Recent scholarship highlights the importance of public discourse for the mobilization and impact of social movements, but it neglects how cultural products may shift discourse and thereby influence mobilization and political outcomes. This study investigates how activism against hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) utilized cultural artifacts to influence public perceptions and effect change. A systematic analysis of Internet search data, social media postings, and newspaper articles allows us to identify how the documentary Gasland reshaped public discourse. We find that Gasland contributed not only to greater online searching about fracking, but also to increased social media chatter and heightened mass media coverage. Local screenings of Gasland contributed to anti-fracking mobilizations, which, in turn, affected the passage of local fracking moratoria in the Marcellus Shale states. These results have implications not only for understanding movement outcomes, but also for theory and research on media, the environment, and energy.

Analyzing oppositional social movements in the context of municipal immigration ordinances, the authors examine whether the explanatory power of resource mobilization, political process, and strain theories of social movements' impact on policy outcomes differs when considering proactive as opposed to reactive movements. The adoption of pro-immigrant (proactive) ordinances was facilitated by the presence of immigrant community organizations and of sympathetic local political allies. The adoption of anti-immigrant (reactive) ordinances was influenced by structural social changes, such as rapid increases in the local Latino population, that were framed as threats. The study also finds that pro-immigrant protest events can influence policy in two ways, contributing both to the passage of pro-immigrant ordinances in the locality where protests occur and also inhibiting the passage of anti-immigrant ordinances in neighboring cities.

Although risk assessments are critical inputs to economic and organizational decision-making, we lack a good understanding of the social and political causes of shifts in risk perceptions and the consequences of those changes. This article uses social movement theory to explain the effect of environmental activism on corporations’ perceived environmental risk and actual financial performance. We define environmental risk as audiences’ perceptions that a firm’s practices or policies will lead to greater potential for an environmental failure or crisis that would expose it to financial decline. Using data on environmental activism targeting U.S. firms between 2004 and 2008, we examine variation in the effectiveness of secondary and primary stakeholder activism in shaping perceptions about environmental risk. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that primary stakeholder activism against a firm affects its perceived environmental risk, which subsequently has a negative effect on the firm’s financial performance.

In the years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, some 400 local governments passed "Bill of Rights" resolutions in opposition to the USA PATRIOT Act. Event history analyses show that cities with progressive profiles were markedly quicker to pass such resolutions. These effects are strongest in the early phase of the Bill of Rights campaign, a period for which there is also robust evidence of contagious influence among nearby cities. The authors argue that the campaign's success lies in the miscibility of multiple movementsthe ability of groups with different beliefs, agendas, and traditions to combine around a common goal. The case is used to distinguish between strong and weak forms of miscibility and to develop insight into strategic, organizational, and political conditions that promote the construction of movement-spanning coalitions. Conflict over the scope of individual rights is fundamental to democratic politics, most sharply when the nation is threatened. While freedoms of speech, assembly, due process, and other constitutional rights receive nearly unanimous assent in the abstract (McClosky and Brill 1983), concrete liberties are politically negotiated. National crises restructure the balance between individual rights and collective security, leading the state to withdraw freedoms that in other times appear inviolable. Civil liberties

Few researchers have examined how organizational environments and framing processes simultaneously influence the diffusion of organizational practices. This article combines insight from major perspectives on the diffusion of organizational innovations and from social movement studies, and showsthat the adoption of a program to address global climate change by U.S. municipalities is shaped by social contagion and organizational linkages, as well as by the actions of change-promoting agents. The findings emphasize the potential as well as the limitation of the strategic efforts on the part of innovation promoters to frame adoption in a way that will appeal to potential adopters.