We examine scholarship on the role and influence of advocacy organizations in the U.S. political process. We identify common theoretical questions in the disconnected literatures on social movements, interest groups, and nonprofits, and we propose a unifying conceptual framework for examining advocacy organizations. Focusing on the post-1960s growth in advocacy organizations, we examine major organizational characteristics including organizational structures, membership and participation, resources, and interorganizational networks and coalitions. Our analysis of organizational influence focuses on five dimensions of the policy process: (a) agenda setting, (b) access to decision-making arenas, (c) achieving favorable policies, (d) monitoring and shaping implementation, and (e) shifting the long-term priorities and resources of political institutions. Finally, we identify recurrent theoretical and methodological problems, including the compartmentalization of research within disciplines, an overreliance on studies of large national organizations, a disproportionate focus on recruitment and selective incentives, and limited research on the influence of advocacy organizations. We conclude by highlighting productive pathways for future scholarship.

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The wave of sit-ins that swept through the American South in the spring of 1960 transformed the struggle for racial equality. This episode is widely cited in the literature on social movements, but the debate over its explanation remains unresolved?partly because previous research has relied on case studies of a few large cities. The authors use event-history analysis to trace the diffusion of sit-ins throughout the South and to compare cities where sit-ins occurred with the majority of cities where they did not. They assess the relative importance of three channels of diffusion: movement organizations, social networks, and news media. The authors find that movement organizations played an important role in orchestrating protest; what mattered was a cadre of activists rather than mass membership. There is little evidence that social networks acted as a channel for diffusion among cities. By contrast, news media were crucial for conveying information about protests elsewhere. In addition, the authors demonstrate that sit-ins were most likely to occur where there were many college students, where adults in the black community had greater resources and autonomy, and where political opportunities were more favorable.

This article examines thefoundation ofprivatesegregationist academies that emerged throughoutthe U.S. South in the wake ofcourt-ordered desegregation. I focus on the state ofMississippi whereprivate academies grewdramatically from 1969 to 1971. I provide an analytic history of civil-rights and school-desegregation conflicts in Mississippi, and I useOLS models to examine county-level variation in local support for private academies during this period. My analysis shows that the formation of academies occurs asa response to desegregation (1) when there isa credible threatthat desegregation willbeimplemented (implicitly signaling the "success" of the movement);(2) when blacks have the organizational capacity to make claims and voice protest within newly desegregated schools; and (3) whenwhites havetheorganizational capacity to resist desegregation. These three specifications extend models ofracial competition that havebeen used to explain whitecountermobilization. I argue that theestablishment ofacademies was a countermovementstrategy that flowed out of the prior historyof organized whiteresistance to the civil-rights movement. In otherwords, whites were not only responding to courtintervention and theproportion ofAfrican Americans in their community, but to the social movement mobilization ofthat community.Students of social movements, public policy, and political conflict have all attempted to analyze the dynamics of countermobilization. Under what conditions

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Based on a survey of the population of local environmental organizations in North Carolina, this article addresses fundamental questions about how local organizations are structured, their orientation toward strategy and social change, their activities, and their perceived impacts. By comparing subsets of local organizations in terms of their geographic scope, degree of professionalization, and tactical repertoires, we identify important patterns. First, locally oriented organizations that focus on a neighborhood, city, or county are more likely to be affiliated with a national organization than regional or state organizations, but they are less likely to participate in coalitions than groups working at the regional or state level. Second, organizations relying on a mixture of volunteers and professionals are more formalized and report higher levels of success at mobilizing people than those that rely exclusively on volunteers or professionals. However, groups that are volunteer-based are more likely to engage in partisan activity and have diverse environmental philosophies, but less likely to use conventional advocacy tactics like lobbying and less likely to have a nonprofit tax status. Finally, organizations engaging in disruptive and routinized protest strategies tend to be more similar to one another than they are to organizations that rely exclusively on moderate tactical repertoires such as lobbying or environmental education.

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