Characteristics of Successful American Protest Groups: Another Look at Gamson's Strategy of Social Protest

Abstract

William Gamson's Strategy of Social Protest is considered to be a major contribution to the social-movement literature, but it has been criticized on methodological and theoretical grounds. The seriousness of the existing criticisms makes it useful to reassess Gamson's Strategy. This article first reviews the critical literature on Strategy and discusses Gamson's response to his critics. Second, the article reports the results of several analyses of the data set obtained by using the best statistical procedures available for assessing the relative importance of organizational and environmental variables and analyses of the major concerns raised by Gamson's critics and his response to them. The results suggest that displacement and group factionalism are the major predictors of protest group success. Implications of the analysis are discussed.