Winning Woman Suffrage One Step at a Time: Social Movements and the Logic of the Legislative Process

Abstract

We describe a theory of legislative logic. This logic is based on the observation that each succeeding stage of the legislative process has increasingly stringent rules and becomes more consequential. This logic unevenly distributes the influence of social movements across the legislative process. Social movements should have less influence at later stages where stringent requirements are more likely to exhaust limited resources and where the consequentiality ofaction will cause legislators to revoke their support. We apply the theory to a study ofstate-level woman suffrage legislation. We find that legislators responded to suffragists by bringing the issue of woman suffrage to the legislative forum, but once suffrage bills reached the voting stage, differences in social movement tactics and organization did not have as great an impact.Scholars of u.S. political change characteristically see policy adoption as a single, discrete outcome. In reality, policy change takes place over a sequence of stages, which makes possible varying levels of policy success. Bills must first be introduced (a major feat on its own), come to a vote, be passed by two houses, and (if a constitutional amendment) be approved via referendum. As Burstein and Linton (2002) noted, most studies of policy change tend to focus on the final

Social Movements and Institutional Analysis

“…Coupled with grass-roots mobilization against new incinerators, and negotiations with state agencies to buy recycled materials, theorizing recyclables as commodities transformed cultural beliefs and discourse about waste in the industry, creating institutional conditions for diffusing recycling practices (see also Strang & Meyer 1993;Strang & Soule 1998;King, Cornwall, & Dahlin 2005).…”

“…Under these conditions, diffusion is a contested process, and the success of the initial movement for alternatives depends on whether or not challengers can muster political support to place and keep alternatives on the agenda (Soule & King 2005;King, Cornwall, & Dahlin 2005). Under these conditions, the diffusion of novel practices depends on challengers' abilities to mobilize sufficient power (resources, numbers, organization) to secure authorizing legislation, defend alternatives politically, and so on.…”

The Media as a Dual Mediator of the Political Agenda–Setting Effect of Protest. A Longitudinal Study in Six Western European Countries

“…They found eleven such studies published from 1978 to 2010 in major sociology or political science journals (Burstein and Freudenberg 1978;Costain and Majstorovic 1994;Soule et al 1999;McAdam and Su 2002;Baumgartner and Mahoney 2005;King, Cornwall, and Dahlin 2005;Soule and King 2006;King, Bentele, and Soule 2007;Johnson 2008;Olzak and Soule 2009;Johnson, Agnone, and McCarthy 2010). Some of this work holds that protest is especially effective early on in the political cycle (King, Cornwall, and Dahlin 2005;Soule and King 2006) while others find that protest is a consequence of political attention rather than a cause (Soule et al 1999), but most of these studies show that protest, or social movement activity more generally, matters somehow for what issues political institutions devote attention to.…”

Structural Approaches in the Sociology of Social Movements

“…These people also tend to lack the time and political skills required to work for social change, and their community organizations are more likely to lack the money needed to engage in extensive political work. Thus, not only are certain groups materially deprived, but they are also denied equal capacity to influence the political processes that help determine how society's resources are used and distributed (King, Cornwall, and Dahlin 2005; McCarthy and Zald 1977).While debates about the role of deprivation in social movement mobilization developed largely among political scientists, sociologists were beginning to articulate a model of social movement mobilization that focused on the capacities of challengers to resist injustice rather than on the conditions of inequality themselves. An important contribution in this regard is Charles Tilly's From Mobilization to Revolution (1978), 4 which explored how the war-making and tax-collecting activities of 18 th century political elites contributed to the institutional elaboration of the modern national state.…”

“…These people also tend to lack the time and political skills required to work for social change, and their community organizations are more likely to lack the money needed to engage in extensive political work. Thus, not only are certain groups materially deprived, but they are also denied equal capacity to influence the political processes that help determine how society's resources are used and distributed (King, Cornwall, and Dahlin 2005;McCarthy and Zald 1977).…”