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369 18 Recent Trends in Public Protest in the United States: The Social Movement Society Thesis Revisited In stark contrast with trends in many Western European nations, evidence suggests that public protest participation in the United States during recent decades has been far less common than earlier, suggesting caution in concluding that the United States has become a social movement society. The strong thesis that the United States has become a social movement society rests on four empirical claims: (1) that protests have become more widespread over time, (2) that participation in protests has diffused to a wider array of social groups over time, (3) that protests have become more institutionalized over time, and (4) that protest is subject to less repressive and more institutionalized state response over time (Meyer and Tarrow 1998; Soule and Earl 2005). Much anecdotal evidence suggests that mass protest in the United States has become rarer up until the turn of the twenty-first century. Evidence from several sources is assembled here, aimed at providing several glimpses at recent U.S. protest trends during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including national survey evidence, protest event evidence from the New York Times, and newspaper reports of university campus protests during the last decade. We then discuss the sudden spurt of protest activity, starting with the emergence of the conservative Tea Party in 2009 and the progressive Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, drawing on newspaper reports of both movements . Together this evidence allows a tentative assessment of the extent to which the United States has become a movement society. We consider a number of factors as having potentially central roles in the trends of public protest we describe, including movement actor agency embedded in longer-term trends of social movement organization (SMO) John D. McCarthy, Patrick Rafail, and Ashley Gromis john d. mccarthy, patrick rafail, and ashley gromis 370 formation and evolution, institutionalized processes of channeling and repression of public protest, and the emergence of new forms of civic engagement that compete with more traditional social movement mobilization in general and with protest in particular. We will argue that a broader conceptualization of the elements of a social movement society, consistent with our focus on supply-side processes, can better illuminate trends in public protest in the United States. The U.S.–European Contrast Evidence that protest participation remained quite a bit more vigorous during the last decades of the twentieth century in a number of European nations than in the United States comes from the World Values Survey (Van Aelst and Walgrave 2001; Norris 2002; Norris, Walgrave, and Van Aelst 2005). Despite the well-known difficulties in interpreting the meaning of the protest participation item used in those surveys,1 comparisons of protest trends in European nations with those in the United States show only moderate increases in U.S. participation. Specifically, between 1981 and 2000, the United States only witnessed an 8 percent increase in reported protest participation relative to larger increases in Belgium (26 percent), the Netherlands (20 percent), Sweden (20 percent), and France (12 percent). The percentage of respondents at the turn of the century reporting to have ever protested shows similar patterns, at 20 percent in the United States and 39 percent in Belgium , 32 percent in the Netherlands, 35 percent in Sweden, and 38 percent in France (Norris, Walgrave, and Van Aelst 2005, 199). Norris (2002, 200) shows that the United States (2.9 percent) is well below the mean in increase in demonstration participation (5.5 percent) between the early 1980s and the early 1990s internationally. The foregoing analyses have shown how normal protest has become in recent decades in many Western democracies, and that has clearly become truer in European nations than in the United States. This trend evidence has buttressed the broader generalization that many European nations have become social movement societies, where protest has increasingly become a normal part of the political process. Indeed, Mayer’s analysis (chapter 19), although not phrased in terms of the movement society thesis, makes a strong case that France has become the quintessence of a social movement society. We do not aim to account for the stark differences between these several European nations and the United States here, although we will speculate on their origins in our conclusion. We point to these differences mainly to make the contrast the starting point of our inquiry into whether protest has atrophied in the United States in the late twentieth century...

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