Social movements and public policy: Rethinking actors and political opportunities

Abstract

The study of how social movements participate in the production of public policies became a major research agenda in Brazil and around the world. In this article, we seek to collaborate with the development of this agenda by proposing an analytical model to approach what is traditionally thought of as the "political context," which would condition the actions of social movements in their attempt to influence the State. Through a critical dialogue with the national and international literatures, we argue that, instead of interacting with an objective, external context that conditions movement emergence and actions, social movements should be understood as participating in interdependence relationships with the variety of actors and institutions with whom they regularly interact, through what we call relational structures. In analyzing the relations between social movements and public policies, we highlight two relational structures: political regimes and policy subsystems. Our argument is that social movements do not interact with these relational structures, as a contextualist approach would presume, but rather within them, although normally from disadvantaged or marginalized positions.