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The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act: The Effects of CrossDisability Successes Social movement activities, including both contentious and noncontentious actions, are carried out over an extended period of time. Thus, earlier actions and their results will affect subsequent actions and their results. In this chapter and the next, we examine the effects that several clear successes had on subsequent patterns of protests in the deaf and disability communities. In this chapter we consider the effects of two cross-disability successes on subsequent contentious political action in these two communities, while in the next chapter we consider the effect of an impairment-specific success on them. The first of the two cross-disability successes was a set of protests that occurred in April 1977. These protests emerged because of the failure of the federal government to promulgate regulations for the Rehabilitation Act of 1973; protesters demanded that this failure be rectified. The second success was the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in July 1990. These two successes were similar in some ways. Both focused on cross-disability issues that applied to people with all types of impairments, and both were about legislation . In addition, people with many types of impairments, including deaf people, worked for the successful results. However, the two successes differed in several important ways. In the case ofthe protests around the Rehabilitation Act, the success was directly attributable to one set ofcontentious political actions that focused specifically and solely on that issue. In the second case, that of the passage of the ADA, reasons for success were multiple, and not solely or even strongly related to contentious political action. It is possible that the ADA's success was more clearly related to noncontentious than to contentious political activity. These two cases, then, permit us to examine the effect ofdifferent types ofsuccess on subsequent contentious political activity. 160 The Rehabilitation Act 0/1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act 161 In this chapter we examine the sequelae of these two successes. We examine changes in numbers ofprotests, locations, issues, organizations, and other factors that might have been affected by the two types of successes. We are not looking to see if the successes caused the sequelae. Causation is difficult, if not impossible to prove, and it is usually even difficult to support either statistically or conceptually. Although we cannot say that success caused any visible changes, we can look at patterns of changes that are suggestive of the effects these successes may have had on subsequent contentious political action. THE EFFECTS OF SUCCESS ON SUBSEQUENT POLITICAL ACTIONS Success is one characteristic of prior contentious actions that would seem likely to affect subsequent action. It makes sense to hypothesize that more successful contentious actions would have different sequelae than partially successful or completely unsuccessful contentious actions. Logically, three predictions are possible regarding the relationship between successful contentious action and the amount ofsubsequent contentious action. One would predict that successful contentious actions should be followed by a decreased amount of contentious action, the second would predict that they should be followed by an increased amount, and the third would predict that there should be no change in the amount ofsubsequent contentious action. Strain-related theories of the origin of social movements (e.g., Smelser, 1962; Westhaus, 1972) would predict that a successful contentious action would decrease the number of subsequent contentious actions. Such theories assume that one of the most important, if not the most important, factors in mobilization for contentious political actions are psychological, ideological, political, or socioeconomic frustrations . These frustrations are perceived to be caused by social structural or cultural imbalances, because ifthey were caused by individual factors such as motivation level or intelligence, collective actions would not be expected to produce solurions. A contentious political action that successfully attains its goal reduces the frustration or the strain that caused the initial mobilizations. The success, then, would lessen the need for subsequent contentious action and for the social movement itself. The social movement would eventually disappear. This happened, for example, with the antiwar and student movements of the 1960s (Oberschall, 1999). Of course, success is not the only reason a social movement would die. Social movements die because of factors such as lack of resources, problematic organizational factors, leadership changes, failure to mobilize support, changes in the political opportunity structure, changes in the effectiveness ofthe movement's frames, and failure to attain established goals (Kamenitsa, 1998). Social movements may also die because...

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