The Politics of Provocation: Participation and Protest in Israel

Chapter 5

Chapter 5 EXPLAINING COLLECTIVE ACTION __ The move from individual to collective behavior is fraught with theoretical and methodological pitfalls. Despite the fact that both citizens and groups are political actors, social scientists view each from very different perspecitives. As illustrated in the previous chapters , psychological models of involvement and choice dominate general views of the individual. Those who study groups, on the other hand, emphasize sociological constructs such as social structure, organization , and power. The methods used in the two approaches are no less divergent. The advantage of survey research is the ability to deal with a large number of variables simultaneously.The study ofgroups is more complex and cumbersome. The scholar is dependent mainly on secondary records such as books and news articles, which were not written for the purposes of research. Problems of measurement and interpretation abound. Interviews and observations about more current groups can somewhat supplement these data, but gnawing gaps and frustrations remain. Despite these differences, it is hoped that the theoretical framework presented in chapter 2 allows for some integration. It was argued that very different concepts and variables can be organized under similar categories. Just as an individual actor is born in a certain environment , so arc groups; individuals can be distinguished by their level of political resources as can groups. Finally, just as individuals make choices about both the quality and quantity of participation, so political action groups plan strategies of confrontation. These are not identical processes, but they do run along similar paths. The discussion of collective action is divided into two sections. 92 l ifE POLIIICS 0~ PROVOCMION The first section is devoted to providing an overview of Israeli collective action. A statistical breakdown of protest groups and actions provides important information about the nature and scope of protest in Israel. In the second section the theoretical framework is adapted to the study of collective action. The explanation of group behavior runs along familiar lines, but employs a rather different set of variables. A DESCRIPriVE OVERVIEW The data for studying protest groups, it will be remembered, was gathered from newspaper articles on all protest actions carried out between 1979 and 1984. The use of the newspaper as a data source has many disadvantages and it is useful to begin by considering them. Newspapers do not report on all protests; they must be selective. The researcher must begin with the assumption that the sample is skewed and that many groups which are not considered newsworthy will be excluded. These groups are likely to have certain characteristics in common. They arc likely to be smaller, concerned with more local issues , and less violent. When dealing with the national level of politics , such groups arc also not very important to the social scientist. Like the proverbial tree fa lling where no one can hear, groups which are ignored by the press are not politically important.1 An additional problem with using newspapers as a data source concerns the ways in which they cover protest. The news media are concerned with events and provide a great deal of information about collective actions, but much less about groups. An article rarely describes the social origins of a group or its level of resources and almost never gives any indications about group structure. Agood deal of this information must be inferred, which presents a great risk for empirical research.2 To build the final sample of groups it was critical to establish operational rules of inclusion and exclusion. The definition of an act of political protest was adapted from Taylor and Jodice (1983, 19)and was defined as: " ... relatively short actions carried out by citizens for the announced purpose of protesting against a regime or government or one or more of its leaders, or against its ideology, policy, intended policy , or lack of policy, or against its previous actions or intended action ." It is important to note that under these rules, only strikes which were directed against the government were included in the sample. A protest group was defined as a collection of at least ten individuals engaged in a protest act. A coding sheet was pretested to determine just how much infor3 .133.121.160] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 20:36 GMT) EXPLAININC COLLECTIVE ACTION 93 mation could be gathered from the news articles. After several refinements , the final version had a total of twenty-two questions which were divided into three sections: the nature of the group, the nature of the act, and...