Political Opportunities: From Tilly to Tilly

Abstract

A few years ago, The concept of political opportunities lies at the core of this approach. Political opportunities can be defined broadly as "consistent but not necessarily formal, permanent, or national signals to social or political actors which either encourage or discourage them to use their internal resources to form social movements" (Tarrow 1996: 54, emphasis in original). More specifically, they refer to those aspects of the political system that affect the possibilities that challenging groups have to mobilize effectively. In this sense, opportunities are "options for collective action, with chances and risks attached to them, which depend on factors outside the mobilizing group" (Koopmans 2004: 65). Four main dimensions of political opportunity have been stressed in the literature