The Impact of Protest Movements on the Establishment: Dimensions, Models, and Approaches

Abstract

A broad consensus exists within the literature on collective action that protest movements can have a multitude of important, intended, and unintended impacts on the establishment. There is, however, less agreement on how we can measure such effects, a problem that has clearly hindered systematic investigations in this important area of research. This chapter argues that the methodological question of how to study the impact of protest movements on the establishment leads to a much broader theoretical issue and to the main challenge facing researchers of social movement outcomes to date, namely, how to establish a link between movement activities and political, social, and cultural changes.1