The Coevolution of Industries, Social Movements, and Institutions: Wind Power in the United States

Abstract

Movements develop in coevolution with regimes and other actors in their environments. Movement trajectories evolve through stochastic processes and are constrained, but not determined, by structures. Coevolution provides a theoretical structure for organizing existing understandings of social movements and sharpening future research. Stochastic thinking is essential for recognizing the both the volatility and path dependence of collective action and its underlying structural constraints. Formal models of diffusion, adaptive learning, mutual reinforcement, and inter-actor competition are developed and compared with empirical protest series. Responses to exogenous reinforcement, mutual adaptation in which failure is as important as success, and inter-actor competition are the most plausible mechanisms to account for empirical patterns. Trajectories of action depend upon the number of discrete random actors. Overall, the analysis suggests that movement dynamics are shaped more by interactions with other actors than by processes internal to a movement, and that empirical analysis must be sensitive to the level of aggregation of the data. This article advances two arguments. First, that coevolution can provide a theoretical structure for organizing existing understandings of social movements and sharpening future research. Second, that developing formal models of movement coevolution is a crucial part of a total research program for understanding social movements. The first argument largely involves renaming and reframing existing concepts and may be viewed by some as merely an incremental advance over what has gone before, although we believe it is an important one. In particular, this work is entirely consistent with a recent shift toward emphasizing mechanisms and processes rather than inputs and outputs. However, we will demonstrate that stochastic or random processes and adaptation and competition are crucial to movement dynamics, elements of a coevolution structure which have been absent in prior theorizing. The second argument involves demonstrating that the very act of attempting to model movement coevolution forces sharper and clearer theory at many points and that it raises important new research questions. In particular, we will show that although there are many theories which can account for the rise of a protest cycle, there are very few which adequately account for its decline, and even fewer which provide plausible accounts of the repeated ups and downs of protest event cycles. We show that adaptation to external reinforcement and competition among movement actors provide accounts for aspects of movement dynamics inexplicable through other mechanisms. We begin with the fundamental observation that in social movements, actions affect other actions: Actions are not just isolated, independent responses to external economic or political conditions-rather, one action changes the likelihood of subsequent actions. This broad understanding of interaction effects encompasses relations often seen as qualitativel...

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