Political Opportunity/Political Process
Certain political contexts should be conducive (or representative) for potential social movement activity. These climates may favor specific social movements or general social movement activity; the climate may be signaled to potential activists and/or structurally allowing for the possibility of social movement activity (matters of legality); and the political opportunities may be realized through political concessions, social movement participation, or social movement organizational founding. Opportunities may include:
- increased access to political decision making power
- instability in the alignment of ruling elites (or conflict between elites)
- access to elite allies (who can then help a movement in its struggle)
- declining capacity and propensity of the state to repress dissent
Read more about this topic: Social Movement Theory
Famous quotes containing the words political, opportunity and/or process:
“Since the Civil War its six states have produced fewer political ideas, as political ideas run in the Republic, than any average county in Kansas or Nebraska.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“The wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure: and he that hath little business shall become wise.”
—Apocrypha. Ecclesiasticus, 38:24.
“To exist as an advertisement of her husband’s income, or her father’s generosity, has become a second nature to many a woman who must have undergone, one would say, some long and subtle process of degradation before she sunk [sic] so low, or grovelled so serenely.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)