Running Uphill: Political Opportunity in Non-democracies

Abstract

This study analyzes twenty-four cases of occurrence/non-occurrence of mobilization in non-democratic states to determine conditions of political opportunity in high-risk authoritarian contexts. Ragin's (1987) Boolean method of qualitative comparison (QCA 3.0) is used to identify specific configurations of conditions that constitute political opportunity in non-democracies. We find that political opportunity is sensitive to conditions created by divided elites, changes in repression, media access, influential allies, and social networks. Our analysis identifies four configurations that create an opening for mobilization under authoritarian conditions. The key factors, identified by QCA in the most parsimonious model, are media access and social networks. These two factors are sufficient conditions for producing mobilization in non-democratic states.

Environmental Movements in North-East India: Political Opportunity Structure and Movement Success

“…In the last few decades, the concept of POS has emerged as the leading theoretical tool among the scholars of social movement and has been widely used to analyse the outcomes of social movements (Amenta & Zylan, 1991;Banaszak, 1996;Corduneanu-Huci & Osa, 2003;Joppke, 1993;Kitschelt, 1986;Tarrow, 1996). This framework attempted to predict the differences in outcomes of social movements, in terms of their periodicity, style, activism and institutional contexts.…”

Qualitative Comparative Analysis: How Inductive Use and Measurement Error Lead to Problematic Inference

“…The nature of the original data is, however, of mostly secondary importance. In the replication materials, I provide an additional set of analyses based on a study by Osa and Corduneanu-Huci (2003), generating the same basic insights as those discussed in the main text. 23 It needs to be noted that Grofman and Schneider (2009) omit logical remainders, i.e.…”

“…While I adopt the same strategy below, an analysis including the logical remainders can be found in the replication materials. This latter analysis is based on Osa and Corduneanu-Huci's (2003) data. As the results show, even in this case the general conclusions regarding measurement errors and the inductive use of QCA still obtain.…”

“…For instance, in Osa and Corduneanu-Huci's (2003) work on mobilization efforts in nondemocracies, indicators for political opportunities are combined with a measure for the presence of social networks without giving any theoretical thought to the causal patterns in which these relate to mobilization. Similarly, the elimination of other possible explanatory factors, suggested by the social movement literature, is hardly discussed.…”

“…12 The problem of omitted variables is discussed in detail by Seawright (2005b), who shows that very strong assumptions need to hold for such omissions not to affect the results of a QCA (see also the debate among Achen 2005;Ragin 2005;Seawright 2005a). I use Osa and Corduneanu-Huci (2003) as a second example presented in more detail in the replication materials. 13 Goldthorpe (1997, 15) makes the same point, while Goertz and Mahoney (2009) provide insightful discussions on the scope of a theory and the problem of causal homogeneity (see also Mahoney and Goertz 2006).…”