Abstract: In order for social movements to matter, the conditions for attaining the movement’s aims must not be so favorable that these aims could be achieved with little or no mobilization, but also not so unfavorable that the movement could never succeed despite a large mobilization effort. Given the multiplicity and diversity of factors affecting the outcome of social movements (such as public opinion, sympathy or hostility among political elites, and levels of mobilization) and the interactions between them, it is a daunting theoretical problem to determine when social movements matter. This paper’s aim is to propose a game-theoretically grounded agent-based model that formalizes the relationship between the factors affecting the outcome of social movements and when movements matter. Using computational experiments, we demonstrate the effects of the political opportunity structure and public opinion on the emergence, growth, and decay of social movements. Further, we examine the interactions between underlying structural parameters such as homophily, group size, and network structure in the initiation of collective action. Our results show that these parameters can interact in complex ways, sometimes helping, sometimes hindering, the dynamics of micromobilization.
Under Review
