more successful than others? McAdam gives multiple reasons.

Table 2 tries to establish more systematically what characteristics of civil rights protest were most likely to lead to intervention by the federal government. Be able to explain the results in a non-quantitative way. What do the asterisks mean? What does a negative b mean?

What was the advantage to Martin Luther King of Birmingham, Alabama over Albany, Georgia as a site for protest?

Why does McAdam consider riots a protest tactic ? In what ways are riots similar to the other tactics McAdam considers? In what ways different?

Conclusions

What's your one-line summary of McAdam's contribution?
 
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Last updated September 8, 2005
comments to: reeve@umd.edu